Final hike was guided with extreme fear of Forest Service

</element><element id="paragraph-1" type="body"><![CDATA[The frost Monday morning caused my neighbor's catalpa tree to lose its leaves and beans.

The rain in the last couple of days has turned the large, brown leaves into a troubling sight, like a carpet of skin oozing through the yard.

Catalpas can be annoying trees to have in a yard because of the mess, but the tree has a somewhat magical property. Catalpa fence posts will grow into trees. The fence posts my grandpa planted decades ago have grown into rows of catalpa trees that all lose their leaves at the same time following the first frost.

The wet catalpa leaves may be unattractive, but across the street from that mess is another neighbor's yard covered with golden ginkgo leaves, like a spot of sunshine on a rainy day.

A large portion of the leaves, though, have fallen onto the street and vehicles have passed over them, crushing them into a disturbing mustard-like nuclear street paste.

Harrisburg's street sweeper was grinding along Wednesday afternoon attempting to clear the streets of leaves, but I'm betting a lot of leaves were sucked into the storm drains before the sweeper reached them.

I had never before noticed a grove of cypress trees growing in a lot on State Street north of the old Dairy Queen in Eldorado.

On Veterans Day the leaves, sort of hybrid of flat leaves and pine needles, were a reddish brown. Though the cypress is a conifer, it does lose its leaves in the autumn. But that lot is a strange one for cypress because that type of tree typically grows near water.

The trees at the Garden of the Gods Saturday were not pretty. Fall color has come and gone in the Herod ridge lines. The chief color was the drab brown of oak trees, the predominate species of the dry hills.

The 18 hikers of our River to River Trail Society guided hiking series on Saturday divided into two groups in order to maintain compliance with the recent policies of the Shawnee National Forest, limiting groups in some areas to 10.

We were hiking the Indian Point loop leading to a dramatic overlook a short distance from the Backpackers Parking Lot and then down to a grotto of overhang bluffs.

Our two groups separated. I took 9 hikers in and Eric Johnson waited to take his group of eight. However, there was trouble from the outset when four teenage girls charged from their vehicle to walk beside us. Suddenly, my careful planning to keep the number of hikers to 10 fell to pieces because of these teenage strangers, obviously ignorant of the Garden of the Gods Wilderness rules, who had fallen into step with us. So I issued an order for my group to halt and allow these strangers to continue on up ahead of us, out of sight.

It was a lucky break no one in our cheerful group attempted to socialize with the strange hikers, because then our group of 10 would surely have been cemented into one of 14 and I would have had to devise a strategy to diplomatically tell these newcomers to get lost.

But fortune was on our side that day and I breathed a sigh of relief.

We commented on the unique shapes of the white pines we hiked within. They apparently grow a new series of branches each year, giving them an odd segmented appearance. We were just around the corner from the overlook bluff and I anticipated the "oohs" and "ahs" from the hikers new to the spot.

Then anxiety gripped me again to see not only the four teenagers enjoying the bluff, but also two men breaking down a tent. Our group of 10 was about to become one of 16 if I did not take quick action. One of our group struck up a conversation with the campers, encouraging a hickory nut roasting experiment using their smoldering campfire.

I encouraged the group to follow me to a second overlook, away from the campers and teenagers, and enough did that I believed we were safe from accusations of exceeding the 10-person limit.

However, later on in the hike we met up with another group of campers, a group I tried to avoid and then on the next overlook I was convinced the 10-person rule - as I've stated several times before - is not feasible in certain forest Wilderness Areas.

We greeted about a dozen people in the forest, peppered around the area, each hiking their own hike and not intending to be grouped together, but fate and a desperate desire to see the fall color had brought us all together for a few moments.

The group-size limit of the Forest Service in Garden of the Gods Wilderness, Bay Creek Wilderness and Lusk Creek Wilderness is intended to create a greater opportunity of solitude, a provision of the Wilderness Act.

Indian Point, a landmark identified in large letters on a billboard at a parking lot with room for dozens of vehicles, is an area almost as popular as the Garden of the Gods Observation Area itself.

We adhered closely to the group-size rule, but the Forest Service should exempt Indian Point from it. It is too heavily promoted and too heavily used to expect people to wait their turns to look at the views.

Our hike ended at about noon while the wind was picking up and colder air was moving in. It was the final hike of the River to River Trail fall hiking series since predictions of cold, rain and possible flurries caused the cancellation of the Williams Hill hike.

The fall hiking series was great one this year with many new faces and many seasoned ones, now well-prepared to lead others on some of the many Shawnee trails.

-- DeNeal is a staff writer for The Daily Register and The Daily Journal. He may be contacted at 253-7146 ext. 230 or by e-mail at bdeneal@yourclearwave.com.