trip report: Boondocking near Ashville

2015-11-18

My camera broke such that I didn't know it was working, so I don't have many photos, but I did take a few.

For my birthday, Angie and I decided to take a trip down to Ashville. Since staying in hotels is silly, we boondocked of course! My Jeep is no-where near as good for this as my old truck Jane was, but it worked pretty okay. On the upside it got us pretty far down a very rough road, farther than Jane could have.

Here's Angie eating a nice vegetable and tofu soup cooked over a small fire. To help the fire burn and make it easier to get the water to a nice simmer we stuck some stakes in the ground as a pot-stand. You can see in the foreground that we turned the sticks almost entirely to ash. When we left the next day we rubbed the ash into the ground and put the leaves back too for a little stealth camping. After next rain no-one will be able to tell we camped there.



It was a little on the chilly side. It dropped below freezing both nights. The morning after these photos were taken we went up the ridge a bit for a hike and pretty ice crystals were growing out of the ground. By my figuring it must've been ~25F or colder up there, so it can't have been too warm down where we slept.



A good sleepingbag and a warm hat will do wonders though. Once my fingers got a bit too cold too play more guitar we slept snug and cozy, using a silnylon tarp in a cave pitch to break the wind. The photo below isn't from this trip, but it demonstrates a (rather poor) cave pitch to explain what I mean for handling wind.




After our hike the next day we went in to town and wandered Ashville, then found a site off a rather easier to get down dirt road by a nice river. Sadly I took no pictures that evening. We had a similar dinner, and as we had an established fire-ring that night, played with the fire most of the evening.