It was a strange run today. A few weeks ago I encountered a herd of sheep up this track. I had intended to take the uphill route that day, but it was apparent from below that there was as large herd up there so I stayed on the lower trails. I had gone higher before and it was a pleasant ramble that I filed away as one to explore more sometime later. The sheep deterred me the last time, but they were gone today so up I went. They had pretty well trampled and shat up the areas where they'd been concentrated.

Unfortunately, I took a wrong turn early on the climb and wound up on overgrown tracks wrapping around to the east flank — where I had seen the sheep, but not where I'd been before.

I wound up bushwhacking to the top of the ridge (photo above), then made my way westward through a stand of tall ponderosas, a park-like area that eventually spilled onto a two-track road that had a familiar feel to it. At the forested peak, I realized why: It's the hill I'd climbed from the opposite side several times in other exploratory efforts. Those were based at the snowmobile clubhouse on Sucker Creek Road several miles west and north of where today's run started.

The peak was nondescript and unrecognizable, except for an old wooden pallet dumped there years ago by someone, probably as campfire wood. I even recognized the Bud Light bottle nearby. My problem today was that this peak put me quite a bit farther west than my return route up would need to be to get me back to my parking place three miles east of Lincoln.


I got to a familiar junction with a sign about logging activity (though none had been done in recent years). This picture was taken May 18, when I came to it from the exact opposite direction. I found a vague track today heading east around the mountain so I followed it, and it turned out to be the right choice, eventually putting me back to the original uphill track where I started.

The upshot is that I got my longer run in today, even though I was thinking not to go longer as I climbed. Nice that I'm able to do it, anyway.


Technical note: I am suddenly having trouble emailing my pictures to myself at my gmail address. They eventually show up (I mean like after hours, not seconds), but it's messing up my running log's timeliness. That's why I had the pic of my table and chairs yesterday. They've finally shown up, but it's more than an hour after I sent them, so I'm going back and editing the post and adding them to it. These are Oregon grapes, which were all over on the east slope.


This is a slit trench on one of the tracks down from the top of the mountain. It was bigger and deeper than the average "tank trap" used to block roads to ATV use, but I doubt if it was a miner's trench.

I'll probably skip tomorrow in order to be fresh for my zipline adventure Monday. Hope I'll be back out running by Tuesday. That'll give me four days to go 23 miles in order to reach 700 by the end of July, which is one of my quiet, OCD goals.

8; 22; 97; 677.