Have we just been unlucky or is the amount of fire damage to our National Forests as extensive as we have been seeing? My inclination is to think the latter.
Today we hiked the Arcadia Trail (part of it). It connects our campground with one five miles above it, the Shannon Campground, which is at 9000+ feet. That makes it 2900 feet higher than the Arcadia Campground where we are staying.
We knew that we wouldn't do the entire 10 miles with this kind of elevation gain (at least 3000 feet) so decided to go 6 miles or 2000 feet, whichever came first.
The first mile of the trail was on a gentle slope, a nice dirt trail.
Then the trail became more rocky and steep, with incredible views of the valleys below and plains beyond.
Then we hit a small stand of small Aspen. They were clearly very recent growth.
Above that it was a long stretch of burned forest. This was hard going because there were dozens of trees that had fallen over the trail.
At 2.75 miles and 1600 foot gain we decided that it was too slow going and not a lot of fun to be inching our way up any further by crawling over and under fallen trees. So we called it a day and started back.
Today's wildlife. More lizards.
Hike Report: Arcadia Trail in the Coronado National Forest
(Note that the elevation gain changes a bit when one disables the elevation correction. Note also that, as is typical with both my hiking and biking Garmins, elevation gain does not equal elevation loss, even though we always start and stop in the same exact location; I basically take an average of all of these figures to arrive at what I believe to be the best estimate of elevation gain. It is probably accurate to within 50 feet or so, which is pretty good. Usually it is within a few feet of elevation gains provided on the occasional trail map that reports elevation gains of hikes, which makes us feel confident in what we estimate when this information is not provided by trail maps.)
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