HIKING AT THE CAVALIER W. M. A..
It was a cold 27 degrees on this Tuesday morning for our hike in Chesapeake. Margaret and I arrives early and drove to the first parking lot to see if anyone had got there before we did. Not seeing anyone we drove back out to the main gate where we met Bob and close behind him was John. Here on Ballahack Rd. where The Cavalier Wildlife Management Area is located we all were going to meet and go on a 6 mile hike. The rest of our group pulled into the driveway in the next 10 minutes, that is, all but Brain. Coming from Toana on the other side of Williamsburg we knew he would be a little late, but after 15 minutes we headed on in hoping he would catch up with us before we left our trucks and started on our hike. This trip I decided to drive all the way into where the old hunt club cabin is standing out in the middle of the cornfield to start this hike. Brian still had not showed up so we called Ellis for some help on trying to get a phone number for him. Ellis came through with a number and I was able to talked to Brian and he told me that he was making a tour of Chesapeake and for us to start the hike and he would catch up to us later.
We left the cabin area and headed north/east crossing over one of their roads and here we found the first of 5 deer hunters, not knowing that mussel load hunting was allow at this time of the year we started making more loud noises so that the hunters would know we were coming their way. This did not make them very happy, but Phil West had told me the week before that we were welcome to hike anytime we wanted too. Guess he forgot to tell me about the deer hunters. We did not hear any shot on this property all day and was never in any danger. After crossing the road we headed into a beautiful pine tree area where there was some snow still on the trail. Crunch, crunch we walked on and soon the snow was no longer there as the sunshine had melted it away the day before. I had been talking to Brian on the cell phone and letting him know where we were and how to meet us at one of the intersections that we would be crossing in about 30 minutes. At last we were all together, Brian had met us here and now we were 13 hikers out searching for that one bear that we always are looking for but never seen to fine. Bear scat, yes !, bears tracks, yes !, bears no !
On this trip we had Margaret, Bruce, Bob S, John G, Sandy Butler, and Brian from our Tuesday Group and Fran, 2 Cindy, Becky, Larry, Bob, and Susan from the Wednesday Group, which we enjoy having them with us and hope they keep coming back. We hiked on and about 12:00 P.M. we stopped in a nice sunshine area and had our lunch. Here we pulled out of our packs ponchos, plastic bags, table cloth and soft mats to sit on and enjoy our PB&J’s and Tuna. We had walked 3.5 miles by this time and after a 30 minute break we plan to do another 2.5 miles. I let everyone know that we had a large ditch to cross over and the only way to get across was on a small 2x6 in. bridge that some of the hunters had constructed after the large well built bridge had wash away about two years ago. Everyone said to push on and we would cross that bridge when we got there. Well, we did and everyone did great going down the side of the ditch, crossing over the small bridge and up the other side, with no one following in the water. We were back at the cabin now and all were happy with the hike and all said they had a very good time. We cover 6.1 miles in about 4.5 hours on a beautiful sunshiny day with the temperature going from 27 degrees all the way to 44 degrees. It’s great to be in the outdoors.
By Bruce Julian
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