Mt. Cheaha: First trip! w/ John, Kevin, & Juan 2/2/2013

I'm writing this more than a year after it occurred, just trying to log all my adventures on the same blog. This trip was with John, Kevin, and Kevin's friend, Juan. This was Juan's first backpacking trip ever. We started out at the Mt. Cheaha trailhead and planned to head up the Pinhoti to Odum's point. We weren't sure, but we figured this might be a really high point. Never actually made to Odum point, but we did indeed find some good scenery.

I'm not sure exactly what John was laughing at here...lol.

So, we're all coming around a switchback when Kevin spots a little "shortcut" trail. He was 4th in the line of all of us, takes off jogging down shortcut trail mouthing something along the line of "look at me suckas!" when his foot catches a log and.....FACEPLANT. It was beautiful! We all stood there and laughed at him for a good two minutes. You can see Juan bent over laughing hysterically in the pic below, which was taken as he was getting up...lol:

It was truly a beautiful day.

As we walked along the ridge, out of nowhere it started raining. We didn't even see it coming. At that point, we weren't anywhere near an actual campsite. To our left was up a mountain, and to our right was down a mountain. There was NO way we could pitch a tent here. We also didn't have ANY rain gear at this time. The very top of the ridge was maybe 100-150 yards up to the top. We all sprinted up to the top where luckily it flattened out well enough for us to pitch our tents before we were too wet. It rained for about an hour and then stopped. We were able to get some wood from underneath the leaves that wasn't too wet and have a camp fire. Even made our own fire ring. It ended up being a really good time. Many more times like these are to come.

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