Mudfooting at Zaleski

On Thursday I took another hike at Zaleski State Forest. This time I was in the southern part of the Forest, along the Bridle Trails that run near Raccoon Creek.

I’ve mentioned before that horses really tear up a trail, and what with the recent and frequent rains we’ve been having here in southeastern Ohio, the trails were pretty wet (and even moreso near the creek).

That meant a lot of mud.

The hike started out fairly dry. I started at the Horse Camp (this is a State Forest facility just for camping with horses, so that the horsemen have a base for riding the forest) which sits at about 1000 feet above sea level (Raccoon Creek is at about 700 feet). There were a few muddy spots, but I just walked around them.

Some barefooters really like squishing through mud, but I am not one of them. I will tend to try to avoid it until it is inevitable, but after that I usually won’t worry about it. Just a quirk of mine.

As I headed away from the Horse Camp, I decided to do some bushwhacking and explore Bowman Hollow (just north of, and below, Turner Ridge). I’m always interested in seeing if I can find any recess caves. Just a few miles north of here, just north of Lake Hope, I showed some of those recess caves in Barefoot Bushwhacking, and I wanted to see what was off the beaten path in this part of the Forest.

Not much, it turns out, at least not much when it came to recess caves — it was still very pretty territory, and I came across an Eastern Box Turtle there. It seems that the geology here is just different enough that larger recess caves do not form. The harder rocks must have all eroded away, or they are farther down in the strata. It was still interesting to look at, though. Here is one of the little creeks:

Orange-water Creek

Notice the orange coloring? If you hike the Zaleski Backpack Trail, they provide water at the campsites, and discourage drinking any of the water in the creeks, even after filtering. The reason for this is that this is old coal mining country. Old high-sulfur Ohio coal. And water trickling through the old mines picks up that sulfur and makes sulfuric acid (which rather ruins the water for drinking). It also dissolves out the iron in the stone, so that orange coloring is rust in the water. A lot of the water in Zaleski looks like that.

Just upstream from that location was a small overhang that looked pretty cool:

Small Creek-carved Overhang

Maybe after 10,000 years or so of further erosion that might be a nice recess cave.

After I left Bowman Hollow I then headed along Raccoon Creek for a while. There the trails were a mess. The horses’ hooves would chew up the trail and it would get muddy. So the horses would then go a little to the right or to the left, and expand the mud area. At some points the mud area was something like 20 feet wide with no choice but to walk through the mud.

Hence my mudfooting.

Actually, this mudfooting was not too pleasant. In some places I sunk down into the mud nearly a foot (or should I say, a calf), again, from the action of the horses’ hooves. That was a lot of extra work to traverse. It was also pretty loud, with the squishing and slurping noises and my feet went in and out. Usually I hike pretty silently and can get pretty close to wildlife, but while making my sloppy noises, I heard a deer take alarm quite far from me. There is another reason I was concerned about tromping through such deep mud: I had no idea what was under it. There could have been dangers under there (it turns out there weren’t) that I would not discover until I’d put my full weight on it, over maybe even slid my foot over it.

That’s not to say I would have preferred shoes or boots (sacrilege!). They would have gotten pretty glopped up and been nearly impossible to clean. Even worse, in the deep mud they probably would have gotten sucked off my feet. No, the only way to travel those trails are as a horse, or barefoot.

It wasn’t all bad. I was able to easily clean off my feet in Raccoon Creek. Here we can see another bit of rock overhang:

Raccoon Creek

Finally, I don’t know just what it is about Zaleski, but I never see five-lined skinks anywhere but there. Maybe I am just more attuned to them there, but near the end of my hike as I was ascending a ridge to return to the Horse Camp, one skittered across my path and headed up a tree. My previous picture was taken with my cell phone, but this time I had a much better camera with me, and got a much better picture (I think):

Five-lined Skink (click for really good detail)

This skink was actually having a bit of trouble hanging onto the smooth bark of this beech tree. Note the blue tail that indicates that this is a juvenile.

This was actually a fairly short (and slow) hike, under 5 miles. Between the bushwhacking and having to slog through the mud, I only averaged about 1.5 miles per hour; I usually do closer to 2.5.