The Briar Patch

Hands Jigsaw Puzzle
When David Rice asked me about doing the food drop for his scouts at Grayson Highlands, my response was "PLEEEEEEZZZZ don't throw me in dat der briar patch!" Yeah, I'm in love with this place! Going on the hike this year, and welcoming a guest author,14 year old Briana Bennett, to my blog has inspired me to finish editing and make the slideshow of our hike last year. So, the faces and the place are familiar, but it's still worth seeing again!
Without further ado, Here's Briana's account of the adventure:

When Miss Charlotte took Christine, Claire, Dylan, and me (Briana) to Mount Rogers, I didn’t know we were in for such a big adventure. When we got there, we were really excited and couldn’t wait to get started. When we did, we saw some people behind us with horses; we pretended they were following us, (Even though they were on a different trail going the opposite way.) That just didn’t stay interesting for long though, soon we were pretending to be secret agents. We were having a great time.

There were some rocks to climb, but mostly it was just grass. We had to go over some stairs, then under a three foot high break in the fence, and through this wooden zigzag thing in a different fence. All this stuff prevents the ponies from getting out. Miss Charlotte kept urging us on because it looked like it might rain. (Our game morphed once again -- we had been U.S.A. secret agents, but now, we were STAR WARS Alliance agents and we were running away from Darth Vader.) We did get to see the ponies; they let us get really close. Miss Charlotte, as usual was taking lots of pictures. Before we entered the woods we stopped at a little hut next to the trail and signed the log book. (OK, we didn’t just sign, we filled a whole page.) Then, we entered the woods; they were super cool. (Supposedly the nearest woods like these are in Canada.) There were lots of pine trees and interesting moss. It was dark and kind of spooky. When we got to the top, we didn’t realize it at first, but we soon found the little disk saying we were at the top. (It was embedded on top of a rock.) We jumped off the rock and Miss Charlotte took pictures of us. While at the top we declared a bug we found to be the tallest bug in the state.

It was on our way down that the adventure switched from imaginary to real. WE GOT CAUGHT IN A THUNDER STORM!!! That was scary because WE were the tallest thing around. We were running down the mountain trying to get to shelter. At first it wasn’t raining, but as we neared a sort-of-cave we had passed through on the way up, (we were planning to stay there till the storm was over,) it started raining cats and dogs. We stayed in the cave-like thing till the storm was over. Then we hiked back to the car and changed into the clothes we had brought just in case. Even without our adventures it would have been a great hike, but I am glad we had them.

And now, presenting THE SHOW! (Little did we know how prophetic the sign at Massie Gap was going to be! The mile long mad dash through the lightning bolts was utterly terrifying!!!)