Today my brother Andrew and I took a hike. We went out into the “backyard” – which is to say, up the mountain behind my uncle’s house. There is no trail. Nothing. People don’t go up there, for the most part – except every few decades to log trees, and occasional hunters.
We just kept walking uphill. Mostly a southward bearing, leaning a bit southwestward. I used the GPS on my phone to take regular bearings, every few hundred feet. And we tied plastic ribbon on branches to mark our path, too, which was useful for finding our way back down the hill.
Here is a screenshot of the navigation app I used, with all the little pink waypoints.
I took some pictures, and so did Andrew. The hillside got snowier as we went up, but easier, too, because even deep snow is easier than the really thick underbrush of the lower slopes, and once you get into the old growth trees higher up, there is much less underbrush.
