These Paws Are Made For Walkin’

Another song title used for a post title, but this time not the Talking Heads. I have to thank Kristen for coming up with the title for this week’s travelogue, and Nancy Sinatra for the wonderful song (although I still argue her best songs are “Somethin’ Stupid” and “Bang Bang”).

So… the question once again, as it is in each travelogue post, is “Where’s Nico?”

This week’s answer is:

Talladega National Forest!

After we left Dauphin Island, we headed up to one of the nicest state parks I’ve ever seen – Cheaha State Park in northern Alabama, the once and (sigh…) now apparently future home of Kadyn Proctor. Cheaha is actually within Talladega National Forest. The area is kind of the southern end of the Appalacians, and though the altitude is only about 2400 feet or so, that’s the highest point in Alabama.

If you ever have a chance to stay there – I highly recommend it. We stayed at the Improved Upper Campground, and just a half mile or so either way, there were some spectacular overlooks – Bald Rock and Pulpit Rock. You can see dozens of miles out from both points, and the sunsets were great at Pulpit Rock.

Bald Rock

Pulpit Rock as I try to play with Panorama mode on my iPhone

Pulpit Rock sunset pic

An unamused Nico and I doing a dramatic reenactment of “The Lion King” at Pulpit Rock

Kristen consoling the unamused Nico on Pulpit Rock

Also, from Cheaha State Park, it’s a fairly short drive over to the Chinnabee Silent Hiking Trail. It was a really nice trail – it was actually constructed over four years by a troop of Boy Scouts from a school for the deaf back in the mid-70’s. The out-and-back hike is about six miles or so with about 700 or so feet of climb – nothing too strenuous, but also our first chance to do a little bit of climb in our hikes after mainly flat trails so far on our trip. It’s good to get a bit of that in before we head west, where we’ll be doing a lot more climbing.

Nico, by the way, LOVES to climb. He gets giddy when he gets to scamper up rocks.

Which really gets us to the title of this post. Nico really is an amazing hiker. He did about nine miles with some decent climb on that first hiking day in Cheaha, and around six miles or so pretty much every day since then. That’s an awful lot when you consider the guy needs to take a whole lot more steps to cover the same ground as we are covering.

On Wednesday, we moved over to the Coleman Lake area of the Talladega National Forest. It’s a really nice setup, and if you have your ‘America The Beautiful’ pass from the National Park Service, it’s only ten bucks a night and has water and electrical hookups. There’s some pretty hikes in this part of the National Forest that we wanted to explore, and this campsite was perfect for that.

The hikes we have done the last several days are on different sections of the Pinhoti Trail. The whole trail is over three hundred miles and serves as sort of a southern extension to the Appalachian Trail – we just did some nice day hike sections around Coleman and Sweetwater Lakes and Pine Glen, the Heflin Spur and Sweet Birch Canyon. We’ve seen a ton of butterflies in the area, as well as wild turkey, deer and a coyote just off the trail. We also found a great spot on Coleman Lake to watch the sunsets, and a great place on the Pinhoti near Pine Glen for picnic lunches.

If you happen to come to Talladega, my top recommendation for a hike in the central region would be the Chinnabee Silent Hiking Trail, and my top recommendation for the northeast section of the park would be the Sweet Birch Canyon portion of the Pinhoti.

We’ve enjoyed Talladega so much that we decided to extend our stay until Thursday. In the meantime, here are some pics from the trails!