Evan Harr's Blog River, Rocks, and Caves

            During our last expedition we did three things. These included rock climbing, canoeing, and caving. They were all very fun, but my favorite ended up being rock climbing. This is mainly because it was the biggest achievement that I made throughout the whole expedition.

Canoeing took place in Lake Fontana. We started at the boat drop off area, and canoed for many miles. The first place we camped at was basically like a peninsula with little flat ground and a small area for the chef to cook. When we woke up, we thought the canoes were gone, but they were just around on the other side, and flipped upside down so they wouldn’t float away. The second place we stayed at was a hunting ground with many bear tracks. There was a lightning storm with a lot of rain and thunder, and we even heard a strike really close to us. After that, we paddled for a while more and camped on an island. The island was very rocky to get up to the small little strip of flatland at the top where all of our tents were setup.

The next thing we did was go through a cave. We did things like sliding, crawling, and even climbing. There were cool little animals in the water like albino crawfish and salamanders. There were also bats, which you couldn’t shine your lights on too brightly or they will fly around, and that isn’t good for them because they will die. There were some parts of the caves where we had to lay flat on our stomachs and crawl under a tight space. We then camped a few hundred feet away from the cave entrance. After that, we whitewater rafted the New River. It was pretty intense compared to the Nantahala River, mainly because it had bigger rapids.

We drove all the way from North Carolina to West Virginia to climb Seneca Rocks. It was a long drive to make it to the Indian Village campgrounds, but when we got there, it was pretty cool to see the huge rock that basically jetted out of the ground. Out of the three days that we were there, we only got to climb two of the days. On the first day, I didn’t even climb, I only repelled. On the third day, I climbed all the way to the top of the summit. This was very hard for me, but when I reached the top, I felt so happy and accomplished. The repel down was the hard part because it was a 200 foot drop while being strapped to a rope that was connected to a metal figure eight. I also started to move away from the rock, which made it a little scary. The repelling was easier compared to rock climbing vertically, but it was fun overall.

Overall it was a pretty cool expedition. It was some of the greatest and toughest things I’ve done in a while, and I actually did some of the stuff that I was afraid to do, which made it even better. These are some of the sweetest things that I’ve ever done, and it is also cool that we have school as a part of it too. That about sums it up and I had fun doing all of this.