First
Backpacking Trip
Being an outdoorsy woman, I am always looking for new outdoor experiences. A few years ago, me and three of my friends attended a Fall weekend Womens’ Retreat. We participated in some cool classes at the retreat like shooting sports, rappelling, dutch oven cooking, but the one that really sparked an interest in us was backpacking. The following year, instead of attending the Fall Womens’ retreat, we decided to invest our money in buying gear and planned our own weekend retreat on the Butterfield Trail located in the Devil’s Den State Park in Winslow, Arkansas.
In all
my adventures, I had not considered backpacking until I attended that retreat. Our backpacking class
instructor was the only person we knew that had backpacked. She often hiked alone. We
were amazed that she didn’t get scared out on the trail by herself. Good surprises or bad surprises, we were
decided we could handle it. In her
class, she spoke about how refreshing it was to get away from her stressful job
to have a mental break on the trail. Her
face brightened up as told her fun stories and you could tell she was in love
with hiking. We wanted some of what she was selling us with
her positive words. Our wanderlust had been sparked.
Later, we talked among ourselves about
being on the trail at night. We were
good at imagining the worst-case scenario and we would creep ourselves out just
thinking about being on the trail at night.
Could we do this backpacking gig?
We had zero experience but forged ahead on planning our trip.
Our first step toward planning was looking
at the trail map online. I called the
Devil’s Den State Park office and spoke with a young college student who was
interning at the park while working on a Forestry degree at the University of
Arkansas. He confirmed there was a
great campsite a little over a mile from the trailhead. I passed this information on to my friends
and we all agreed we would hike to the campsite one mile from the trailhead and
set up camp. We felt like this was close
enough to the cars if we needed to make a great escape from God only knows what
craziness we might encounter or imagine.
In my mind, I had gone over escape plans from the trail if the need
be. The logistics on where to camp had
been decided.
Next up in our planning was deciding needed
gear. It was overwhelming all the choices. We relied on the advice from Amazon customer reviews
on the products to help us decide what to purchase. I
ordered my backpack, trekking poles, sleeping pad and boots early enough to try
them out around the house. I watched a YouTube
video to figure out all the nooks and crannies of my backpack. It is funny reflecting back to then I didn’t realize
my Osprey backpack has a strap to hang trekking poles from when not is use and
the chest strap buckle is also a whistle.
I paid a reasonable price for some used gear
which included a tent, jet boil and cookware.
The gear was dated, but in good
shape. All my choices worked well for me
except my sleeping bag. It was awful and
so uncomfortable in many ways. I bought it
from the Boy Scouts of America store. I can’t remember who suggested I go there, but
it was a bad choice. By the time we all had gathered our gear, we had
laid down some serious coin and felt like we were as ready as we would ever be.
We were hopeful that our logistics were set
in place and we would soon be enlightened of a new world of freedom to take a
break from the grind of life. Our
excitement was building, and we were thrilled that soon we would be
experiencing Arkansas beauty close up and spending time with friends. We wore our rose-colored glasses attitude with
confidence and in the middle of our optimism we were not at all considering
that we may be fooling ourselves about being able to handle this venture. Our “Let’s do this” mode kicked in and we were
not changing our minds.
Due to things being hectic at work, we got
a late start on our two-hour drive to Devil’s Den and arrived later than we had
initially planned. We hurried gathering
our plunder from the cars and hoped we had enough daylight to get to the
campsite one mile from the trailhead and get camp set up. We snapped a quick photo that reflected our excitement,
and it will always be one of my favorite hiking photos with friends. After
hiking well over a mile, we realized we should have reached the campsite.
Nightfall was quickly approaching, we decided to find a spot and set up camp. We found a not so ideal spot, but knew we had
to get settled. I puttered around camp getting
my stuff from my backpack organized like my tent was going to set up
itself. I hurried and got it set up as
the light was fading. Thank God I didn’t
struggle that much with setting up my tent.
Putting up my tent with a headlamp would not have been fun.
After getting camp set, we gathered our
camp chairs around the fire ring we had built after gathering rocks. We started a nice fire with cotton balls and
petroleum jelly, which was a technique we had learned the year before in the
retreat backpacking class. We felt very
accomplished. We had a nice
campfire dinner and turned in early. As
I tried to get comfortable in my tent, I wrestled my boy scout sleeping bag,
broke a sweat in the process of getting semi-comfortable and am sure I burned off
all the calories I had eaten for dinner in the process. Even though it felt like I may have a very
restless night, I did get a little sleep.
The next morning bright and early, we were surprised when people came through riding horseback and we realized our tents were smack dab in the middle of a horse trail.
The night before we had not noticed trail blazes on the trees or evidence of the actual trail in the dark. The horses were able to bypass the trail and go around our tents and as they continued pass us the riders had strained smiles on their faces. This possibly could have been a really big deal, luckily, we were able to move our tents quickly to a new location before starting off on our hike.
Fall was in the air. The colors were vibrant, and the trail was alive with other hikers also enjoying the beauty. For our morning break, we hiked to beautiful Vista Point Overlook.
We had daypacks for our hike to the Vista Point Overlook
We stopped among some trees, that would be great for hammocks, close to the overlook. The view and the colors captivated our attention and we soaked it all in and didn’t want to leave.
Fall colors are the best!
We decided when we were braver and not so wet behind the ears about backpacking, we would come again for another overnight trip and camp at the vista in hammocks. Then we remembered that hikers in hammocks are bear burritos and knew that sleeping with bear spray would be a must for hammock camping. After a nice, refreshing vista break we hiked to the car and drove to Winslow, Arkansas for a scrumptious lunch at Grandma's House, a home style buffet restaurant, which also has delicious homemade pies.
Grandma's House and USA represented in Winslow, Arkansas
As we talked over lunch, we figured out that we had started our hike at a trail access point and not the actual trail head. Wow – really! This fact is why we couldn’t find the campsite the first night, we started at the wrong place. Lesson learned and mystery solved. After lunch, we stopped in Winslow and briefly enjoyed the Farmers’ Market and live music. It was a refreshing experience.
Winslow is a fun town. We happened to catch the Farmers' Market and live music.
When we returned to camp that afternoon, we hiked some more. We encountered a friendly green snake that was not at all afraid of us. The friendly snakes posed for several photos and even a video. He didn’t crawl off he reared up like he was sending the message, “Enough with the photos and gawking at me. Y’all need to move on.” So, we did.
We started paying more attention to
the trail, hoping we didn’t see snakes that may not be so friendly. We had
not given snakes nearly as much thought as we had serial killers, bears or
mountain lions. It was a perfect hiking day and there were
lots of hikers enjoying the trail. We
had some friendly chats with several hikers.
Later in the afternoon, we seemed
to struggle more with our gear. We
wrestled with our trekking pole adjustments so much, we considered leaving them
on the trail for a more experienced hiker to find. One of the ladies stepped on her trekking
pole and broke it. We were shocked how
easily the pole snapped. There were a
couple of times I wanted to take a break from my trekking poles, but since I
missed the part on the YouTube video on hanging them off a backpack strap, I
continued to carry them. One of the
ladies couldn’t get her backpack adjusted comfortably and we mentioned it to a
passing hiker that looked like he would know how to help. He made some adjustments and it made it more
comfortable. We had met our first trail
angel. My friend was amazed at how much
better the pack felt. She moved forward
on the trail in less discomfort and had a little pep in her step. After a few distractions with gear, we ended
up having an enjoyable hike.
By the end of the day, we were tired and
had big appetites. We called the Devil's
Den visitors center at the state park to see if there was a local pizza place
that would deliver to the park. If this
was possible, we were more than willing to hike the one mile for pizza. The college student intern at the park’s visitors
center I had spoken to a few times answered my call. I made my request and he laughed and stated
that there wasn't a local pizza place that delivered in the area. He was already familiar with me and my off
the wall, crazy questions. Truth be
known, he had probably told the park ranger about a concern he had for a group
of older ladies on the trail. I don’t
blame him if he did give the park ranger a heads up of a possible assist effort. We were disappointed we couldn’t get pizza
and just ate our flour tortillas with peanut butter and honey and apple crumble
for dessert. Our camp food satisfied our
hunger pangs but not our taste buds.
Good news is we had chocolate and it was a nice surprise that one lady’s
husband had packed mini wine coolers in her backpack as a surprise. We each enjoyed a wine cooler as we gathered
around another successful cotton ball, petroleum jelly fueled campfire.
The fire was bright, and we started spotting green eyes in the dark. Creepy stuff - it was spiders’ eyes! The spiders’ eyes were reflecting off the campfire. One lady had noticed them the first night while gathering firewood but didn’t say anything until we all started noticing them the second night. In her mind she thought that if she would have mentioned it to us, we may have been hiking out of there in the dark to look for a motel. She admitted it was a hard to keep it to herself and couldn’t decide what was worse hiking out of there at dark or the green-eyed spiders. We were too tired to be scared and just continued to visit as we watched the flicker of the campfire and the glow of the spider eyes. One of the ladies on the trip is terrified of spiders and she didn’t even care that there were hundreds staring at us. The fire slowly dimmed to embers and we were then noticing the glow of the moon and stars instead of glowing spider eyes.
We enjoyed the fire and tried to forget there were hundreds of spiders surrounding us.
When we turned in for the night, one of the ladies sleeping pad was flat. She was tired and she used her foot pump to overfill the mat with air and popped it! She was so frustrated and as the rest of us watched it play out, we had to refrain from laughing. Due to us all being so tired and slightly scared, it was either we laugh or cry at this point in the weekend. We all ended up getting a good laugh out of it. Needless to say, she didn’t have a good night sleep without her sleeping pad. We finally settled in and we were all laying in our tents relaxing to the soothing night sounds. Since we had such a good laugh over the sleeping mat, I thought we needed another one. From my tent, I couldn’t resist breaking the silent of the forest and loudly playing a creepy song from the soundtrack of the movie Friday the 13th. It was not well received by the other ladies. They yelled from their tents, “Turn that dang music off!” I giggled and apologized. We again said our goodnights and I promised no more creepy music. Thank goodness my one-man tent was comfortable; I was dreading another night wrestling my sleeping bag. I prayed sunrise would come quickly. I was so tired that night I slept a lot better than the first night.
In the morning, I woke an hour before sunrise and while the other ladies were sleeping, I made coffee on my jet boil with bear spray close by.
Peaceful morning!
I didn’t dare look into the dark with my headlamp, because I didn’t want to make eye contact with any critters, especially green-eyed spiders. It ended up being one of the best quiet times I have ever experienced. There was a lot going on in my life at that time and the quiet of the woods wasn’t scary anymore, but peaceful. I love it when peace floods my soul like that. When the ladies started getting around, we talked about all our fun, crazy and scary moments. If we hadn’t heard about leave no trace in our backpacking class, we would have left behind some worthless gear at the campsite because we were struggling to get in our packs. Whew! We finally figured it out and were on our way hiking the one mile to our cars to head back home.
Starting at the wrong trail access point,
setting up camp on the horse trail, and the green-eyed spider twist to our backpacking
trip is bad enough. We later learned that a man's skull was found on the
Butterfield Trail in March 2019. As I read about this online, I was
shocked to find out the hiker was reported missing on August 27, 2017 just two
months before our trip. His friend had gone back to the car at the
trailhead for medication and when he returned to the trail, he couldn't find
him. There was a massive manhunt, and no evidence of the hiker was
found until his skull was found in March 2019. I couldn’t find online
what was determined as cause of death. It was a shocking fact that we
will always remember about this crazy weekend. I hope the hiker's family
got answers as to what happened to him. So sad.
In the last several years, we have continued to camp at Devil's Den for a weekend trip to participate in the Devil’s Den annual trail run and we stay in their comfortable campers' cabins. We kick back and relax in our cool camp shoes we had purchased at the Devil’s Den visitors center on our first trip there.
We all
still love those shoes. We bring lots
of snack food and do a little campfire cooking. We always plan a trip to Grandma’s House
for lunch when we make this trip. Never fails, we reminisce about our crazy backpacking ordeal
and someone always tells a remember when story about that trip that always make
us smile.
We realized we love hiking, but we are not
crazy about sleeping on the trail. We
didn't chalk it up to a bad experience, but a learning experience that didn't
inspire us to try camping on the trail again. We have downsized to day packs, which includes
emergency gear in case we get stuck on the trail. God forbid this happens! At the end of our day hikes, we leave the
trail and enjoy a hot shower, a great meal, and a cozy bed at the end of the
day. We call it slackpacking and feel
like ain’t nothing lacking in slackpacking.
Human Skull Found At Devil’s Den Identified As Missing Hiker | 5newsonline.com
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