Our first hike last weekend was down a dirt access road from our tent site and up Mt. Hale. We'd been driving most of the morning, set up the camp, and were looking for a moderately short hike to end the day with. Rain clouds kept rolling in overhead, darkening the forest further and splattering a few warning drops, but never really opening up.
Up the hill, er, mountain we went. There wasn't any scenery and even the forest floor seemed rather blah. Probably just our mood at the time. It was one of those hikes where we hoped for a little rain to justify turning back. A quarter mile from the top we found a better excuse.
So we didn't bag a 4,000 footer that day. Still, we enjoyed two more days of hiking culminating in the Mt. Jackson/Mt. Webster loop. The loop trail was scenic both in the woods and on the rocky tops. As you get near the tops of either mountain the terrain roughens and there's plenty of rock scrambling.
We met a few groups along the way, some of them families out for the weekend. Turns out there is an AMC hut a couple miles in where you can make reservations and bunk up hostel style. The main feature is that they also prepare meals, which were reported as very good. I can see how that might be an attractive option for someone trying to get kids to backpack ten miles over a weekend.
We met a couple who had brought their infants along. The parents looked quite outdoorsy, but the kids looked like they'd been carried after the first quarter mile. Maybe two to three years old, the age of brightly colored sunglasses that dwarf chubby faces and sticky fists full of multicolored cereal treats. They were getting close to the top of Mt Webster, the rougher of the two legs, and vowed not to come back down that way. Faith, in passing, mentioned if that was the case they were about one third of the way through the loop.
We stopped at a falls further down the Webster trail to cool our dogs (all five of them). Zeke swam laps in the pool and we flash froze our feet. A few minutes later the couple walked through, kids hanging off of them like awkward backpacks. Someone's going to sleep well tonight, I thought to myself.
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