Near lunchtime and the end of our half-day outing, I finally managed to hook a 22-inch rainbow using a size 16 olive hare's ear and sulfur nymph. Brackett coached me against horsing it in and breaking the rod. Eventually, he got a landing net under it so it could be photographed, revived and released.

Whew. That was hard.

But in terms of difficulty, it was nothing compared to nearly 10 miles of rugged hiking in a day in Georgia's highest state park, Black Rock Mountain — named for a 3,640-foot peak.

Initially, my friend Jan Toussaint and I decided to hike only the 2.2-mile Tennessee Rock trail — a well-marked loop with a few steep climbs that took us about 45 minutes to complete.

Because it was still early afternoon in the shady forest, we figured we could take the 7.2-mile James E. Edmonds Trail and be back at our car before dark around 9 p.m.

Armed with two canteens of water and no map, we set out from the parking lot and walked a short distance to where a sign told us the trail was divided into east and west forks. Arbitrarily, we took the west fork.

Narrow, twisting and lined with delicate, white mountain laurel and rhododendron and flaming orange wild azalea, the path was scenic and cool, shielded from the afternoon sun by a thick tree canopy. We had no real sense of direction as we followed the trail up steep inclines and over narrow brooks through the dark forest. Every once in a while, a sign would assure us we were on the west fork.

At midafternoon, we noticed the woods were growing unusually dark for a summer's day. We couldn't see the clouds through the trees, but suddenly booming thunder and flashing lightning were all around us and we got drenched.

After about 25 minutes, the storm quit. The rain had actually cooled us off as we continued climbing the narrow, root-laden trail. Happily, there were no mosquitoes.

The wanderers

Around 6 p.m., we arrived at Lookoff Mountain — one of the highest points in the park. But we had little time to enjoy the panoramic overlook because we were growing uneasy: here we were, at the top of a mountain with less than three hours of daylight left and very little idea how far we still had to walk to reach the parking lot.

That's when Toussaint heard a dog bark.

We followed the sound to a mountaintop campsite occupied by Tom Van Antwerp, his girlfriend and their pets, a black pit bull and black Lab. Thankfully, the pit bull was tethered to a log.