Frozen Head, Spicewood Branch Trail 4.13.19

 Three fearless frontiersmen and one fearless woman, gathered under stormy skies at 8:30 at the Durham Street parking lot and decided, thanks to the wonders of cell-phone weather apps, that if we continued to Frozenhead State Park for our hike, we would arrive just as the storm moved out of the area. And that is just as it played out. We made our way to Frozenhead and arrived at the Visitor Center a little after 10am. We met up with another hiker from the Knoxville area and proceeded to the trailhead. We departed the trailhead around 10:30. The hiking map lists this part of the hike as a 2.55 mile difficult hike. I would agree. It was 2.55 miles of upward accent with no level or down treks for the close to 2,000 accent. The trail was well traveled and maintained. It was a bit sloppy in some sections due to the recent rains. We crossed several small streams with waterfalls with no problems. I would say this trail offered up more flowers, but not the variety, than Tuesday's Shakerag Hollow hike. The trail was lined on both sides with white and red trilliums. We also encountered some bright orange/red salamanders on the hike. We arrived at the top of our ascent around 1pm and had our snacks. We observed the weather at the top was a bit cooler because of the altitude and wind. We all had to put our jackets back on. Because of time constraints, we decided to cut the hike a little short and not make the final accent to Lookout Tower. This shortened the hike from 7.1 miles to 6.3 miles. It still was a good hike. We began our descent around 1:30 and we were back at the trailhead a little after 3pm. The descent was much faster and I would suggest you trim your toenails if you decide to make this hike. We arrived back at the Durham Street parking lot around 4:30. All in all, I would rate this as a 6+ mile strenuous hike. Despite the few sprinkles, it was a great hike. John is leading a hike in 2 weeks on the Bird Mountain Trail at Frozenhead. - it should be a good hike.
If you would like to see some nice pictures of this hike, map and altitude graph, click here.  If you are viewing the pictures from the TTA website and having trouble, please go directly to the Blog at www.sdctta.blogspot.com.  Google Chrome is the prefered browser.