red river gorge

Me at the base of the indian staircase

 Last weekend my dad and I met up with my Uncle Denny to hike in the RRG in Kentucky. We rented a cabin because it was way too cold to sleep out (temps were 30 degrees colder than normal). It was a lot of fun hanging out with my Uncle Denny because I haven't seen him since he came to visit me in 2008.

We were going to do a hike called the indian staircase. But first we had to find it. My dad had a map that was 10 years old that didn't even have the approach trail on it. We walked along for about 3 miles and he decided we should start bushwhacking up towards a cliff where he thought the staircase was. There was lots of snow and ice all over everything since they had just had a huge ice storm. After I tripped over four downed trees I was like "dude, I don't think this is the right way". So we retreated to the trail and kept walking. My dad spotted finally a staircase carved into the bark of a tree, and that's how we found the trail.

The trail was really, really steep and covered in ice and downed trees. All of us were just wearing yak traks so it made walking interesting. I kept telling the guys to kick in their steps but they weren't so I took the front and kicked in steps for them. The trail gets narrow and there's a big cliff you can potentially fall off, especially when the trail is ice, so we started slowing down. Then, we got to the actual staircase, and it looked like a fucking ice climb. You walk up on this 10 foot ledge and start up the stair case, and even just walking around the ledge made me nervous because I couldn't kick steps into the ice and if one of us had fallen it would have been a long, long way down.

"This is way to dangerous" I tried to tell my dad, but he wanted to see if he could get up the staircase. I pointed out to him that if he slipped he would not be able to stop himself on the ledge before he went over the cliff. My uncle was getting pretty nervous too. And it was fucking cold and getting colder while we stood around trying to see if there was a way up. Finally we retreated. Just coming back down the trail was hard - I don't think we would have survived coming down the ice covered rocks.

We did 3 more hikes and headed into town because my uncle had told us about this pizza place that had great pizza, and then you can sit out back by a bonfire and drink beer. The whole day we were talking about what kind of pizza we were going to get and how many pieces we were going to eat and then how we were first going to have a beer. And how we would have more beer while sitting by the bonfire.

But the fucking place was closed.

We went back to the lodge, which was the only restaurant opened. "Do you have pizza?" I asked the waitress as we were being shown to a table. "No, we only have the buffet". Crap. Then my dad asked if they had beer. "This is a dry county" she said. I could have wept.

But, the food wasn't bad (though it wasn't pizza). And we had beer in the cabin. Actually, I drank some Jim Beam with my uncle and woke up with a bad headache the next morning.

We did a short hike up to the natural bridge, which was really cool but covered in ice. I couldn't believe some guy was taking his kids up the trail and they only had on tennis shoes. I don't know how he got them down.

Anyway, we've decided to make a trip to the RRG for hiking right before Christmas a new tradition. Though, after walking around in my hiking shoes (I couldn't fit my boots in my luggage) and freezing my feet off I decided that my dad needed to buy me electric feet warmers (he did, they came today, and I have already put them together!).

My dad and I at the base of the natural arch

The indian staircase