Adventures In The Desert: Uwharrie National Forest

A few weeks ago, I took a day off of school and work so Jeff and I could go camping. We went to Uwharrie National Forest, which is about 2 hours from home. The weather was beautiful - cool enough that we weren't sweating from packing in all of our stuff, but warm enough that we weren't freezing either. As the sun was setting, we thought we had found the perfect campsite, with rock remains (from a cabin maybe?) that would make a great fire pit, flat areas for the tent, and it was on high ground, so we could see a lot around us. Unfortunately, after several trips up and down steep hills, we couldn't find any water, so we decided to pick up our gear and hike back to the last place we saw water. It turned out to be a really nice spot - it had a fire pit already made and lots of wood around to burn. As for water, we got to really test out Jeff's filter, since there were only pools of stagnant water nearby. The temperature got down to 31 during the night, but we stayed pretty warm, except for our toes. It was a nice, quiet weekend for us. We didn't really run into other people until we hiked out the next day, so it felt like we pretty much had the forest to ourselves.

setting up the campsite

our water source

After Thanksgiving, Jeff and I went back to Uwharrie and met up with a good friend of ours from Jordan (although now living in the States). We went to a different trail this time, hiked for about half an hour, and then found a nice spot away from the trail to set up camp. It was still pretty early on, so we set up the tents, gathered lots of firewood (we were expecting temperatures around 35 that night), and then spent about an hour and a half exploring other parts of the trail. Then we came back, ate some, started a nice, big fire, roasted hot dogs for dinner, s'mores for dessert, and finished it off with hot chocolate. Around 10 we bundled up and went to bed. It ended up getting down to 33, although it felt a lot colder with the wind chill. After the sun came up, Jeff got back to work on the fire, and we had oatmeal and more s'mores for breakfast with our coffee/hot chocolate. It was a really nice, lazy morning of eating, stoking the fire, and hanging out. We had bought some freeze-dried meals from REI for lunch (beef stroganoff, sweet corn and green beans), and after we finished eating we packed everything up and hiked back out. We really enjoyed Uwharrie both times, and hopefully once the weather gets a little warmer again we'll go back and try some of the longer trails.