What have I been up to?
Since the last entry in my livejournal, we have been on 2 more ski trips. Even though there is still lots of snow left, that's the end of the season for us, the snow is getting slushy during the daytime and we've moving on to our summer activities.
Last weekend was my birthday weekend, so we took 2 days of vacation time to make it a 4 day weekend and went on our first 4 day backpacking trip. We went to Henry Coe State Park again. It might seem like that's where we always go, but the reason is that it's a wonderful place and it gets too hot there in the summer, so we've been going while it's still cool. This might have been our last trip there until after summer.
One of the things we love about Henry Coe is that it is so huge that you get the sense you are the only ones there. We saw 1 other person on a trail on Saturday, a few hours into our hike. We saw 2 people on a trail on Monday. Those are the only people we saw during our 4 days in the wilderness! We saw some wildlife: a rattlesnake, a beetle, 2 squirrels, 2 rabbits, a turtle, several frogs, lots of birds, and a horny toad. And some bugs and butterflies.
It's spring in Henry Coe right now and everywhere we went there were fields of wildflowers, all different types. Here's Craig walking through one of the many fields:
No promises, but I hope to get some of my flower pictures from this trip posted; if I do, I'll put a link here in my journal.
There is a place at Henry Coe called "The Narrows". It's between two steep tall hillsides, with a creek running along the bottom. The "trail" through the narrows requires crossing the creek, and is not really a trail as much as just travelling along the narrows wherever you can. It's only a bit over 1 mile, but very slow since it requires finding places to walk since there is no designated trail. It is not always passable, but we checked with the rangers and they said we would get very wet, but it was safe to go through. How could we resist? Here's an idea of what it looks like:
We really lucked out that Monday, the day we went through The Narrows, was somewhat warm and somewhat sunny, so we weren't really cold despite being wet. We probably crossed the creek 20-25 times, and some of the hiking had to be done in the creek, since there was no passable land on either side. We managed to find places to cross that kept our upper bodies dry, the deepest we had to cross was between my knees and the bottom of the shorts. And we only had to cross sections that deep about 3 times, the crossings were more often mid-calf in depth. Here's a picture of Craig at one of the crossings:
Here's a picture of our camp in the "China Hole" area, at the end of the Narrows; there wasn't much land availabe for setting up camp!
This is the strangest thing we saw during the 4 day trip:
We asked at the visitor's center what this was, and it turns out, many many years ago when Henry Coe was owned by ranchers, one of the ranchers would drag this wrecking ball behind his truck to clear paths through the brush!
Last weekend was my birthday weekend, so we took 2 days of vacation time to make it a 4 day weekend and went on our first 4 day backpacking trip. We went to Henry Coe State Park again. It might seem like that's where we always go, but the reason is that it's a wonderful place and it gets too hot there in the summer, so we've been going while it's still cool. This might have been our last trip there until after summer.
One of the things we love about Henry Coe is that it is so huge that you get the sense you are the only ones there. We saw 1 other person on a trail on Saturday, a few hours into our hike. We saw 2 people on a trail on Monday. Those are the only people we saw during our 4 days in the wilderness! We saw some wildlife: a rattlesnake, a beetle, 2 squirrels, 2 rabbits, a turtle, several frogs, lots of birds, and a horny toad. And some bugs and butterflies.
It's spring in Henry Coe right now and everywhere we went there were fields of wildflowers, all different types. Here's Craig walking through one of the many fields:
No promises, but I hope to get some of my flower pictures from this trip posted; if I do, I'll put a link here in my journal.
There is a place at Henry Coe called "The Narrows". It's between two steep tall hillsides, with a creek running along the bottom. The "trail" through the narrows requires crossing the creek, and is not really a trail as much as just travelling along the narrows wherever you can. It's only a bit over 1 mile, but very slow since it requires finding places to walk since there is no designated trail. It is not always passable, but we checked with the rangers and they said we would get very wet, but it was safe to go through. How could we resist? Here's an idea of what it looks like:
We really lucked out that Monday, the day we went through The Narrows, was somewhat warm and somewhat sunny, so we weren't really cold despite being wet. We probably crossed the creek 20-25 times, and some of the hiking had to be done in the creek, since there was no passable land on either side. We managed to find places to cross that kept our upper bodies dry, the deepest we had to cross was between my knees and the bottom of the shorts. And we only had to cross sections that deep about 3 times, the crossings were more often mid-calf in depth. Here's a picture of Craig at one of the crossings:
Here's a picture of our camp in the "China Hole" area, at the end of the Narrows; there wasn't much land availabe for setting up camp!
This is the strangest thing we saw during the 4 day trip:
We asked at the visitor's center what this was, and it turns out, many many years ago when Henry Coe was owned by ranchers, one of the ranchers would drag this wrecking ball behind his truck to clear paths through the brush!