Weekly Hikes in March

Green Gorge, Signal Mountain

 

In January I had this goal of getting back to hiking every week with my kids. That grew into hiking with a group of friends and the added challenge of finding a new place to hike each week. We are so blessed to live in an area that has an abundance of hiking. March saw us falling off on both of these goals. But it's ok. We are ok. And we are still getting outside as much as possible.

For our first hike in March, none of our homeschool hiking buddies were able to join us, so I messaged a neighbor whose son goes to a private school that gets out early, and they were able to join us on a quick hike to one of our favorite neighborhood trails.

North Chickamauga Creek to Strip Mine Falls (Blue Hole), Mowbray Mountain

The second hike we went on was a new one for us, and we were delighted to have several other families join us. We hit up the North Chickamauga Creek Gorge where we hiked to Strip Mine Falls via the Hodgkin Loop.

The kids had such a blast. We hiked the loop in reverse so that we could end at the creek. I knew that kids would get distracted with throwing rocks in the water, and I didn't want to spend half of the hike nagging kids to keep moving.

It was a perfect way to do this hike. The kids got to explore and climb on parts of the bluff, cross the Strip Mine waterfall twice, and then enjoy the rushing creek while the mamas talked.

They also found a crevice in a rock that they could shimmy up. They could have spent hours at this special spot climbing up through the hole. This was such a great hike. We will definitely be back!

 Green Gorge, Signal Mountain

The same week as the North Chick hike, our community was told to start practice social distancing. For us, this meant pretty much locking down our family to our neighborhood, though we did have one friend that we continued to stay in contact with for the remainder of the month. He was able to join us on a walk to Green Gorge (our neighborhood trail) for our third hike of the month.

The boys also spent the last three weeks riding bikes with him. Biking makes it fairly easy to social distance. As of today our state has called for "sheltering-in-place" so they boys can no longer play with this friend and they are super bummed about this latest development in the era of the Coronavirus.

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Learning how to do stoppies. The playground is off limits but learning new bike skills isn’t. #lifewithkids #coronatine #bicycleskills #stoppies #mohaus2020

A post shared by Cheree Moore (@mo_haus) on Mar 27, 2020 at 9:18am PDT

To be honest, the first week of social distancing was hard. Unexpected change can be challenging, no matter how old you are. And I was really struggling.

Green Gorge, Signal Mountain

I ended up taking a walk by myself one night in the rain. I found myself down at Green Gorge. Just me and the creek and God. It was so therapeutic and I came back ready to embrace whatever lies ahead of all of us.

 Three Gorges Segment of Cumberland Trail, Mowbray Mountain

The following week, we took Daniel and ventured off our mountain for a family hike on Mowbray Mountain. We did this section of the Cumberland Trail last month with some friends. The kids loved showing Daniel their favorite places to explore and climb on this trail.

We saw a total of 8 other hikers all afternoon ad were able to safely distance ourselves. It was so good for our family to get outside together.

We hope to be able to take neighborhood walks and bike rides while we shelter-in-place for an unknown amount of time. All of our parks and trails have been closed. We watched a live Town Hall meeting last week on YouTube and were saddened that the town council had to close some of our trails because there had been a huge influx of people from places like Atlanta and Nashville overwhelming the trails of our little community.

I am so glad we live on a wooded property. The kids can still climb our huge rock wall and explore our woods. Their hammocks are up and they spend 80% of every day outside. I feel so terrible for people living in apartments or homes with tiny yards during this crisis. We spend part of every day watching the birds and squirrels and chipmunks in our yard. All we have to do is look out our windows.