It should have only been about half that much, but we doubled the road walk by a hard, but necessary for our safety decision. The final part of the Eglin East hike includes at least two river crossings that are at dangerously high levels and uncrossable, or requiring a road walk around. The recent heavy rains, or deluge as the locals are referring to it, have left several rivers in the area running in very high flood. We had another storm system on top of us bring heavy rain, high winds and cold temperatures for a couple of days. As hard as it was to voluntarily replace beautiful trail miles with more road walk, risking drowning or hypothermia from hiking in thigh high fast flowing cold water in cold temperatures were not on the agenda for this week. We are too close to finishing this hike to start taking health or life threatening risks. So the road walk it was.
Actually once we had made the decision and started hiking it wasn’t too bad a hike. Just long and straight, lots of traffic, and cold and windy weather. The forecasted storms actually passed more to the north of us, dumping their rain into the watersheds of the rivers we had feared. We crossed a couple of them, and were very glad with our decision: the rivers here are running high, wide and swift. One rather long bridge had the narrowest sidewalk I’ve ever attempted to walk on, made of concrete rough than coarse grain sandpaper, that resulted in a hole in each side pocket of my hiking skirt! We passed through the town of Crestview on the second day, notable mainly for the local MacDonalds that was nicely positioned just in time for a fast food lunch. The next day we lucked out on lunch again, with hot meals at a convenience store in Holt. I guess there is some advantage to be had from road walking!
The only real wildlife on this long roadwalk, but we enjoyed watching a couple of hawks climbing on thermals then diving fast down to earth before climbing again, and I was hassled by a couple of problem loose pitbulls, one of which nearly got hit by a car as he finally backed off from me.
Tomorrow we go backin the woods. Yeh!!
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