Hiking With Gadget Girl
It's All About The Adventure!
I overslept this morning and scrambled to eat breakfast, do the potty thing and get packed up and moving. I was still pretty exhausted from yesterday's hike so felt like a zombie most of the day. We immediately started climbing but thankfully it was not a steep pitch to the trail. On the side of the trail there was a fallen tree and in that hollowed out tree, was a treasure of pine cones that some industrious chipmonks must have filled before last winter.
We wound around the side of a hill and then the trail took us through a brushy valley where we made it over our first pass of the day.
Today we only had two passes, yay! Today was fascinating because we got to see an abandoned alpine railroad tunnel and old tracks. If we had time, we would have loved to taken the trail down to the "Alpine Tunnel" railroad which showed the old railroad trackes leading into the now filled tunnel.
We continued on the CT which took us down the other side where the old tunnel had come through. We stayed on the old railroad bed for about three miles.
We stopped to read a couple of historical signs that described the "Snowplow Trials", where they tested two types of plows that attached to the train. The rotary plow won hands down. The second sign described the "Sawmill Curve", where trains would go too fast and then couldn't make the turn and crashed. It was quite fascinating.
We arrived at an intersection where there were a bunch of these two seater dune buggy kind of vehicles that were running all over the really rocky road. We had to walk up that super rocky road to get to the lake and then up to the final pass of the day.
There were a couple of fly fishermen in the two lakes. By now it was super windy and cold and gave us extra incentive to get over that pass to the other side.
Once over, the trail was steep and challenging to go down. Our trail app recommended that we catch the dirt road that parallels the trail and see the old cabins. We liked that idea and enjoyed seeing the cabins.
We were getting tired as we were closing in on our 16 mile day and finally found the river we were planning to camp at.
Sometimes at night after a full day of hiking, it is tough to write up a journal when all one wants to do is to go to bed. I've left out some names of things, like the lake and the river but you wouldn't know where they are anyway!