Hiking the Trail at River Ridge Retreat

April 19, 2022

Yesterday, just after noon, we headed out to hike the trail marked for hiking at the River Ridge Retreat. It is marked on the campground map and we found the map of the hiking trail to be accurate. So many trail maps are just suggestions of where the trail might be. It was nice to have an accurate map.

We walked Nox before we left on the hike. We felt the hike would be to much for her and we didn’t want to carry the wee beastie. We left her locked in the RV with the ACs running.

We walked to the cabin area to start the hike from the trailhead at the cabins. My thought was, it was uphill so coming back would be downhill.

At first, this seemed like a great idea. The trail was fairly level. It appeared the hill was mostly climbed and we would have a fairly level hike until we headed down back towards Lake Guntersville.

We started hiking and as we went down the old road, it started to rise. We were not near the top like we thought.

We realized that we were on the ridge of the River Ridge. There were dips here and there and my FitBit(TM) claimed we climbed 36 floors of steps.

We could see Lake Guntersville through the trees in many spots.

We reach the section that started down; it was very steep and I needed to focus on what I was doing, so no pictures.

When we reached the bottom, I turned and took a picture.

We still needed to hike/walk back to our RV, which would make it a 3.7 mile hike.

We passed the turn for the pier.

As we passed this sign, I turned and took a picture of it.

We walked along the road back to the RV. We did cut a across the undeveloped RV sites to get back to our RV faster. This may have reduced the total hike from 3.7 to 3.5.

It was a nice hike. We did scrub our hiking boots when we got back to the RV. We saw lots of poison ivy and poison oak along the sides of the trail. Some parts of the trail was high grass and some weeds. We didn’t want to take any chances of having poison ivy or oak on our boots.

Nox was happy to see us; she did wonder what we were doing while we scrubbed our boots. I could just see the thoughts in her head, “Just what are they doing?”