A New Years Day Hike to Coyote Point

I was invited on a New Years Day hike by a local geocacher from Morgan County, TN, 9thLife. 9thLife and I have been corresponding sporadically about placing caches in Morgan County for their annual Laurel Mountain Walks Festival. I think it would be awesome to team up with the county's Tourism Board and make a mini Geo-Tour of the areas many hikes. There is the Obed River, Big South Fork (Rugby area), Frozen Head State Park and Lone Mountain State Forest, all wonderful natural areas with many trails. I've offerred to help 9thLife with this project, but so far she has not asked for much help from me, other than bouncing a few ideas off me. Regardless, when I got an invite from her to go on a hike, I was immediately interested. One of the hikes I've wanted to is in Lone Mountain State Forest out to Coyote Point, and when I mentioned this to 9thLife, she accepted it as our destination. I knew she was probably wanting to place a geocache out there, and decided I'd bring along the ammo can I retrieved from an archived cache I found a few months back. It was well labeled and had a bunch of swag already in it, all it needed was a fresh logbook.

We met at 9:30 at the trailhead. 9thLife had also invited a few other friends, so our group was 4-strong heading up the mountain. The hike was on a wide trail, wide enough to pass as a road, which I bet it once was, either a logging road or ATV one. 9thLife and her friends were very talkative, relating many of their adventures. They had been hiking together for around 20 years and have had quite a few crazy trips, like kayaking down white water rivers without having white water experience, and doing a grueling 26 mile backpacking trip in the Smokies over just two days. They laughed and joked and the time flew by as we marched up the trail.

The hiking distance to Coyote point is about 4 miles with 1000' elevation gain. The incline kept us warm, it was a cold day. The view from Coyote point was indeed fine. We snapped pictures, we hid the ammo can. We ate lunch. Then we were off back down the trail. On the way back, I expressed an interest in tagging the high point, lone Mtn itself, which was oh so close, just a 1/2 mile out of the way. no one else was too interested, but they were fine if I split off, so split off I did. The summit of Lone Mountain, also called Brass Knob by the locals, was not much to see. It's a tree covered mountain after all, but even with the leaves off the trees there wasn't much of a view. The extra elevation though was enough to put me above some magic frost line, as the plants and trees at the summit were suddenly and starkly coated in fine ice crystals. That alone made the diversion worth it.

Coming down off the summit, the trail trends west and if I had stayed on it, would have added a couple miles or more to my day. But I shortcutted down and across the steep mountain side which put me back on the Smokey Bear trail we had come up. Looking back at the track log, I doubt I added more than 3/4 of a mile to the overall hike. The rest of the way down was a quiet cruise, and I was somewhat, but not entirely surprised to see that I made it back to the parking area before 9thLife.