highlights since September pt 5

My mom bought this book about hiking opportunities around Georgetown (the city in California, not the University in DC). One of the hikes was supposed to lead to the crash site of a world war 2 era B-17 bomber. That sounded pretty cool, so on Saturday, October 16th, we headed out in an attempt to locate the wreckage. Unfortunately, neither the directions, nor the maps in the book were very clear. We did manage to find the parking area, despite some uncertainty on the way there, but we started off on the wrong trailhead.

Having to cross over this log a few hundred feet in was our first clue that we might not be on the right trail.

We may not have been going in the right direction, but we did get to see this really cool tree:

That's my mom (blue backpack) and Rachel (yellow shirt) in the bottom left. (The cool tree, by the way, is in the center.)

Once the trail dead ended, we walked back to where we started and found the right trail. (The folks who built the trail decided to put the sign about 50 yards from the start of the trail.) Anyway, we quickly found this cool looking mushroom:

This is typically what they do to trees that block the trail:

I thought I'd take advantage of the photo opportunity.

In this shot, Lennon is pointing a shotgun shell cartridge he found at me. It was very intimidating. It also gave him the idea for a hiking game in which he (and later Abby as well) would set "traps" for the "enemy" along the trail. As the game evolved throughout the day, these traps took the form of different geometric designs drawn in the dirt with sticks and lest there be any confusion, they narrated their trap setting in very minute detail.

We missed an unsigned Y intersection and therefore never got to the plane wreckage, but because of our oversight, we were able to see a lot of pretty scenery, as can be seen in the following shots:

In this last shot, Rachel may not fit the definition of "scenery," but I like to look at her, so here she is.

We also came across this abandoned ranch house (when we later realized that we were not on the right trail, we turned around and retraced our steps, and only then did we realize that we had been trespassing on private property when we came to the ranch. Oops.

We ended up hiking for a LOOOOONG time, but the kids did great, especially Lennon and Abby who continued their crazy game for hours. In order to try to save some time and some mileage, we left the trail and cut across country. When, after a while, we were starting to wonder if we were ever going to get back to a landmark that we recognized, we found this place that we had stopped at on our way out in the morning, so we knew where we were and we knew that we were pretty close to the car. Boy were we happy.

Shortly after reaching this point, we saw the intersection we had missed earlier in the day. It was pretty obvious going back towards the trailhead, but not so obvious when walking away from it. Oh well, I guess we'll just have to try it again some other time.