Family Hike

Now that our cd is done, we are able to spend our weekends hiking again. The trails have become so crowded in these areas that we aim to do the more popular ones on weekdays, and this past Friday we set out to climb Saddle Mountain in Oregon's coastal range.

The trail starts out in a forest and springtime in the forest is my favorite time. The greens are so lush, ferns are still uncurling and the wildflowers are fresh and beautiful.

Once you get through the forest, you start getting amazing views. On really clear days you can see several major mountain peaks and even the Pacific Ocean.

Eventually you get to the "saddle" and you have to cross to get between the two peaks of this mountain. In the photo above, we were looking down from the upper peak to the saddle which we had already crossed. And the in the photo below, we were looking up at the higher peak from the saddle.

Finally we made it to the summit of the upper peak and were rewarded with amazing views. We didn't see any of the major mountain peaks, but we could see the ocean.

Can you see the black specks in the photo below? Those were some sort of flies and they were everywhere on the summit. They didn't bite or really even land on us, but they did fly around our heads and annoy us. We didn't stay on the summit long because of them. 

After our brief stay on the summit,  we turned around and headed back down to the car.