Labor Day Weekend in Hocking Hills, Ohio

Hocking Hills State Forest

The SO (Significant Other) and I decided to trek down to southern Ohio for Labor Day weekend this year. We had been wanting to check out the Hocking Hills Valley for awhile now (SO's cousin owns a canoe livery and campground down there), and since it's a 3 hour drive, we thought a 3 day weekend would suffice.

We (of course) left home 2 hours later than we had originally planned, and arrived at our campground around 3:15 pm.

It was hot. Very hot. And muggy. I think the temperature was around 89 degrees. By the time we finished deliberating about where to put up our tent, putting up the tent, and unpacking sleeping bags, sleeping pads, blankets, and clothes, we were pretty sweaty.

Our campsite on the Hocking River

The huge beautiful tree at our campsite

Hocking River

 We decided to get cracking right away and hit up one of the famous Hocking Hills sights.

We made the steep and windy drive up to the Cantwell Cliffs.

Little cabin at the beginning of the hiking trail at Cantwell Cliffs

 

Cantwell Cliffs is an amazing hike. Beautiful. I loved the time of day, too. Hiking in the forest at sunset is one of my favorite things. Feels otherworldly. 

Sunset at Cantwell Cliffs

 

After the hike, we drove back to our campsite and started making preparations for dinner (hotdogs, potato salad, macaroni salad, and chips... super-healthy. Hey, it's camping). Preparations pretty much included building a fire and unpacking the cooler. And cracking open beers. No problem? I wish I could say it had been no problem, but starting a fire proved to be a total problem. Because a) we had firewood but no kindling, or a hatchet to make kindling, a rookie mistake on our part, and b) the sky was not helping matters by spitting random spurts of rain down on everything. So we spent a lot of time bunching up balls of notebook paper, stuffing them underneath the firewood, lighting the balls of paper, and watching as the fire repeatedly went out. Eventually SO resorted to yanking off small strips of firewood with his fingers to use as kindling. This worked. By the time SO's cousin stopped by with her two kids to welcome us to the campground, our fire was small, but burning steadily.

So after a nice visit with the cousin and kids, we were finally able to stick our weenies over the fire. It was very dark outside at this point.

Weenies over the fire!

We also roasted marshmallows and made s'mores. A very nice evening. The rain had let up, and we sat by our campfire, drinking and talking, until late o'clock.

Sleeping in the tent that night was an entirely different story.

We had been in our sleeping bags for maybe an hour when the sky opened up and all hell broke loose. A downpour of rain all night. Not much sleep was had. I spent most of the night tossing and turning and intermittently feeling along the sides and bottom of the tent, checking for water leakage.

The next morning, it was still raining.

Everything at the campsite was sopping wet. The picnic table, the fire pit, our chairs... At least I had packed my heavy-duty rain boots. I was able to tromp along the muddy path to the porta potties and around the campsite with relative ease.

We did attempt to make a morning campfire. One of my favorite things about camping is morning campfires, where you can heat up water for coffee, and then slowly wake up while warming your tent-chilled body next to the warmth of the flame. But a morning campfire was not in the cards for us. Everything was too wet. We quickly hightailed it to the local gas station, "GoMart," for coffee, because if I don't have coffee in the morning, I die. True story.

Good times start at GoMart

Once I was properly caffeinated, we drove back to our soggy campsite, and well, laid around a lot. We climbed into our shelter, and proceeded to get giddy at our situation, which was being trapped in a tiny tent in the pouring rain. We pulled junk food out of our provisions and ate that for breakfast. We went into laughing fits about nothing. Mostly about how we were completely unprepared for camping in the rain. Most of the other campsites had pop-up canopies and tarps that had kept their things dry. They probably also had kindling. So we sat and giggled and napped (I put myself in a sour cream-and-onion-chip-coma).

Finally, around 12:30 pm, I decided that we couldn't waste our entire first full day in Hocking Hills in a junk food coma in our tent. Even if it was raining. So, we changed into our hiking clothes, and set out to conquer some more of the Hocking Hills "must-see" sites. In the rain.

Luckily, once we got on the highway and a few miles outside of our campground, the rain stopped.

First up on our hiking tour was Old Man's Cave, which was about a 30 minute drive from our campsite.

Old Man's Cave was ridiculously crowded. To the point where I wanted to turn right back around and forget it. Chalk it up as a loss. But, SO really wanted to see it, so we rallied and got out of the car, and made our way to the park entrance. There were bodies milling about everywhere, like it was friggin' Disney World or something. There was barely room to walk. I was really annoyed with the whole ordeal.

The site was amazing though. I kept thinking how cool it would have been to be there without the crowds. Kind of like when I was at Machu Picchu in Peru. One of the most otherworldly and incredible places, but so full of people scrambling about everywhere. Definitely reduces the mystique of a place. 

Old Man's Cave

Upper Falls at Old Man's Cave

After escaping the masses at Old Man's Cave, we drove up to Conkle's Hollow, which was decidedly less overrun with people.

Sandstone outcrops of Conkle's Hollow

Conkle's Hollow definitely makes you feel like you have been dropped onto the set of Jurassic Park. The forest is thick and feels ancient.

Is that where the t-rex lives?

From Conkle's Hollow it was on to Rock House.

Rock House requires you to make a pretty intense hike down to it. The path down is pretty steep and narrow, and we got held up quite a few times behind people who were having a tough time making it down the trail.

But once you make it down, totally worth the effort. 

Rock House is basically a huge cave on the side of a cliff that you can walk around in. 

Inside Rock House

 As one little boy put it, "this should be Old Man's Cave, Dad."

Too right, young sir, too right. 

Obviously the hike back up from Rock House was pretty exhausting, so by the time we made it to the car, we were pretty worn out from the day. It was around 4:30 pm at this point, so we'd been hiking off and on for four hours.

We made it back to our campsite just in time to fail at making a fire again. We had planned on roasting hot dogs for dinner (again), but damp conditions and lack of kindling thwarted our fire-making efforts (again). So we basically ate junk food (again) for dinner. Not that hot dogs are a well-balanced meal, but they are slightly more substantial than chips, potato salad, and m&m's.

After our hasty, unsatisfying dinner and a change of clothes, we got back in the car and made the ten minute drive to the canoe livery. We were scheduled to take a tiki torch-lit canoe ride at 7:30 pm.

This consisted of us picking out a paddle and life vest, boarding an old school bus with 40 other people, and being driven to a location on the Hocking River to launch our canoes.

I don't have any pictures of the canoe ride because I knew that if I had brought my "camera" (iphone) onto a canoe with me, it would have inevitably ended up in the water somehow. Trust me.

I can tell you that the canoe ride was equal parts awesome and scary. We didn't get back to our campsite until around 11:30 pm. 

We woke up to sunshine the next morning which was nice. 

Is that....the sun? 

And luckily, we had decided to pack up our campsite directly after gas station coffee and breakfast, because this is what the campground looked like a couple hours later.

Because OHIO. 

Here are some pics of our cute little campsite that I snapped before the rain. 

From our campsite we drove to Logan, a 15 minute drive, to visit with SO's cousins before we headed back up north. We picked up lunch for everyone on the way.

This was lunch

Logan, Ohio

The ride home would have been uneventful if I hadn't been hit with severe nausea and stomach pain. Too many cheezy breadsticks? Who knows. But we made it back.

And that was our rainy but awesome weekend in Hocking Hills.