The West Fork Trail

The morning of the hike is upon us.

We woke up, and gently, with one eye open, tested neck movement and back pain. Still tender, but passable.

Game on. Let’s do this hike!

We grabbed a protein shake for the road (this is absolutely not a Pancake Day type of morning) and headed out toward the trail head, about 22 miles away.

It was a gorgeous drive up 89A to get to the Call of the Canyon Picnic area, which is the site of the trailhead for the West Fork Trail.

We were warned that the trail was very popular and that the trailhead parking area would be quite busy, so we said a little prayer and went in anyway. We were greeted at the ticket booth by a nice lady and her guard chiweenie.

The little ticket lady hurried out of her little booth and moved a cone blocking one of four spots up by her booth and motioned us to tuck our big rig in there (just the truck and not connected to the Airstream because there never would have been room). It worked out perfectly!

We gathered up our gear, hit the bathroom at the trailhead and plunged into the woods!

It ended up being a marvelous hike!

The trail was mostly sandy with a lot of rocks and some roots, but it was clear and easy to follow. There were about a dozen creek crossings, and each had an array of mostly stable stones or logs that enabled a dry crossing.

The canyon walls rose up high on both sides of the narrowing valley, which itself was filled with towering pines, lots of hardwoods, and thick ferns and snake grass covering the valley floor wherever it could grow between the tumbled up boulders and rocks that had fallen at some point in the past. As we made our way further into the canyon, the walls slowly got closer and closer together.

It made for a mostly shady, cool walk through a beautiful natural area. While there were plenty of other hikers that day, it really didn’t feel crowded. Everyone was just enjoying nature at their own pace.

We also passed quite a few people happily hiking with their dogs (which made us really miss our pups 😢). You could tell by the huge wagging tails that they knew they were headed for some water play time. We eventually came across the part of the creek where all the big dogs were having a ton of fun playing in the wider, deeper parts of the creek. The very creek that had cut this canyon between these rock faces over the last millions of years.

We worked our way in to the end of the hike, about 3.3 miles in, and then turned around and began working our way back out. All in, the hike took us about three and a half hours as we were not pushing hard. Rather, we took our time and enjoyed the hike (this is code for Ann’s hips were absolutely SCREAMING by the time we got all the way into the canyon, so the 3.3 miles back out were pretty SLOW 🐢).

With hips creaking, knees popping, water bottles empty, and souls overjoyed with the opportunity to experience this hike with such great weather and with each other, we loaded up the truck, moved out of the way, replaced the cone that had protected the spot, thanked the ticket-taker and her faithful guard dog (who was napping in the sun), and headed back toward the campground!

Annnnnnnnd, no one in our little group had any bathroom emergencies on the trail! Yay us!

I mean, Ben peed four times to my zero, but Ben says pees don’t make it on the official blog trail map. Only forest floor “number two” incidents. That’s not really fair because the map of Ben’s pee breaks would be way more impressive than my little old maps. 🙄

Actually, I’m pretty proud to say that there have been zero national (or state) park trail number twos by anyone in our party on this trip. Lots of close calls, but close only counts in horseshoes and hand grenades, so we are calling this a victory!

Ben has just informed me that we have four national parks left to visit on this trip, so I guess there is still time.

Harumph!

We made it back to the camper and had a bit of a surprise.

It had been a bit chilly in the camper that morning. The A/C finally had a chance to keep up after baking in the sun all day. Since it was slightly cool, we had decided to briefly shut the system off while we had our coffee and did our morning prep stuff. Just before we left, Ben turned the AC on again so it could resume its day-long fight to keep the airstream cool.

Or so he thought.

Instead of turning on the AC, he had accidentally turned on the heat. The thermostat just cycles through four settings:

Off

Heat

Cool

Fan

In that order.

Since he had turned it “off” in the morning, the next button push did turn the system back on, but in heat mode. So, instead of the A/C working to cool things down, the airstream instead said, “oh, they want it hot? OK, I’ll just keep the fans blowing and let it get nice and toasty inside their little aluminum tube.”

And it did get nice and toasty.

We expected it to be a little warm when we got back, but it was reading over 103 degrees inside the airstream.

We opened the doors and turned on the roof fans (and also turned the AC on, CORRECTLY this time!) and we were able to get the airstream cooled down before dinner.

Lesson learned, we checked around inside to see if we had any new issues since we left. The only thing that we damaged was the butter, which we had left near a window inside the hot airstream. It had gotten hot enough to melt all of the butter in our little tupperware.