Cumberland Trail: Brady Mountain and Black Mountain sections

It's been a while since I hiked on the Cumberland Trail and after running into my CT hiking buddy a few times recently, I decided we needed to make some plans to get back out there. I picked the Grassy Cove Section, a part of the CT not too far away and verified that it wasn't dangerous due to hunting, and we scheduled a hiking day for right after Halloween. With me joining a community orchestra, and Levin having weekend violin group lessons, it's gotten harder and harder to make time for a day hike, so even though the weather outlook looked pretty dismal, we were committed to hiking, even if it meant being wet all day long. I dressed appropriately.

Typical Spooky Hiking Conditions for our day

Jake invited another NiMBioS fellow along, Sean, and we met at the Black Mountain Trailhead at 7am. It was foggy, but not raining. We left a car at the parking lot and all piled into my car for the drive to the other end of the seciton we'd be hiking. We actually missed the turnoff onto Jewett Rd, as it wasn't signed and also was just a small dirt road leading up into the mountains. Luckily we realize our mistake before we had gone too far, and we made it to the Jewett Rd trailhead around 9am. The trailhead here is easy to miss. There probably was a sign once, but all that is left now is a few wooden posts. Luckily, I knew where it was because of a geocache that was placed there (which I had found earlier in the summer). The trail here is mostly on old road beds and ATV trails, and was somewhat overgrown. It was well marked with white blazes which was good, because a few times it veered off from more obvious atv trails and a few times we ended up hiking down the wrong path for a ways before realizing we hadn't seen any white blazes. After a few miles we reached our first point of interest and also one of the few geocaches along the trail, Donelly's Window. This earthcache hadn't been logged since 2011, so I was pretty happy to be the first visitor in 4 years. That said, it was one of the most underwhelming "arches" I've seen. Hardly more than a little hole through some small windows. There might have been a decent viewpoint, but the clouds were thick around us and we couldn't see out over the valley at all.

Donnelly's Window

Beyond Donnelly's Window the trail was pretty easy going, but somewhat spooky since we were shrouded in mist/cloud. At least it wasn't raining though. And considering it was All Saints Day, it seemed kind of fitting. Still it would have been nicer to be able to see out from the ridgetop more. Sean set a fast pace through the mist and we were soon at our next point of interest, the "Lost Overlook". It would have been very easy to miss this spot, since it isn't signed or well marked, and requires a bit of walking off the trail to reach. Luckily I was checking my map and GPSr pretty frequently, and we spotted the small rock cairn as well. As we scrambled down the rocks to the overlook, the cloud ceiling had lifted enough for a pretty decent view out over Grassy Cove. The rocky bluff that you end up on is pretty tall, but not quite above the tree level, so it wasn't an amazing view. Just a good one. The rock formation was very cool though. At it's tip, you were standing on a very narrow (like 16" thick!) slab of sandstone. Kind of unnerving. I had a matchstick container with me and decided to hide it here. Hopefully I can get the needed permit to publish it as a geocache. It would have been nice to hide an ammo can, but I hadn't brought one with me. Oh well, sometimes even the little micro caches can be worthy if the location is fun.

Lost Overlook

About a mile further we reached another unimpressive rock formation, Brady Mountain Arch. The map I had for the trail made me think that there was something pretty cool here, but the only arch like rock we found was pathetically small, and hardly even an arch. It made me think that the trail-builders were desperate to point out any marginally cool thing along the trail. But then, maybe we just didn't find the "real" arch.

Brady Mountain Arch? Not much is it?

Near this arch my map showed two green dots pointing out the site of a plane crash and also a Rock house formation. We decided to look for both of these and spread out along the ridgetop in our search for the plane crash. We never found any sign of the plane, but did wander among some neat rock formations. To look for the Rock House, we backtracked along the trail for about a 1/4 mile, then took off westerly towards the edge of the ridgetop. There we found a very cool rock formation that I am guessing is the Rock House complex identified on the map. It wasn't really a Rock House, at least not how I think of them, as large overhanging shelters. it was a really cool complex of passageways through a rocky bluff. There was a center alcove with 4 different passageways you could take to get into it. We debated eating lunch here, since it was a cool spot. But we ended up just exploring for a bit and making for the Brady Mtn overlook for our lunch spot. I did mark the location with my GPSr. It would make for a really great geocache spot, although you'd have to determine if it is on State land or not. It isn't signed from the trail, and didn't even have a faint use trail leading to it. If it weren't for the little green dot on the map I had, we would probably never have found it. And I suspect that the map I had is outdated and not referenced much anymore.

Rock Passageways

Alcove

We were all getting pretty hungry so we hiked quickly to the Brady Mountain Overlook. We lost the trail near the overlook and I led the way there by dead reckoning. As we got close, we found the yellow blazed spur trail that led the way to our lunch spot. The cloud ceiling, which had descended on us while we were looking for the plane crash site, had lifted once again, and we had an excellent view of Grassy Cove. The bluff here is quite high, maybe 200', and it was the best view we had all day, a perfect lunch spot.

We took a very leisurely lunch, enjoying the view for as long as possible. Some of the dogs may have even fell asleep, they were getting pretty tired. But we still had many miles to go, so reluctantly we shouldered our packs and got back on the trail. We followed the yellow marked spur trail to the main trail, and saw our first real trail sign of the hike, pointing out where the overlook was. I suspect that hiking in from Hwy 68 is more typical, and that people usually hike to this overlook as a day-hike. Doing it that way would be nice, but also pretty steep, as we had a good steep descent on wet-leaf slippery trails. Once we got close to highway 68 we looked for a few geocaches, GC1NV0M and GCKPPP but couldn't find either one. With all the fallen leaves, we certainly could have missed seeing something. We gave each one about 15 minutes of searching. GCKPPP was at the Hwy 68 trailhead and there was an information board there. It had a copy of the same trailmap I had been using, which had some directions for getting to the Black Mountain trailhead. According to the printout, we had to walk west up highway 68, then turn right onto Cox rd and look for a trailhead off on the right, about 0.4 miles up. We walked this section of road, and found the tiny trailhead, only to see a printed note about how the trailhead was closed and the trail was moved to Hwy 68.

We didn't know where the other trail might have been, so we decided to simply walk the old trail. There were white blazes along much of it, although many had been painted over with green paint. While the walking was easy enough, on an old roadbed, there were signs about hunting in the area, by permission only from some hunting club, and we passed one tree stand (empty) along the trail. This made us all a little nervous, since hunting season is starting for some game. I don't really know how dangerous it is to be out hiking in areas with hunters. I mean, they aren't shooting eachother all the time are they? But most "official" sources say to avoid hunting areas to be safe. So we all breathed a sigh of relief when we finally passed over onto State Land near the Windless Cave. I was hoping we would find this cave, which is marked on the trailmaps. I wasn't sure if we would see it since we weren't on the "real" trail anymore, but we spotted it down a small creek. The creek actually disappeared into the cave, which had a huge opening. The cave was also closed for White Nose Syndrome. Still it was very cool to see.

Windless Cave

Windless Cave Break

What we did find near the Windless Cave was yellow trail blazes showing us a spur trail that took us right to the real CT. There was a trail sign there and we could see the trail that we should have taken to highway 68. But we had to go up Black Mountain, so off we turned, to make our final climb up to the car. The clouds descended on us once again, but the rain still held off as we sweated and climbed up to the top of Black Mountain. Rather surprisingly, when we reached the rocky outcroppings, there was a group of rock climbers at a top-rope, climbing in the wet fog. They were the only people we saw all day. I had been to Black mountain before,a nd knew the trails here fairly well, so I took Sean and Jake to the east overlook, which is the best one. All we saw were clouds, and it was drizzling, so we didn't stay long. I offered to take them off the main trail and through the maze of rocks, but they wanted to just stick to the main trail and make it back to the car quickly. We were all pretty tired by this point. According to my tracklog, we had hiked 14.5 miles, and climbed about 2000ft. A decently tiring day.