Hiking Giant City Park Illinois

Hiking Giant City

My wife and I like to backpack.  It's challenging and relaxing, and puts us in touch with nature.  Occasionally we get nature all over us.  The biggest reason to backpack is to get away from our four highly interactive daughters.

Our daughters' are constantly in a life-threatening crisis that requires our undivided attention. After years of dealing with cars making funny noises, hairspray cans with clogged nozzles, and cell phone companies that always lie about how many peak minutes were used, we were ready for nature at her best.

We planned a weekend hiking the trail at Giant City State Park.  We'd spend the night at the midpoint of the trail, in the lovely isolated primitive campground. We'd have no kids, phones, or distractions. It'd just be us in the great outdoors.

As an aside, the internet states that the Giant City trail is twelve easy miles.  They lie. I hiked it and I'd estimate it at eighty-five bone-crushing miles, with hills the size of the Rockies.

We set out early in the morning on a perfect fall day.  About a mile later I threw away my sleeping bag.  I'd rather be cold than carry that three pounds all day.  After that, the hike was perfect. That is, for a while.

After about the twenty-two miles, which the stupid map shows as the three mile point, we came to a beautiful rocky creek.  I pulled out my water bottle and the nifty water purification pump I'd just bought.  I'd just started pumping water into the bottle when I froze in terror.

Coming up the trail behind me was that most feared creature, the Great Midwestern Teenage Girl. Afraid to move, I stared wide-eyed as the creature scurried down the creek bed, snapped my photo, and ran up the other bank. Stunned, I blinked in disbelief.  I heard more scurrying and turned my head to see another of the beasts, then another, and another. I soon realized that the herd was composed of at least twenty of the fiends.

My wives' laughing brought me back to reality.  She was in histerics, guffawing so hard she had tears in her eyes. I just sat on a rock in despair.  We'd come here to get away from our daughters and now we had the same thing, quintupled. How much can an old man take, I wondered.  Is there no rest?  Is there no place to hide?

Suddenly, I realized they were headed for the campground!  If I could beat them to it, I could find an isolated spot far from where they'd bed down.

With renewed purpose I stormed down the trail with my laughing wife not far behind.  Within twenty minutes we'd overtaken them and could barely hear their strange giggles behind us.  Knowing the nefarious power of these beings I hiked ever faster until my wife wacked me in the head with her hiking staff.

With her subtle urging I slowed a bit but still made the camp by mid-afternoon. With not a girl in sight we set up camp in a quiet alcove just feet from the outhouses.  As I lay back contemplating how I'd get my wife to share her sleeping bag I heard the footfalls of the herd.  Looking up, I was glad to see they'd dropped their packs far away, on the other side of the campground.  This isn't so bad, I remember thinking.  How much trouble could they be?

All went well until evening.  We'd finished a tasty dinner of dehydrated something brown, when the girls revealed they were some kind of encounter group. They put on a play about feelings that required them to wear signs depicting emotions such as remorse, grief, sadness, and guilt. I wanted a sign for the emotion "let me out of here now".  Their lengthy play included lots of crying and weeping.  Disgusting.

To cap off the night they sang. They sang loudly well into the night.  They sang every song known to man, and some they just made up. They sang in long forgotten languages.  They sang whole soundtracks. I prayed to be struck deaf.

When I thought they'd quieted down hours later, the outhouse door banged.  Then it banged again, and again.  Though their number was twenty I counted one hundred eighty-four trips to the outhouse, more or less.  Then the wind reversed, to blow towards us from the outhouse.

At first light I gave my wife back her sleeping bag back and packed as fast as I could.  Literally running the rest of the trail we were in the car by noon and home by three. 

When we walked in the door the kids were arguing over a boy or lipgloss or something.  It was so good to be home.