Sipsey Wilderness / Randolph Loop 11/21/2014

This trip was the first for Kevin to the Sipsey Wilderness. It was my third trip to Sipsey, but the first trip which I planned out, initiated, and completed successfully. We set out at Randolph Trail Head around 6:40 PM for a short night hike to our first spot.

We started out going north on Trail 201. It started out a small path but then led to a forest access road where you could go right on 202 or left and up 201.

We had expected that we'd get tired and set-up camp sometime before reaching Trail 209 where we would then head east toward the "Big Tree". However, we also are more accustomed to hiking Cheaha with all it's elevation changes. We came up on Trail 209 much before expected. Kevin spotted a level spot to camp. As soon as we walked off the trail, there sat a fire ring. Perfect. We set-up for the night. Kevin made a small fire, but we didn't really keep it going long.

I learned the hard way: when grabbing some cheese to go with your "All American Cheeseburger" Packit-Gourmet meal; it's always good to check the date. Cheese made in 2012 isn't very tasty. lol

The next morning we woke up, had breakfast, and headed east on Trail 209 towards the 204A cutoff trail which would take us to the "Big Tree".

Here are some pics of Saturday morning:

Trail 209 had the best scenery that we saw the whole trip. We stopped pretty frequently to take pics. We came across some primitive camping site that didn't look to be very old.

We came to a point where 209 crosses the river. The sign had been knocked down, or fell down, one or the other. So we took an extra guy line and tied it back in place.

Here's a not-so-good pic of where we had to cross the river:

Some more scenery from Trail 209:

We took the 204A trail off of 209 towards the "Big Tree". It was marked with bright neon orange paint. There was a large "B" in a circle and then small dots in the same color paint going up the trail. This trail SUCKED. Since it is an unofficial trail, it is not maintained. That means that any tree that falls across the path pretty much lays there forever. That also means we climbed over about 112 tree trunks on our way to the "Big Tree", but alas we found it!

It was as big as we had imagined. It was down in the bottom of a large canyon. We went down to the bottom to fill up our water bottles and this is what we saw:

We ate lunch there at the tree and then headed back to find our way out of the canyon. I had planned just to go back the way we came, but after climbing over 112 tree trunks we elected to figure out how to get off 204A from the opposite direction we came. It's not marked very well, so we made quite a few wrong turns but eventually found a tiny trail that led us up out of the canyon. We found some really awesome sites to camp at for future trips. Eventually 204A runs back into 204 which we took south back down to 209. We followed 209 down thinking that we would find a good spot along the river to camp. But all the good spots were taken. We ended up running into 202 before we knew it.

Thing is, to get onto 202, you have to cross back over the river. This time, there wasn't a nice trail of rocks for us to walk over without getting wet. We had no choice but to take off our boots and forward it. As we walked down to the water there was a guy about the cross it heading back toward his friends at one of the nicer sites we didn't get to in time. He told us, "It sucks really bad!" It only took about 3 steps in the water until we couldn't feel our feet or our ankles from the ridiculously ice-cold water. After we were across the water we yelled back in their direction, "You were right, that sucked!" after-which he replied, "Don't worry! The feeling in your feet comes back!". Comforting. lol.

Once on 202 we stopped at the first decent site we came to. This time we made an awesome fire and warmed up by it for quite a while before getting ready to cash out for the night.

The forecast had said that it was to thunderstorm sometime after midnight, but it didn't. It only rained starting at about 3:30 AM till around 6:00 AM or so. We woke up about 6:30 AM and headed the rest of the way down 202. I wish I had studied the maps better as about half-way down 202 we ran into the Johnson Cemetery - which is a old, creepy cemetery looking well over 100 years old. In the gloomy fog, it looked like something right out of a horror movie. We kept going though, really glad we went clockwise instead of counter-clockwise as those cemeteries would not have been cool to run across in the pitch black dark of night. And finally, the victory pic!: