![]() The morning sun was bright as we climbed to the east and leveled out about 150-200 feet higher than the lake, sparkling below us through the trees. ![]() Frequent white blazes make it easy to follow this section of the trail as it rises and undulates along a southern flank of Bishop Mountain. 1 mile on a wide, dirt surface, well-covered in leaves. Turn to the right, and you’ll see another brown plastic post and, more to the point, a white blaze on a tree, and that’s the western trailhead of the Honeycomb Trail. Come on, TVA! A brown plastic post is next to a gap in the trees next to the pavilion, and just a few feet afterwards, there’s a dirt road running parallel to the main road. We drove to the north side of the dam and parked at a picnic pavilion by a (still-locked) bathroom. One of Ruth’s co-workers who spends weekends at the campground offered to give us a shuttle back to the dam, so we opted to try our luck hiking west to east instead. We did some reconnoitering and figured out where the western trailhead was, so when a chance came up to try a long-ish hike we decided to try, try again. It didn’t work out as we planned, as we missed a key junction that would have taken us to the dam, so instead we just hiked in a circle. We didn’t have very good information about the trail and weren’t sure about its western trailhead, so we made an attempt at an east to west hike. The Honeycomb Trail is a relatively new trail that has been open for a little over a year, running from Guntersville Dam to the Honeycomb Campground just off Highway 431. Those words have been chasing around in my brain ever since we had to bail on our attempt to hike the TVA Honeycomb Trail a couple of weeks ago. Sad to say, I’ve forgotten most of the words, but I remember one phrase she never failed to employ when any of us were frustrated by some task or puzzle: “If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again.” She’d trot out that proverb in a sing-song voice to her eye-rolling audience, and we’d grit our teeth and give it another go, until we figured out how to solve the problem. Along the way, she would dish out servings of motherly wisdom. She was a sharecropper’s daughter, and could work any of us into the ground with no apparent effort on her part. When my sisters and I were growing up on the farm, we spent a lot of time with our mother.
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