50K - Bushwacking with Blaine, Mileage with Mindy (Part 1: the Wacking)

After deciding to bail on the Mt. A 50K (didn't want the long run with the long drive), I had wonderful offers of company to fill my miles at Bradbury.  Mindy was going to meet up to time her run with my middle miles.  Erin was nice enough to pick me up at Bradbury to drive Blaine and me to the power lines (where TMR had done its part to work on the Bradbury/Pineland Connector trail).  The idea was to run back to the park, getting there about when Mindy would be pulling in.  Ha!

The trail is great (TMs do good work!).  I would like to run long on that terrain.  It is very spongy, without being too soft, from all the years of pine needles building a thick carpet.  We were quickly off what the TMs had worked on and onto the mountain-bikers' stretch.  When it popped out onto a road, I asked Blaine which way (I thought he'd run it before).  He said he didn't know, that we should head back to where we started and go from there in a way he'd run before.  Fine with me, I didn't know any of it.  I had run part of the BL backward that somehow ran into part of the connector, but that was in winter and I never looked at the map to see how it fit in with this.

We ran through seriously marshy power line trails.  At one point I was kind of busting on Blaine for pussy-footing from bog to bog and decided to just run right through it.  Oops!  He got to laugh at me as I ended up mid-thigh in what I expected to be, at most, knee deep.

We approached the next road and both may have said, "Oh, shit."  There was the sub-station that I drive by on the way to Pineland from my house.  Definitely not where we should be.  Blaine knew where the BL came through here, but that would be way too long.  Best to follow the road back.  It was funny when we came back to the exact place Erin had dropped us more than 1/2 hour before!  It wouldn't have mattered at all, except I worried about getting back in time to meet with Mindy now.

Road or try the connector trail again?  We thought we could make up some time by running the road to Lawrence road to find where the trail crossed, then following it back to the park.  And we thought we did just that.  But the trail kept splintering.  We'd find ourselves in someone's wood lot or at a cool quarry (where we found a pool that was still very iced over.  several times I was a little mad I left my camera in the car).

Finally I used Blaine's phone to call Rick (I don't know Mindy's number....it's on my phone in the CAR!).  I had Rick open my email and send Mindy a message, something to the effect, "Blaine and I are lost, but getting closer to Bradbury."  Again, aside from feeling bad about being late, we were having a lot of fun.  Blaine and I are both, um, talkers.  There was never any dead air AND there was an air of adventure.  What fun!

OK, we'd seen a sign, back a ways, that said, "PARKING".  We found that again and headed down.  We popped out at the spot on Lawrence Rd where the crew had originally met up on trail day.  Back on the road.  This time we ran all the way to the school on Elmwood.  We saw the trail leading up to the park.  Road or trail?  Did we really need to ask?  So off the road, up the mountain.

Right!  This trail also broke into several branches.  We tried a couple.  Finally, I said, "I know the mountain is this way." We just ran (through very cool terrain).  Then I noticed a brook that looked like someone was doing some work on.  Blaine thought I might be grasping at straws, but followed the little stream up with me.  To a trail!  It wasn't long till we popped out onto the Boundary Trail, but not where the Connector ties in, much closer to where South Ridge connects.  Yay!!! We took the easy way to the summit, then down the Switchback.

Instead of 7ish miles, we'd gone just over 10, but lots of back tracking and bushwacking made for a longer time than normal for 10.  Mindy was great though and said she was able to get work done on her paper.  Blaine and I told tales of our run, peppered with lots of "I'm sorry"'s, while I changed into dry shoes and socks.  We said by to Blaine and headed off on our adventure....