A Night on the Backpacking Loop at Raccoon Creek

With the family still away, I came to Raccoon Creek on a scorching Friday evening, after work, and set off to get a campsite on the backpacking loop.  My only condition was that no one else be camped out there, and from all I could tell at the self-check-in station--where you pay $4 according to the honor system--there were people in the Adirondack shelters nearby, but not in the tenting sites.  So it was a go.  I chose the Pioneer backpacking area instead of the Sioux area because it's further from things.  There's nothing particularly special about this stretch of woods.  It's just another woodlot with an airport nearby and screaming jets.  But the evening I spent out there was fantastic.

As evening set on, a whole choir of wood thrushes began to sing its flute-like, resonant song.  There must be six or eight of them in the trees nearby.  The gold sun setting through the green trees had a cathedral effect on the darkening woods.  The campers in the Adirondack shelters came out here seeking silence, too, and so there was not a peep out of them.  Just birdsong and the cool of the evening.  I got a beautiful fire going and watched it like Netflix.  Sadly, at 10:30pm, a very loud group pulled into one of the group tenting areas about a quarter mile away.  They arrived in a school bus, beeping the horn over and over, yelling, playing loud rap music on the radio.  They must have thought they were all by themselves at the end of a dirt lane through the woods--little knowing that others walk muddy trails through the same woods to spend the night in a spot nearby just in order to escape the likes of them.