Tales From The Wood Booger: Icy Hiking At Sawnee Mountain Preserve

Saturday, February 21, 2015

Icy Hiking At Sawnee Mountain Preserve

"My backyard mountain."

Snow Miser finally made his presence known in North Georgia. After what can be described as a mild winter the area was greeted with ice and near zero degree temperatures (so much for General Beauregard Lee's prediction of an early spring) this week. It even caught hikers on the AT (Appalachian Trail) by surprise. While ice is beautiful it is also destructive. We had power go out twice and we were extremely lucky because, that added up to an hour, some people went days without electricity.

To bring this back to hiking, ice is a hazard to trails because of slippery conditions and fallen trees. Besides the danger that ice brings added to the mix were negative wind chills in the mountains. The U.S. Forest Service put out an alert for dangerous trail conditions with fallen trees, ice and deadly wind chills. With all that said, Deb asks me not to go hiking on Friday in the mountains. While I didn’t go to “the mountains,” I did go to a mountain…Sawnee.

Sign from last year.

Even a trip to “my backyard mountain” was up in the air because the Preserve had been close all week do too the ice storm as north ForsythCounty was one of the hard hit areas. So, I had no plans to

go out Friday and just happened to check the Sawnee Mountain Preserve site that morning and the trails closed notice was gone. I tried calling the visitor center, to confirm the trails were open, but couldn’t get anyway on the horn. I still didn’t trust what I read because last year I was told the trails were open and when I got to the park they were closed. Anyway, I decided to go by and see and to my surprise they were open. Let me say there was plenty of evidence that the Preserve had felt the effects of the ice. Trees had been cleared from a number of places on the trails and there was still plenty of trees with ice and some pines were buckled under the weight.

It was a nice day with a cold, but sunny start to the hike (28 degrees) however it felt colder by the end, even though the temperature had went up, because of clouds and the snow flurries. One good thing about the cold there were not many braving the cold I only passed five people, which was nice! So here is a photo blog of my day on the icy trails of Sawnee Mountain Preserve.