Otter Creek WVa

“My nephew(17) and I arrived at the mouth of the Otter Creek Wilderness just before dark Fri 3/22.

It was about 18-20 degrees with a few inches of snow from Thurs night.

I decided not to drag his inexperienced butt on a night hike so we bagged it and got a room in Parsons.

It was a tough decision......beer and basketball or frigid night hike.

Saturday morning was clear blue sky and cold.
I had not been to the mouth of the creek before and hiking in daylight was a better idea.
The first little bit is along rocks at the creek's edge.
These rocks were iced in places and hard enough to see in the light.

Having to fish the kid out of the creek at night might have turned him against bakcpacking.

I dragged him up an unused trail....Coal Run Trail....which turned into another one of my bushwacking escapades.

We navigated our way through fairly open hardwoods up and up to where we found an old timber rail trail which dead-ended at a very steep gorge way up Coal Run.
The partly frozen falls where beautiful but the way was too steep and slippery for "creek-crawlin".

We tried another fork of the rail trail which promised to take us up to Green Mountain and a real sweet campsite I know.
After a bit this trail ended way short of the top.
I appears that this trail was wiped out long ago by slides as it disappears in jumbled rocks with rhododendron and good sized trees growing through the rocks.

After manuevering through this mess for a few hundred yards and not finding the trail we gave up.
We made our way back down to Otter Creek and camped by the rumbling roaring creek.

We saw a lot of icicles and frozen falls.”