Ralph E Simmons Memorial Hike
I’ve finally gotten the chance to get my hands on some real gear thanks to finally getting my travel voucher. I got really tired of having to take all of my computer stuff out of my normal backpack and try to fit all my camping gear in it, so I found this Marmot Aspen Mountain 30 daypack at dick’s. Along with Eureka Apex 2 as my tent, Reactor jacket by Marmot left my mighty warm and toasty while I was relaxing by the fire and packing things up the next morning.
After all the $$$ dropping I did, I flew out to the memorial park and started out of the parking lot by 1400. I took the northern trail leading to the White Landing campsite, despite how I was merely wandering around I did manage to stumble into the campsite and explore around with plenty of daylight to gather wood, start a fire, unpack the tent and food, and have a nice well-deserved break. The tent went up with relative ease, but I’ll admit now that I did put on that protective covering sideways which eliminated the whole fucking purpose of it (duly noted). The park is so remote, the animals sond so much more differently than they do anywhere else I’ve been, and the St Mary’s river running alongside the campsite (you’ll see in the pictures) just kind of levelled me off to sleep. I did manage to see some small amphibious creatures, almost left my footprint on a snake, and had a frog that was attached for dear life to the side of my pants (he’s in there too).
The return trip was a bit more enjoyable, I took the southern-trail and noticed that there were quite a bit of ore pellets (a Lorainite always knows their ore pellets) just kind of randomly placed on the path. After a while I reached an area close to a bridge where there was a 6ft pile with rather large (4-6in diameter) chunks of ore. After a chilly night I was pretty happy to be walking into the sun the vast majority of the hike back and of course the smell of the morning dew was just awesome. It was a perfect scene.
I’m curious about the whole Nassau County, Florida area. It reminds me a lot of back home where the are a lot of little pockets of malls where there used to be a bit of commerce that failed. I noticed that the trees were all of the same type (pine) and were planted in pretty straight rows, although I failed to notice any type of logging infrastructure. After finding the hotspots of ore pellets, I was really curious (I also found an old tractor tire and a steel bumber off of an old-school truck) as to what exactly the area had been used for at one time.