Adventures in the front country

Given that I have yet to post photos that I've been promising, I'm going to use Thuy and her lovely shots from our hiking adventure this past Sunday. I'll try and post other photos this weekend when I'm down in Claremont with the fast connection and the computer with all of our photos.

Thuy and I decided to go on a short hike up to Inspiration Point. Thuy had tried to hike there earlier this summer but ended up on another trail and wanted to try again. In the morning, I surfed the web and found topo maps and felt relatively confident that we could find our way and Thuy said she knew where the trailhead was so we thought we were set. We were wrong.

The trailhead that Thuy was familiar with was for the Tunnel Trail (also goes up to Inspiration Point) which isn't the way that I saw on the maps (but didn't realize it at the time). The hike up was uneventful. It seems that the very little walking I had to do in Memphis last week helped my endurance quite a bit as well as my heat tolerance so I was feeling pretty good when we got to the top.

Then it was time to descend. When we started out we had mistakenly gone along an access road but were redirected by a woman and her dog. At the top we appeared to cross the same access road. Thuy, using deductive reasoning, determined the correct direction to go on the road (her reasoning was very sound, I'm not mocking her at all). Unfortunately the road quickly ended at a locked gate with a sign indicating that the owners of the land beyond the gate would not enjoy our company. We turned back and almost immediately found a sign for the Jesusita Trail with "cars" and an arrow drawn on for good measure. This trail ultimately skirted the private property which would normally be a good thing.














Not yet realizing that we had taken Tunnel Trail up to Inspiration Point, we figure we can take this as an alternative way down. After all, some helpful person had indicated that it was the way down to the cars...

So we walk down, and down and down. We're passed by some mountain bikers who must clearly be headed toward their cars so we don't worry. About the time the trail dumped us off on a private road with no indication of being near a public road, we began to worry. Thuy gets on her cell phone and calls Jaeson for navigation help. Given that we have no idea of where we are, he really couldn't help us. Now wishing that we had a GPS with us, we decided to continue down on the path where it picked up again a little way down the road. We did this for two reasons: 1. the mountain bikers went that way and 2. it is late enough that we don't have enough time to go back the way we came before the sun sets. I must admit that it was a much more scenic route that crossed the creek several times and was nicely shaded by dense trees the entire way. If we hadn't been so worried about the fact that we had only a couple of hours before sun down, it would have made for a very pretty walk.















Nearly an hour later we happen across a lone jogger who we stop and ask for directions. He very kindly indicates that we are a fifteen minute stroll from the road. The road being one that is about five miles from the road we parked on, but a road none the less. After one more nearly disastrous wrong turn at a fork in the trail, we come out at the San Roque water treatment facility and Thuy gets back on her phone to call the infamous Gina (a good friend of Thuy's whom I had never had the pleasure of meeting despite hearing a great deal about her). Gina basically drops whatever it is that she is doing and comes to pick us up and drive us back to my car. Gina is my hero. And like any good hero, she pulled up in a hot car and only laughed at us a little. Okay, she laughed quite a bit but certainly less than many others would have in a similar situation. While Gina is now my hero, I suspect I did not make an equally good first impression on her.

The lesson from all of this is that one should take the same trail down and one took up a mountain, particularly when everyone else you see on the trail is doing exactly that. We were very lucky that we didn't spend the night out in the woods. If we had taken one more wrong turn we would have been in bad shape. Granted, in SB front country, you can only walk so far while still being on the same side of the mountains. But, we could have spent the entire night walking parallel to a road and ended up who knows where. Least you think we were in mortal peril, there were occupied houses around the trail and if we were still lost come dusk, we could have braved the poison oak and left the trail to go ask for help from one of the local residents. However, it isn't very nice to think of that as your only option. It's much better to just know exactly where you are going instead of walking nearly six miles away from your car. We were lucky. Next time we will be smart so that we don' t need to be so lucky.