Conquering a Tough Missouri Trail at LaBarque Hills
Last weekend this trail ran me off. Spider webs everywhere, and somewhere in the middle of flailing at them my wedding ring came off my finger. I never even felt it go. I quit.
On the way out, I watched the footage back — found the last shot where the ring is on my hand, found the first one where it isn’t, and narrowed it down to about a football field and a half of trail. Then I scoured the section before going home.
But, I don’t accept defeat easily – so I went back to look one more time – and finish the hike. This is that hike. The full LaBarque Hills loop this time, six miles, plus a trail cam left at a creek crossing, a couple of box turtles that were not happy to see me, something screaming out in the woods that I still can’t identify, and a mountain lion that turned out to be a log.
LaBarque Hills Trail — Young Conservation Area, Eureka, Missouri
6.02 miles · 1,115 ft of climbing · about 4 hours 15 minutes
Missouri Department of Conservation land, free, open dawn to dusk
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Oh, this has a lot of interesting things for hiking. At the end, my Trail Player app exports a video from the GPX. I see a giant hill in the middle of the trail loop. I might access it from the trail and walk the ridge instead of climbing up. That could be a future video, since no ‘stick to trail’ rule applies in a conservation area.
My wife, Marie, says I should put the trail player video at the front of the hike video – so you know what is coming up… what do y’all think?
Oh! The Trail Cam videos caught a couple pairs of hikers leaving before me – and they were carrying tree limbs – or branches, really – with lots of twigs and stuff – and you know what those were for? The Spider Webs! Hold the branch in front of you and it catches the spider webs instead of your face!
