Morning Hikes

We loaded up the Jeep and headed south to the Hyalite Drainage to do a couple of day hikes. Kobi in the middle, Linda navigating and yours truly behind the wheel. Our first hike came after we had driven about twelve miles up some curvy forest roads.  Most of the drive was on pavement so we had no excitement in old Stinky Jeep.

We parked in a well used parking lot and followed the paved trail up to Palisade Falls. Linda noted that the falls were beautiful and majestic but would not be considered spectacular. The falls drop 80 feet along the face of a basalt cliff.  We took some pictures and let Kobi splash in the water a bit then we hiked back to the Jeep and followed our original path back down the mountain road to a new trailhead.

This trail is a 10.2 mile loop that passes by History Rock. Our plan was to hike to the rock and back and that is exactly what we did.  The trail was well used and led through two nice meadows and up a valley. We probably hiked about two miles and came to History Rock. The rock is a sandstone rock face sticking out of the mountain side right next to the trail.  People have scratched, drilled, hammered, sawed and cut their names and date they were there all over the faces of the rock. It was a bit disappointing and looked more like a big sad defaced rock then anything else.  We looked for old dates but only found 1972 as the oldest. I read a post by someone on the web that said they found a name and date from the 40's, but we didn't see any- thing like that. I felt that instead of calling it History Rock they should just call it Carved Up Rock. Linda did find that a person put in a lot of effort to apologize for defacing nature by carving the words "I'm sorry". You can see it in the photo.

We drove back to our camper and snoozed the afternoon away preparing for the big evening festivities and the reason we were here. (For the wedding write-up see the previous post.)

We can't really accept this apology.

Guess it's ok to deface this rock!

Cool mountain water is all I need.