Rough Run Maps & Directions

When you are not familiar with an area, it's hard to know the difference between Round Knob and Dunkle Knob and Brushy Knob OR Rough Run versus Road Run versus Stony Run.  It all becomes a bit of gibberish if you didn't grow up running all these ridges.  One of the beauty's of the internet age is access to some pretty specific trivia and one of the the things we found was a USGS map of Fort Seybert.

Not the most up-to-date maps (above) but when it
comes to topography, it is still going to work.

We found that if we carried an extra dog collar, learned how to use our Garmin, we could always know where we were.  With our maps, we could tell what everybody was talking about.  It was not a full-proof system but when the closest you ever got to a forest was watching Robin Hood movies, you needed something!

Here is Ft. Seybert with the old bridge configuration.

The cool thing about the USGS maps (available for free at http://www.usgs.gov/pubprod/maps.html) is that it includes topography (helps us know where the ridges are), forest roads (helps us know where we're headed), and streams/rivers.  Some of the roads are a bit different and the area has grown, but the maps are a nice frame of reference if you've never traveled these ridges, 'hollers', or forest roads before.  We took these free maps to Kinkos and printed out some big copies (black-and-white is way cheaper by the way!)

Rough Run the creek and Rough Run the road.

Maps are no substitute for knowing the terrain and we certainly had a bit of a time interpreting "remember that place where we struck that time for Bobby's bear…" but a good map, a flashlight, and a basic sense of bearings will get you around Rough Run.  Getting around safely is another issue.  Particularly when you have  a fear of copperheads and all the rocks are loose!