Pigeon Mountain adventures

I just got back from a camping weekend with a few really good buddies of mine. We went to Pigeon Mountain in northwest Georgia. We had a good time walking and hiking around the area. However, two of the guys didn't have the best sleep because they somehow forgot their sleeping bags. Looking back, I definitely should have offered my tent-mate Ethan a share of my bag. But at the time it was pretty funny to see him come into the tent around 4am the second night with a camping chair. He set it up in the middle of the tent and proceeded to try to sleep a couple of hours in it. Needless to say, he didn't get much sleep during the weekend.

The goal Saturday morning was to go find the Overlook nearby. Being the navigator with a map, I was finding it difficult to locate where this overlook might be. I directed us to a few different places and we ended up off the mountain and driving around for over an hour. We did get to see some beautiful countryside. But it turns out, the overlook was about 1/4 mile from our campsite. On the map it said "Hood Overlook." Not sure how I missed that one. Here's a picture from it: The highlight of the trip for me was being in a dark cave for close to four hours with these guys. We were making our way through Pettijohns Cave. We shimmied, crawled, and worked our way through all kinds of slippery mess. Having been in there three times before, I was most qualified (though not extremely confident) to lead us to the goal of seeing the waterfall several miles in. Thankfully, after going through the Z-bends (Scott and Dan were champs getting us through that) and getting turned around, we ran into a few locals who helped us get to the waterfall and back.

Here are a few pics from this trip and from years before after coming out of the cave:From January of 2002 with some old friends from youth group:
From late 2000 or early 2001 with some college friends my freshman year: