Here is part one of the tales about how me and my friends Greg and Chris used to go hiking in the woods. Its part of a longer set of tales called \"Why I don\’t do it any longer\".

Anyway, Chris and I headed out to Greg\’s place to stay the weekend, just to mes around and maybe do some hiking. It was spring and the weather was nice, so we decided to do it that Friday after noon. The woods behind Grge\’s house are wild and huge (I once saw a real live black bear in them)and usually a good place to kill time by hiking.

We started off good enough, traveling downhill on an old oil well road and taking a moment to pause and look at the well and its acompaning wooden building, which had seen better days. After climbing up on it to get a better view, we decided to follow the creek in the distance (swollen by rain) for a while before looping back. We did this, jumping from stone to stone and marveling how deep the water was, since normally this steam barely ran at all. We followed it for a while, looking around and acting as goofy as teenagers do, until the rocks got to be hardr and harder to jump to and from. Greg and I had decent shows with traction, but Chris was wearing cowboy boots. I had no sooner asked if the rocked were getting too slippery when he fell in sideways, soaking himself in profile.

After Chris got halfway soaked we decided to head back, and rather than try to follow the stream back, Greg decieded we\’d go back through the woods instead. Byt this point we had traveled more than a few miles, past all of those weird stone out croppings that WV seems to have (are they natural or man made. who knows?) and were a good bit away from any roads. Nevertheless we headed on.

After a few hours it was obvious we were lost. I wasn\’t worried, because as long as we didn\’t go northeast we\’d be okay, because there was nothing but miles of woods that way until we reatched Salem. The thing was, Greg started to panic and I had to try and keep him calm while making sure Chris just didn\’t wander off in the other direction and get even more lost. Despite it all I managed to get them back to an area where we could hear route 16, which was near Greg\’s house. I herded them that way, and had to try Greg from trying to climb straight up a dirt enbankment before we finnaly made it back on to the road to his house. Humming the them from \"Chariots of Fire\" I ran to the oad and sat down. waiting for them to catch up. When they did we walked the half mile back to Greg\’s house and had a pizza.

The rest of the weekend was without incident, except for me schooling them at wcw/nwo Revenge for the Nintendo 64.