Treks and Adventures
Lori, Jeanette, Marylyn and I had a short (2.2 mile) but very scenic hike in The Gorge at Tom McCall Preserve. We lucked out on the weather and managed to slip our hike in just before the rain came in. Afterwards we went went to Backwoods Brewing for lunch.
I had one last piece of the Burnt Bridge Creek Trail and I finish it today. The Freeway section of the trail had a very bad problem with homeless squatters in this area. The city of Vancouver had clear out the squatters on the rest of the trail so I thought it was safe to scout this last section. I found it mostly clear with no tents and just two folks with mental problems along the trail. I walked down to the West end of the trail and back and explored the Ellan Davis Trail. My walk was 7 miles with 670 ft. elevation gain in 3 hours.
I had planned on making this a conditioning hike on trails in the center section of Forest Park but once I went down a couple of new trails all training went out the window and exploring took over. I still got in 7.5 miles with 1850 elevation gain in 4 hrs. of trail time.
We still had an injured player on our team so we went for an easy outing this time. This time I was with Lori, Jeanette, Sylvia and Marilyn. We started out at Hughes Water Garden, always a fun place to visit. They were in the process of getting setup for the summer season so they only had part of the inventory in yet but it was still fun to see what they had so far. They have lots of working water fountains going and several demonstration ponds.
Durham City Park was our next stop. This is the last Park on the Fanno Creek Trail route. From here the creek empties into the Tualatin River. We did a short 1.5 mile exploratory walk. We finished up with lunch at the Three Mermaids Public House.
Normally I don’t post my training hikes or walks but this one had some special spots thank to the record rainfall we had. I have never seen Balch Creek with so much water coming down it. All other times it has had just a mild low water flow but this time it had white water rapids. I also came across a mud slide just below Pittock that blocked the road and left a house on the edge. I had plenty of wet muddy trails. My hike was 9 1/2 miles, 1800 ft. gain, about 450 stair steps in 4 1/2 hours.
