The Ship 54 Blog

September 26-28, 2003

Backpacking

Sand Ridge State Forest, IL

We left Marseilles between 5:30 and 6:00 pm on Friday night to head out to our overnight stay at

A Crew of 9 took on this trail  Brian and Brennan Thomas, Roger and David Close, Steven Whelchel, Jordan Thompson, Cory Clements, Mark Young and myself made up this august company.  Good weather, a good size crew, good chow, and here we are and here we go on our first backpacking hike. 

I threw a bag of Matchlight charcoals into the fire grill, lit the bag and began putting up my tent as did the rest of the crew.  The weather was in the 60’s getting a little cooler, but the sky was full of stars.  From torrential downpour to a beautiful fall night. 

The small backpacking tents went up fairly quick.  Cory brought five pounds of venison burgers.  Brian and Brennan brought a couple pounds of fish.  Surf and turf

Rise and shine, up and at it, reveille, reveille, reveille!!!  Most everybody was rolling out of the rack at 0630.  A couple of our harder sleepers had to have a little help getting moving Saturday morning, just a little, not much.  We started a wood fire first thing.  I had a mission to get that percolator perking and get that first cup of Joe brewed.  I took 4 fire starters from Wal-Mart.  They are the same material that the fake fireplace logs are made of, only smaller.  We used them two times on this hike and they performed wonderfully.  I won’t leave home without them again. 

We got the gas grill going and had a big breakfast of cheese omelets, bacon, and sausage.  We splurged on these two meals knowing we didn’t have to carry all those ingredients.  I still can’t believe David ate three omelets.  We ate up and at the same time began packing the packs for our move out.  We all were having the debate about the final packing list.  Do I take the CD’s to listen to?  I know what my answer to that would have been, but Steve decided to leave them in the Jeep.  Nice call Steve.  I brought 3 books, thinking that I’d be imprisoned by the rain in my tent all day.  I left the books and my tennis shoes.  It was dry, forget the shoes.  I left the books, shoes, extra sweat shirt, and my air mattress.  I was so tired Saturday night, I could have cared less about the air mattress. 

The Dept of Natural Resources web page says that Sand

We set out on our hike fully loaded at 10:15 Saturday morning.  We took the Yellow Trail which is a 15 mile loop around the forest.  Our intentions were to hike to a back country camp sight (BC 11) and stay the night and complete the loop early Sunday afternoon.  From the very first steps, whoa, this sand is deep!  We spent most of the time looking for better footing along side the trail.  Most of the time you could get better footing, but it was a lot of work continuously looking to stay out of the deep stuff. 

We headed south from Pine Camp and the going was fine.  We had to stop a few times to adjust some straps and tighten some waist belts, but other than that, no problems.  I always have a picture in my mind of Scout Backpacking, being so overloaded and unsecured, that a pile of gear is hanging out of the packs, being dragged and pulled along the trail.  That wasn’t the case here.  We were on top of our game, at least we thought so in those first few hours pounding the trail.  We reached the camp boundary and headed east, checked the maps and compass, took a blow of air, leaned on my hiking staff, confirmed our location with the crew, and off we went again.  We turned north along the forest’s eastern boundary for a long hike north.  We stopped at 1:30 for lunch.  Whew.  Good place to stop.  Everybody dumped their packs and got off their feet.  Boots came off.  Everybody was in good shape.  It was a little cool and the breeze blowing on the wet tee shirts caused a little chill, but heck, that wasn’t any problem with me. 

After the MRE lunch, we set off again to the north around 2:15.  Our goal was to reach BC 11 and camp on Saturday night.  Mr. Close was looking hard at the map and determined that if we kept pushing we could reach BC 9 which was 3-4 more miles and make for an easier Sunday hike. My impression was, there is nothing easy about any of this.   We still had a lot of daylight left and we were ready to make that push to the further back country camp site.  At around 4:30 pm we reached The Himalayan Mountain Range of Central Illinois.  We were close to the north edge of the state forest ready to make our westward turn when we ran into this mountain range.  Three large sand hills in a row and then just when you think your done with them, we turned to the west and their was

Spaghetti was on the menu Saturday night.  We got out the backpacking stoves and started heating the hot water.  Spaghetti from scratch.  The 2 pounds of spaghetti was the right amount.  Everybody ate well, but, but, but, this meal had no place on a trek.  We had to bring along a big heavy pan to boil water in, an extra half gallon of water, and two quarts of Ragu Sauce.Â