My husband loves exploring….so when there's a trail…he likes to see what's at the end of it. And so, after Odessa Lake, we took another "spur" trail to Spruce Lake.
A sign at the start of the trail warned that it was "unmaintained" - okaayy….. Considering the trails we'd already seen, this one looked much the same - rocky! Sure, there were lovely bits of grass like above, but mostly….rocks. We even had to scramble over some bigger ones to get to…..
Spruce. This was a very nice lake….but I was getting tired and my non-existent sense of exploration was done already. Ha! And so we hiked down to Fern….and all the way back down to The Pool - about 2.5 miles from Spruce.
Once down, we took a break before our next leg. We decided to make a loop instead of taking the same trail back to where we started. This loop looked innocuous on the map and would get us to a new lake.
In no time, however, this innocuous trail started gaining elevation…it turns out we were going up and over a ridge…instead of staying flat as we'd expected. Great. At this point, I ache…Mr. Higgins aches….we're a bit unhappy. Add to that the unrelenting sun - there was no shade on this trail - and we were ready to be done.
Cub Lake, which we found on the other side of the ridge (1.2 miles from The Pool), was a bit of the letdown. Outside of the odd lily pad formation, there was little to see. A fire had gone through this area not long ago and the trees have not yet recovered.
Once at Cub, we thought we only had a little bit to go to the car. Well, we read the map wrong and had 2.3 miles to go. We were miserable, at this point. At least the trail was nice enough to provide some shade along the first mile or so.
On this day we walked 14 miles, 40,000 steps. We went up and down all day long. My feet hurt, my shoulders hurt (from my backpack), and my hips hurt (of all things). I'm glad we did this hike but it was just a bit too long to be pleasant.
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