05 May Hiking season officially begins!

Tuesday Apr 26 

We kicked off our summer hiking season with a spontaneous quick midday jaunt up the road towards the ski valley. There are several trailheads scattered through the 10 miles between our small town of Arroyo Seco and the end of the highway at the ski base. Many of them connect to other trails, giving us about 50 miles of hiking trails to explore within a 15 minute commute from our doorstep!

We started with an easy, no-destination trip from the Italianos trailhead. This trail crossed the stream at least 5 times in the first mile! All the crossings had an excess of large rocks above the water level that made the progress easy and fun.

We had a larger group from the property with three of our fellow work traders along, and took our time going up the steep hillside, finally ending up in a lovely aspen grove 1 mile from the trailhead.

We took a snack break and then hiked a bit further up the trail until we got to several snowfields, still more than a foot deep, covering the path as it grew steep and narrow through the thick forest. A great introduction to one of the most popular trails in the area — we will for sure be back!

Thursday May 5 

Today we joined fellow worker Kali to check out another trailhead: Gavilan. We arrived the trailhead by 9a and were moving steadily along the uphill trail. The forest was thick and several downed trees blocked our path and required climbing over, under or walking fully around to continue.

We hiked until we reached an open meadow, about 2.5 miles up the trail. The trail crossed several springs … small streams of water that we saw the relative sources, coming strait out of the ground in front of us.

We hiked a bit further than the meadow, until once again we ran into massive snow fields obstructing the trail. We turned around and made it quickly back to the car, and back to the property by 12:30p, having completed about 5.5 miles and just shy of 2,000 ft of elevation gain!