Today, I went to my brother's house and hitched my Harbor Freight & Tools 4x8 Utility Hauling Trailer. Since I had the car's side of the wiring harness uncapped and exposed to the elements since October, one of it's ports was corroded and I was afraid that it would not make contact with one of the trailer's connections. But it did and everything works just like it should.
I drove over to Storage B today and started moving things over to my new storage location at in a relative's shed. Considering that I'll be on the road with most of that equipment, there won't be too much that will be stored there. And that which remains shouldn't be there too long.
One of the first things that I plan on doing once I'm in the Marietta area is getting another storage unit, this time smaller. All I need it for is to stage my gear so that I don't have to transport all of it, which all of that really taxes the weight capacities (in cab and the hitch) on my 2008 Chevy HHR LS. My plan is to sleep in The Cramper for at least a month before I rent a house or apartment in the area.
I now have a 30.3gal (121.1qt) Yeti Tundra 125 bear resistant cooler that I purchased from Cabellas in Tridelphia, West Virginia for $582 out the door. I've always known that I've needed this, but it's price has always been cost prohibitive. Nonetheless, I believe that it's a 20qt improvement over my previous Coleman cooler, which frequently ran out of space, it never sealed right, the screws stripped days after I bought it and it was never bear proof.
Years ago, the Whipple Section - Buckeye/ North Country National Scenic Trail was off-road between Cow Run Road and the Hills - Hildreth Covered Bridge. But enough property was purchased by one owner to necessitate shutting down a township road in the final leg that the trail was dependent on. As a result, the BT was re-routed to the north and according to Whipple's map, North Country remains rated on a truncated path to the Lane Farm Campground in the Wayne National Forest - Marietta Unit via a ford across the Little Muskingum River. I now have authorization to reestablish that footpath and white blaze it's route.
When you look at a national forest on a map, that which I call the "green blob" is it's administrative boundary. What most people don't know is that there's private property in there. But I have Global Imaging System (GIS) shapefile data displaying what the federal government actually owns. Without a guide, the spur to Lane Farm (as displayed on the map) is about 2 1/2 miles long. We have federal property well before that where hikers can disperse camp. This is where in the forest, camping is permitted 150 feet from the trail. So, with the BT/ NCT going in a new direction, the only thing I could see Lane being much good for is parking and campers.
But the problem with the ford is that governmental agencies aren't probing the Little Muskingum's water temperatures and publishing them in real time to Internet. But the nearest information that I can currently find on water temperature is the RECR8 Ohio River Report for the Meldahl Segment near Cincinnati. The more local reports only cover things like the flood stage, which I'm not too particularly concerned with considering that the river can be seen from multiple point on the spur and rather early along it. In person, it's the first thing that I'd recommend looking at. 2 1/2 miles is a long way to go to find out that it's not safe to ford. And this really only affects hikers in the clockwise/ westbound direction. According to Whipple's 10/2010 map, they're routed on the edge of that river about 5 miles prior to the Lane Spur (unofficial, that's my own name for it). On this map, the spur is marked in red diamonds.
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