Late yesterday, I returned from a three night backpack trip with seven of my best friends. For all the reading I did and online pictures I saw over the months leading up to the trip, I didn't think it could exceed my expectations, only match them or fall short.  It blew them away.  We had many slack-jawed moments.  One of the guys said the place looked like Jurassic Park.  I'd say that is apt.  We hiked over 38 miles of the barrier island and camped from the south end to the north. And the marshes and beach and maritime forest looked as they must have a thousand years ago.

For the guys who had never been to the region, the towering live oaks, moss and palmettos fascinated them.  They did me, too.  Walking six miles with backpacks on the desolate Atlantic Ocean beach on the island's east side felt like a scene from Planet of the Apes save the Statue of Liberty buried in the sand.  We hiked through and around the largest dunes I've ever seen. We dropped our packs and bodysurfed in the late afternoon waves.

The bluffs overlooking the rivers on the west side mesmerized us.  The second night, I pitched my hammock in the center of a humongous live oak five feet from a wide, brackish river buffeted by salt-laced winds pushing draping curtains of Spanish moss back and forth over the gnarled, ancient branches hosting them. A few miles away, Plum Orchard mansion and its surroundings matched any scene from any film or novel in my experience. The duckweed covering the primordial lagoon nearby was so emerald green, so vivid and effervescent as to conjure the overbright colors of animation.

Two hikers who camped near us the second night bushwacked through the northern part of the island and spent a cold, sleepless night lost.  To be honest, we made a little fun of them ("How do you get lost on an island 18 miles long and 3 miles wide?) - before three of us almost met the same fate.  They were found by helicopter the following day. We avoided their fate, but only after our own 8 mile sojourn that left three grown men nervous, thoroughly confounded, and finally, relieved, having found our way back to camp just as the dusk gave way to the light of the moon shimmering off the clouds onto the brackish waters of the Brickhill River.  We never found the remote, dilapidated freed slave settlement we sought or the eccentric old woman whose decades-long resistance resulted in the preservation of the island but we stumbled into a cemetery shared by the ghosts of Confederates and Yankees who made peace only after death and only on Cumberland. 

When we stopped chattering in amazement or laughing so hard at each other our sides ached, we saw wild pigs, turkeys, horses and deer.  Armadillos, ospreys, and ibis.  And raccoons who appeared so suddenly after our headlamps were doused, they must surely have been plotting just a few feet away in the scrub palmetto, waiting impatiently for us to finally turn in. Only the gators and bobcats remained elusive, though the cat tracks on the sand left no doubt as to their size and range.

To say God granted us the providence of good weather is an understatement.  We were tucked neatly into the primal wood between two cold fronts and were invigorated without extremes of biting insects or bitter winds. It seemed the wind was always at our backs.

Eight friends, eight backpacks and one special place on God's great earth.  

Astonishment is never overrated.