Dead men tell no tales

But don't worry, I didn't die, so I can tell you about today!

Dad, Nolan, Krista, Alex and I decided to tackle a hike today. We would hike to the top of Little Bald Hill and then we would hike down Sheep Pen Gulch...which has no trail.

Here is the before shot

Krista

You may notice than in every picture at least someone is doing the Texas Longhorns symbol....that was NOT my idea. I have influenced them with it for a while, but doing it in every picture wasn't my idea!

Nolan

I just went along with it
Good job, Alex!

Flowers along the path

I remembered this hike being a slow and gradual upgrade and was very relaxing. I did not remember the rock climbing....okay, maybe a bit of an over statement, but it was steep!

I forgot my lognhorns

Yes, more hornsWe reached the top of the mountain. Had lunch and then we planted an apple seed and an nectarine seed.

Dad plants the seed

A few weeks back I had cleared my back-pack out (the one we were using for the hike). It had used to be my Civil Air Patrol 24 hour pack...so it had the necessities to survive for a day. Matches and a knife would be included. While I was clearing that stuff out I was very careful to make sure the matches were taken out. Can you imagine how awkward it would have been at airport security to have matches in my bag????

Ironically enough I was looking for matches when found my knife. That would have been bad to!

Dad wanted to hike down Sheep Pen Gulch. He said there wouldn't be a trail and so we would have to make our own. He wasn't joking. Have you ever tried forcing a path through the Redwoods?

This is the start of that trail...this was the easiest it would ever be on that trail

Dad was appointed "Scout" by Alex
That was a hard trail. Through trees, over water (or under it), in thorns, through brush and anything that stood in our way. The camera died at the start of the way down, so we don't have any pictures of the way down.

We followed this creek on the way down. Most people would agree that going down is easier than going up. Not in this case. We started that morning at 9:30, we reached the top of the mountain at around noon. We started down at around 1:30. We dragged ourselves out of the brush at 9:30, P.M. It had been a 12 hour hike!

I think I was the first one to try out gravity. I slipped on a wet rock and went head first into the creek. Everyone else did similar blunders on the way down.

For several hours we were all saying, "We are almost there." Spirits were starting to get low. I tried to cheer them up.

"I think we're getting closer...I have seen that tree before!"

After the hike

It was a long hike, but we had a lot of fun!

BTW, I am having some blogger technical issues and I can't close up this huge gap between the bottom of the post and picture. I was not hiding a secret message in the gap....