Wilderness Adventure

After about 4-1/2 hours of hiking, mostly uphill through the trees and a little ways of downhill over granite boulders and through prickly manzanita bushes, it was too dark to continue.  We finally found a nice flat spot to camp out under the stars and meteor showers.

The view from our first night's stop shows Cherry Lake in the distance and the small lake (circled) was our ultimate destination.  This was very early Wednesday morning and the water was still several hours of climbing away.

This is pretty much what we climbed down the whole way into the canyon. It's hard to see in this picture, but we are wearing our packs;  there were a couple spots that were too steep or too wide and we had to throw our packs and then climb or jump...man was that scary!  Of course, thinking this was only a one mile hike, I thought eggs would be fun to bring for breakfasts.  You can image what happened to the eggs from all that throwing of the packs around!  Yuck. It was a spot similar to this one where I found a clear quartz crystal wedged between two boulders.  It came out with a little bit of effort and measures about 1 inch tall, 1-1/2 inches wide and about 3/4 inch deep.  Finding that was cool!

We finally reached the bottom and this is a view of what we had just climbed down. The little yellow "x" at the top of the ridge is about where we started our descent. The water at the bottom was pooled between the rocks with sandy bottoms and was wonderfully cold. We set up camp nearby and promptly slept the afternoon away. With few trees to shade our spot, it got too hot for comfort and the wind kept blowing the tent away. Cena went exploring and found the small lake in the next picture.

What a cute little lake this was. Our tent was set up right on the sandy beach and with a little waterfall behind us and a waterfall in front of us, it ensured a well deserved nights rest. Just off to the right, through the trees, we found a well established campsite and on Thursday, we moved all our gear over there, then spent the day exploring the whole area with a renewed sense of vigor. We found many more waterfalls, a larger lake and the ridge that we were supposed to have climbed down.

I huffed and I puffed and I crawled my way out.

In foresight, this was going to be an easy one-mile hike.. ok, not so easy, but still only one mile. How hard could one mile be? In real time, it was the scariest and most grueling time of my life. In hindsight, it was a great adventure, glad-I-did-it sort of trip and now that we know pretty much exactly where we were, I would not be adverse to trying that spot again. Just give a few weeks for conditioning training (sheeyah, like that would ever happen!).

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