The scheduled hike to Madrona Crest for Thursday (had to wait for Google to finish maintenance to post this) was given a difficulty rating of a moderate 7 mile hike. The weather co-operated this time. It was perfect hiking weather. The hike up to Madrona Crest was such a nice hike we decided to take the connector trail from lost lake trail to Raptor ridge. This presumably would add a couple more miles to our day. The connector trail is in the process of being completed, there was a lot of fresh tree cutting debris around, we got to crawl over a few downed trees and scramble around some rocks. After we got up to Raptor ridge I decided the hike had taken a turn from moderate in difficulty to moderately difficult.
At Madrona Crest conferring with Alan about if we wanted to add Raptor ridge to our hike.
View from Madrona Crest this overlooks the Stewart mtn./Olson creek area that we hiked last week.
It looks pretty cloudy, but there were some very nice sunny breaks throughout the day.
Me - on Raptor ridge, we stopped and had lunch on the outcropping. I'm glad we decided to add this section on to our hike. It was worth the effort!
Another conference on the way down, and it was decided to add a little more to our mileage and go back on a softer trail rather than the hard logging road surface. When we got back to our cars at Arroyo park we again had a conference about the distance we had hiked. Several people carry GPS units with them, and surprisingly they didn't agree on our distance. The shortest was (Al's) 9.5 and the farthest was (Fred's) 10.4, since my body told me I had hiked long and hard, I'm settling on the 10.4 miles. Another fine day with the Trailblazers. Good day and good company.
I had already taken off my gaiters, yes there was a little mud on them.
(I didn't feel like putting them back on just for my sign off photo.)
