Pine Log has proved to be one of my favorite places for an easy, unpopulated getaway. It isn't a very big place at a little over 14,000 acres. It's only about a 25 minute drive from my house and is the best place nearby that I have found to offer the illusion of wilderness and solitude. It's an eventual dream of mine to own a piece of land I can do most of my woods recreating on, but until then, places like Pine Log are valuable finds to me. Most of the time, I go there alone, but while my brother was still in town from Texas, I took him and my nephew out on a hike there yesterday. Plans changed here and there and the plan for the hike didn't firm up until the day before, so in the haphazard planning, I managed to forget my nice, detailed topo map of the area. Ah well, I thought, I studied that map not too long ago. "Not too long ago" being nearly two years.
We parked down by the ranger station at the southern end of the WMA, and followed Stamp Creek north, stopping to fish at any likely spot along the way. The water was a little lower than usual, but it was crystal clear and cold. Fishing wasn't too exiting with only my brother catching a fish. My nephew was on the hunt for crawfish most of the day and his hunt let to the most odd find of the day. I was fishing with a little plastic crawdad, about 2" long. I was flinging it out onto a little rock ledge and then tugging it just off the rock and into the deep water there along the ledge. Since I was using a handline, my retrieval of the lure was pretty slow and at one point, I let the lure sit on the bottom about 6 feet from the bank for a second while I wound up the extra line. I had my eye on the lure, and this enormous crawdad cruised up to inspect the bait. It was the largest crawfish I have ever seen, my non-exaggerated guess is between 5 and 6 inches. Not only was it larger than any I have seen before, it also was striped red, black, and white. Strange coloring, enormous size - I wish I could have take a pic of it, but if this rings a bell for anyone, I am curious what variety it is. Sure looked different than the usual crawfish I see out here.
We followed Stamp Creek and the trail that runs beside it past the Davis Branch split on up to the Guthrie Creek Split. We veered right and blazed our own trail along the creek in the hopes that we would hit a road that I vaguely recalled from previous map study. After about two and a half hours of hiking, it became apparent my memory wasn't going to come through for us, so we turned back and hiked out the way we came.
Last night, I came home and studied my map again, and that road I thought I remembered turned out to be just a little quad trail on the map. No worries. It was a great mini-excursion with those guys, and a good day in the woods.
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