I went to the Exit 27 trail head for Rattlesnake Mountain and hiked from there to Grand Prospect.
Nice, cool day. I probably saw six people all day, including a few bikers. Their are a lot of bike trails on Rattlesnake Mountain, for example:
I love the forest east of Stan’s Overlook:
About 8 miles, very good workout, fun day.
Today was a day for taking photographs of objects that do not appear in the photograph.
The instant I turned onto the Cedar Butte Trail from the PTC Trail I saw a young deer on the Cedar Butte Trail. She moved off the trail but was perfectly visible. I slowly took out the camera to snap the picture and at the instant my finger hit the shutter she moved behind a tree:
On the way back to the car, just past the southern terminus of the Sno Valley Trail, I looked up to Rattlesnake Ledge and saw a couple of people peering over the edge. That can be dangerous, a young man died in 2018 when the ledge was icy. But my camera is not good enough to get the people up on the ledge in view:
My various injuries are mostly healed and the weather forecast looks good so perhaps I will finally be able to get out onto the trails more frequently and start getting back into good hiking shape.
Forgot to bring the camera – too bad, my wanderings this morning took my by Tradition Lake, which was looking nice with all the fall colors.
I went up Tiger 3 to the Talus Rocks Trail, that to the intersection with the Nook, then down the Section Line, the Power Line Trail, the Bus Trail to the Tradition Lake Trail, then back to the parking lot.
About 4.5 miles, a reasonably steep section on Tiger 3, and some elevation gain on the Talus Rocks Trail, but a fairly mild hike.
But fun!
I haven’t hiked much in the past couple of weeks so I am building back up. I did Squak Mountain to Central Peak, taking the trail up and the South Access Road down (see track below).
At about 1,600 feet I saw a couple of tiny little blobs of snow. First of the season. I know what is coming.
I stopped by the old Bullitt Fireplace, all that is left of a local prominently rich family’s weekend cabin.
Apparently Mrs. Bullitt didn’t like the place and Bullitt wound up donating thousands of acres of the land he owned on Squak to the public. And so we get to hike there through the forest:
It was a bit less than 6 miles, about 1,800 feet of elevation gain – moderate but I will ramp it up just a bit on Friday, and even more next week.
Finding this lost trail has been on my to-do list for quite awhile and today I did it, heading south from the McClellan Butte trail head with a heavy heart, knowing my great pal Lili would not be home to greet me.
Anyway, when I hike the McClellan Butte trail I typically look east to the eastern side of the Alice Creek gorge where I could swear I have spied a wispy trail snaking through the brush on the other side.
According to the maps, there is an abandoned service or logging road that runs in that area and I have wanted to see if I could find it. Today, I did, and I followed it until almost the very end (see track below) where it disappeared into the undergrowth.
I reached this, by the way, by turning left where the McClellan Butte trail intersects the service road (NF9020) and pushing past the barrier that has been erected to stop vehicular traffic. Less than a half mile from that barrier the trail splits, and I headed right and up.
It is likely that had Derek been along, the two of us, leveraging his route-finding skills, would have been able to forge ahead a bit farther but I turned around, since I was way off-trail with no one around to help should I run afoul of one of the obstacles on the trail. Here is what much of this “trail” looked like:
At one point there was a peek through the trees in the direction (west) of McClellan Butte:
I also saw a very neat fungus, bright yellow. A little Googling leads me to believe it might be Ramaria rubicarnata. Whatever it is, it was an interesting fungus:
5.6 total miles, rather mild. Here is the track:
A beautiful fall day in the Pacific Northwest and I was trying to be open to enjoyment.
Jan and I were married 34 years ago today, but we are hardly celebrating. We had to euthanize our dog Lili, who was 14 years old and spent almost all that time as a healthy and happy pooch. She was definitely a member of our family.
But she was suffering terribly.
A few months ago she developed a blood-red eye. We took her to two vets, our regular one and a specialist but neither one was able to accurately diagnose what was wrong. We had eye drops which helped a little but she was still having problems.
Then, back in August, she developed what seemed to be a head cold, with sneezing and nasal discharge. Again, no firm diagnosis, nothing was really helping.
This past Tuesday we took her to a vet that was able to do a CT scan and a rhinoscopy and they discovered she had a large tumor that was imminently going to break through the roof of her mouth. We were awaiting the results of the biopsy, scheduled for early next week but she took a sudden turn for the worse.
As the saying goes, we fail slowly and then all at once.
She was clearly having trouble breathing and was not eating (perhaps, the vet said, because she could no longer smell). Still, she seemed to be hanging in there, and we were awaiting the results of the biopsy to see if something could be done to shrink the tumor and provide some relief.
But last night she really suffered. She was having so much trouble breathing, and clearing phlegm from her throat that she came upstairs (“her” couch downstairs was her bed) and stood outside my bedroom door, loudly suffering.
I took her outside, tried to get her to eat, gave her a pain pill but she just kept looking at me with those big, suffering eyes asking: Help me dad!
But I could not help. All we could do was gather her family and put her out of her misery with as little extra pain as possible. She literally died in our arms at about 11:45 am this morning and that is as much as I care to type.
RIP, my good friend.