Forest Walk Exploring Another Trail To Fix Up

Saturday December 16, 2023 Guerneville CA.

What to do today?

I hadn’t had anything planned to do today. But there’s always something to do in a forest.

I had a trail over at my cousin’s place that I’ve been looking at to open up if I could. I’ve checked out part of it, but I needed to check out the rest of it to see just what it would involve to open it up.

I jumped on one of my motor bikes and rode on up to our break area at the top of the mountain as the trail was nearby.

I took a good break there enjoying the day a bit.

Then I rode the bike the short distance to where the trail should start and parked and started walking down the hill from there. Most of the trail was pretty flat, but where it hit the old fire break road, I didn’t like what I saw. There was a real steep part of the fire break road just below where the trail came on the old road that was steeper than I like to ride my motor bike up

Steep part

This is much steeper than the picture shows. I’ll have to think about that as I wanted the trail to be easy to hike or ride. I left it to come back on the way back to decide what to do about it.

As I walked down the old fire break road, I spotted this cocoon. A big moth hatched out of it some time ago.

These aren’t that rare up here as I often find them.

Old road

Eventually, I made it onto this old road I made many years ago. It needed a bit of cleaning up and there was a slide that needed to be fixed a bit further down from here.

This is the old slide that needs to be cleaned up.

It’s good enough to walk through, but this is a fire road so the slide needs to be cleaned up.

I’d walked down the road to get to the slide which meant, now, I had to walk back up the hill for some distance, about a mile or so.

So, I started up the road, taking my time.

Every so often, I stopped and sat down on the side of the road for a break before proceeding on up the road some more. It was a nice day so I took my time.

I checked the fire break area out at the ridge top. Lots of old trees down on it which could use some cleaning up.

The steep part

Eventually I made it back to the part of the old fire break road that I didn’t like which was just too steep to use. I looked around in the woods on both sides of the road and found an old trail on the left that went around this steep part which would be easy to get fixed up. That was a good find as I didn’t like this steep hill.

Spring

I made it back to my bike and headed on down the hill, stopping at this spring to get a drink of water. Those green plants are Fox Glove plants. They are exceptionally large so there’s going to be some huge fox gloves here this summer. And yes, the drink of water hit the spot.