Training Log Archive: CleverSky

WBSW, the far SW. There were some trails on the basemap that I had never explored, so I went to check them out. The one next to the parking area (not on the base) was a dead-end, but then I went up the primary one that I was interested in, which does something like what the rough guess on the base looks like, with some short side trails, and some substantial ones that go into the adjacent privately held land. The terrain out here has a few pockets of nice woods, but is on the whole pretty laurelly. Then I went on a trail that Jon had looked at, and went off through a section of woods that is strategically located, and not too terrible, but it's not mapped well enough to send people through at this point, and doesn't seem worth the effort to improve it (it's pretty clear that Jon considered it not worth using, and I don't disagree). I took familiar trails back south, and went down one that I had run past countless times but had never explored, and which isn't on the base. As I expected, it heads into somebody's back yard. The shortest way back from there was to bushwhack, and the laurel got really dense. I got to see (and climb) an interesting rocky outcrop that was on the base, then back into the green. With no compass, in thick vegetation, carrying an unfieldchecked basemap that was getting hard to read in The Dim, where did I end up? I'm an orienteer, I came out exactly where I parked my car, of course. All that laurel was pretty wet from rain earlier in the day, and I was pretty much soaked.