A few years back, a friend and I, traveled down to the backwoods of Kentucky to backpack in the Daniel Boone National forest.
We had a specific trail in mind that we planned to hike: The Sheltowee Trace National Recreation Trail.
The Sheltowee Trace is a 269 mile trail that traverses the length of the Daniel Boone National Forest.
The trail was named in honor of Daniel Boone.
Sheltowee, (meaning Big Turtle) was the name given to Boone when he was adopted into the Shawnee tribe as the son of the great war chief Blackfish.
The Northern Terminus (end) of the Sheltowee trail starts off of State highway 377 in Kentucky, while the Southern terminus starts in Northern Tennessee off of State highway 297.
We had been planning our trip for several months. A lot of planning goes into a backpacking trip.
We had acquired our supplies: a map, food and other items. We had made plans for water sources along the trail and how many miles we thought we might hike in a day.
We had been hiking frequently and had been carrying our backpacks on our backs in preparation of our hike.
One important piece of equipment that we would need was a bear canister to store our food in.
A bear canister is a bear resistant container that a bear can’t open or break.
There’s a good size population of Black bears in the Daniel Boone National Forest.
When camping in bear country, you must carry all your food in a bear canister and hang it in a bag in a tree overnight a good distance from your tent.
Fortunately for us we only saw a couple of Black bears while out in the wilderness when we were hiking on the trail.
Those stories are for another day.
We decided we would start our hike in southern Kentucky and we would be out on the trail for two weeks.
We had two vehicles and we parked one where we started at the Stearns Ranger Station in southern Kentucky.
The other we left further north at a different trailhead.
So we began our hike on May 18th.
We carried everything we would need on our backs in our backpacks: food, clothes, sleeping bag, a water filter, first aid kit, maps, a compass, flashlights, fire starters, a small camp stove, tent and lots of other small items.
We had gotten a late start so we didn’t get to hike as far the first day.
We had cut about thirty miles off our hike by starting where we did.
We had to make camp when it was almost dark after hiking for about three hours.
Rule of thumb: set up camp before dark.
The forest was very dense around us but there were places suitable for setting up our tent.
We found what we thought was a good spot and pitched our tent. I gathered wood and started a campfire while my friend looked for a place to hang the bear canister.
We cooked a light dinner of noodles and salmon.
It may not sound good but after a long day, it tasted like a steak dinner to us.
After dinner we hung the bear canister in a tree over a solid limb.
We would pretty much repeat this routine every evening for the whole trip.
We finally got in our sleeping bags for the night to get some sleep.
There were a lot of strange noises in the forest that first night and how I got to sleep, I’ll never know.
We had made it through the first day.
There was much more to our journey that I’ll probably write about in the next few weeks.
If you’ve never been hiking down in the Daniel Boone National Forest, you really should go. And this trail goes through Red river gorge in Kentucky, which is a great place to hike. We had to get a permit to hike there, but it was worth it. I believe it was free at the time but I’m not sure now.
The trail follows the Cumberland river all the way to Cumberland Falls, and goes by other places of note as well. There are also many caves along the trail. There are too many to count. Many rock shelters in rock formations. It’s a dark forest in a big forest and it looks like an arcade place. It was my first adventure on a long hiking adventure.
It was a great experience which you will be hearing more about soon.
A quote I found to share with you: “It is good to have an end to journey towards, but it is the journey that matters in the end”. Ernest Hemingway.
Susan Anderson is a resident of Owen County who enjoys hiking and backpacking and writes a weekly column about her experiences. Readers can reach her via email at saanders@hotmail.com or on Instagram @farsideoftheedge.
This article originally appeared on Evening World: Revisiting the Sheltowee Trace trail | A Hiker’s Path
Reporting by Susan Anderson, For the Evening World / Evening World
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