I took my kid, my wife and my dog into the wilderness. Part 3

Hiking Clifty Wilderness in Red River Gorge with my wife, kid, and dog. Part 3

For part 1 and 2

https://steemit.com/travel/@waggy6/i-took-my-kid-my-wife-and-my-dog-backpacking-into-the-wilderness-part-1

https://steemit.com/travel/@waggy6/i-took-my-kid-my-wife-and-my-dog-into-the-wilderness-part-2

In part 2 I left off with us going to sleep on the first night on the trail. We had stopped at a site near Turtle Falls. It took us a bit to find a suitable sure to pitch or ridiculously oversized tent. Either the trees were to close, the ground wasn’t level enough, or there were dangerous dead branches that could fall.

Eventually, we did find a reasonably level spot to pitch the tent and after a quick dinner and a failed attempt at starting a campfire with wet wood, we went to bed. After such a hot and long day of hiking, I was really expecting that I would get a good night's sleep.
Unfortunately, that was not to be.

The slight angle we had set the tent on caused me to slowly slide downhill toward the door all night and I would wake up with me feet all smushed against the screen, so I would slide back uphill to a comfortable position only to find myself repeating the procedure many more times that night, my wife and daughter both asked me at separate times to accompany them outside when they needed to pee, and the sound of the waterfall, that should have been so relaxing, drowned out all the other sounds which would have given me a sense of morning coming. (You can get some idea of what time of night it is as the frogs and crickets seem to quite as the night gets later and the birds seem to be awake as soon as 4 am)

When we finally woke up in the morning we had a nice breakfast of oatmeal and some breakfast burrito filling, got packed up and headed out on the trail for the second day. By then it was already getting hot, and we had no firm idea what time it was.
Consulting the map before leaving we settled on heading toward a site titled Don Juan's Gardens. Though we were hiking Swift Camp Creek trail and the trail paralleled the creek the steepness of the terrain prevented actually getting to the creek save for a few places. Don Juan's was one of those places.

Our destination was about 4 miles away according to the map, we were hoping we would get there by mid-afternoon. Instead, this day turned into the most difficult day of the trip. The temperature quickly approached 98 degrees and the humidity was so high you could see your breath. I've never had that happen except in cool weather before.

Each of us was carrying two 32 oz water bottles, yet it was so hot we had to stop and refill them repeatedly. This is not as easy of a task in the woods, each bottle has to be sterilized using the AquaMira drops that we bought. These drops chlorinate the water by mixing drops from two bottles together in the cap and waiting 5 minutes. So each water stop took us a while. Much appreciated in that heat though.

When we hit the first stream for a snack break we all thought we were making great time. We continued to push on, stopping often to hydrate or refill our water. As we continued on the terrain got more and more rugged. Imagine a rudimentary staircase made of large rocks and you have a general idea of what we were hiking on. The trail couldn't seem to decide if it wanted to go uphill or down. The moment you got to the top of one hill, climbing slowly up unstable rocks with a heavy backpack on, it would appear to level off, only to round a bend and have to climb downhill again, with a pack, on unstable rock.

Eventually, we rounded a bend, the familiar and refreshing cool breeze from one of the many caves hit us, after a steep downhill…

Walking out of what felt like a never-ending tropical jungle to this site was one of the greatest feelings.

This was like an oasis. We took the time to cook a nice lunch, we explored, I took my first poop of the trip. Then we realized, the small stream we had passed earlier in the day was not the landmark I thought it was on the map, this stream was, we had only made it half as far as we thought we had. We still had 2/3rds of the way yet to go. A horrible feeling washed over us as we hitched up our packs and continued on.

The next 3.5 hours was just constant uphill then downhill with the occasional mud puddle for variety, but we did make it. I have no pictures of this, the idea of taking a simple picture was too much work at the time. It was all we could do to keep going. After encountering the only other hikers we had seen all day. They seemed as exhausted as us, so knowing there was a nice campsite ahead I directed them to an inferior campsite closer by and we hurried the last 1/8th mile to our site.

Our tent by Swift Camp Creek at Don Juan's Garden campsite.

View from our tent

Our dog had short legs but he kept up just fine

This is a great site, lots of space, flat smooth ground for a tent, and right on the water. We took a much-deserved rest, had a splash in the water and still had plenty of time to cook dinner before it got dark. I was even able to get a nice fire started that night. We would rest well this night.

It was one of the longest days of hiking we have ever experienced. Funny thing though, after the trip I looked at the satellite tracking from our emergency beacon. We hiked from 11 am to 6 pm with a 1-hour lunch. What felt like 10 hours wasn't even close, though our average pace of less than 1 mile per hour does speak to the difficulty.

For those interested here's a link to the Forest Service website for Red River Gorge and some links for the wilderness area.

https://www.fs.usda.gov/detail/dbnf/specialplaces/?cid=stelprdb5277259

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clifty_Wilderness

https://www.wilderness.net/NWPS/wildView?WID=127

https://www.fs.usda.gov/recarea/dbnf/recarea/?recid=39460