FOLLOW THIS GPS TRACK IF YOU DARE

I have been spoiled by the open summits of the west: this was by far the worst bushwhacking I've ever experienced. While the trail up was okay, it was still fairly overgrown, leaving me with scratches and scrapes even before I reached what I knew would be some off-trail travel to reach the true summit. How could I not go for it, with the true summit so tantalizingly close to the trail? Well my friend, let me tell you.

Even with most of the greenery still dead in the late winter, the summit is guarded by thick groves of Mountain Laurel, which will scratch, grab, and suffocate you with every step. On top of that, there was a sprinkle of nasty thorn bushes for flavor, leaving me with more than one spot of blood. Every once in a while I thought I hallucinated some trace of an old trail or animal path, but it was always a fantasy: as soon as I slipped through a brief gap the trees and brush closed around me. When I finally reached the summit, I was tantalized by the sweeping open slopes on the north side of the mountain, but this was merely a siren song: these open areas were littered, with loose, mossy, ankle-breaking rocks, and every time a path towards the west opened up the brush would close off even thicker to the south, leaving me no choice but to bushwhack back south through an even worse stretch on the way back to the trail. That less-than-half-mile round trip to the true summit took me nearly an hour of miserable bushwhacking.

Maybe there's some kind of lesson to be learned. Don't bushwhack off-trail in a wilderness area? A mistake I surely won't be making again. 1/10 would not recommend.