I started this blog last year after the Four Plus Foolhardy Folks’ club trip to Glacier.  Hard to believe a year has gone by.  Well, we’re off again, this time to Yellowstone NP and the Tetons NP.  We have 6 days of hiking there and then I’m heading over to South Dakota for the Blackjack event — 21 events over Labor Day weekend.  Yippee!

Palomar Mountain State Park is a little over an hour away from my home in Carlsbad.  It’s east of Camp Pendleton and the Pala casino.  I wanted one more hike for the Footsore Fiend’s 2009 YRE catalogue and this is one I’ve been wanting to check out since I arrived.  This past weekend my friend Becky and I walked a 10K route that I’d worked out using trailmaps and guidebooks.

Wow, am I impressed!  After walking since April in the arid terrain of So Cal, it was refreshing to get back up into the pines.  The state park runs from about 4200′ to 5600′ in elevation.  It’s high enough to be green in August and to offer densely shaded trails.  Guidebooks have said it feels like you’re in the Sierra Nevadas, and I would agree.  There was a fire there a few years ago, and though I’m sure it was gorgeous before the fire, it’s beauty is awesome post-fire.  The browns of many leaves give it a Fall flavor even in high summer.  The forest floor is lush with greenery as the forest rebounds.  And the dark tree skeletons here and there add to the interest of the dramatic views.

The views — well, pictures cannot do them justice.  You can see nearly to the ocean and the valley below and Pala casino are spectacular. 

We will be offering a 10K “grand tour” route here as well as a 5K route that features the Boucher Trail.

CLICK HERE for a gallery of photos. 

If you did any good walks this past week, let’s hear about them!

I had a very big walking weekend while a friend of mine was visiting to help me finalize routes.  We walked Griffith Park in L.A., Bel Air/UCLA, Whittier and a fabulous new route at Palomar Mountain State Park.  More about that in the next post.

Sorry I have not been able to post much.  I’m in serious crunch mode.  Now that the club is official, I am putting together my new YREs for 2009.  As some of you know, these are due in August.  So there are brochures, walk directions and maps to perfect along with the routes themselves.  It definitely keeps me walking!

I’ll be putting up a 2009 season “preview” soon, but for now here are some teasers from 2 new routes in La Jolla…

Well, this is an exciting day.  I came home from Chicago to find that my application for a new AVA club had gone through.  It’s official!  The club is called FOOTSORE FIENDS and will be mostly focused on local area hikes.  We will be doing regular Saturday walks and possibly a mid-week 5K walk as well. 

I will be doing some clean-up/reorg on the blog to enable it to be the club’s blog and also will be starting a separate website to post the club’s walking schedule and ‘09 YREs.  Hurrah for new beginnings.

Ah, mid summer!  You can pretty much count on warm weather and family weddings.  This past weekend I was in Naperville, Ill attending my nephew’s wedding.  And what a wonderful, raucous affair it was!  I managed to get in a few walks while there — the Chicago/Oak Park walk, which is terrific.  This is one great thing about volkswalking. Under no other circumstances would I have thought to go check out Oak Park.  The walk included a dozen or so homes designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, his own home and studio, and the birthplace of Hemingway.  It was in the mid 90’s, but the neighborhood was full of large shade trees so it was bearable.  Great walk and I highly recommend it.  On Friday I couldn’t talk anyone into going downtown for the walk I had planned.  There was too much going on.  But several of my relatives and I walked at the local Morton Arboretum, which was a nice experience as well.

I know the Four Plus club had their big NW Hiking Weekend at Crystal Mountain last weekend.  If anyone cares to post a report, I’d love to hear about it.

Anyone want to share their walks this week?  What’s up in the Northwest?

We did a lovely walk today.  It was an AVA event put on by the Laguna Turf ‘N Surf Walkers.  It was in Huntington Beach at the Bolsa Chica Ecological Preserve.  I love nature walks and this was a terrific one with lots of soft dirt trails, a zillion birds and nice water views.  The Preserve isn’t super large, but the club did a nice job planning the route and the 10K covered pretty much the entire preserve.  The weather was cooperative as well — 75 degrees with an ocean breeze.  Terrific!

CLICK HERE to see all the Bolsa Chica pictures.

I was looking for a hike I felt safe doing alone on Saturday and settled on Bernardo Mountain in my guidebooks.  It’s in nearby Escondido and sounded like a very popular trail (including with runners and mountain bikers).  I checked weather.com and it predicted a high of 85 in Escondido so I planned to be at the trailhead by 8am.  I would be in and out before it got bad.

Ha!  Man, I am still a newbie when it comes to walking in California in July!  It was already 84 on my car temperature readout when I reached the trailhead.  I gamely started out.  The beginning of the trail is ugly — a construction zone.  They are building a new bike/pedestrian bridge at Lake Hodges that will enable bikers/walkers to get easily between Rancho Bernardo and Escondido.  It will be great when done, but for now it’s a sight.  There is also an orange-fence-and-sign detour of the lakeside trail due to fire damage.  Despite this, the walk is very pretty.  You are quickly at the edge of Lake Hodges and you follow it on a soft, level dirt path for over a mile.  It’s a beautiful place with sea green water and reddish earth.  There’s a great 5K lake walk in the making here!

To get to Bernardo Mountain you turn right up a trail.  The initial climb has an easy grade and is very pleasant.  The entire ascent is about 2.1 miles and does get steeper.  It also gets hotter!   The afforementioned fire is evident in the blackened skeleton of trees along the route.  There is zero shade the entire way except where the switchbacks allow you to take a bit of cover in the lee of a hill.  At the top there’s a water tank and some impressive views.

I was feeling annoyingly lame because I had to stop for rest several times.  And the march back to the car felt uncomfortably long and hot.  When I got back to my vehicle at about 10:45 the temperature readout said 93!   Lesson learned: 1) don’t trust weather.com; 2) the ‘heat of the day’ comes very early and 3) in July stay coastal!  This is one that will bear repeating in, say, February.

CLICK HERE for Bernardo Mountain photos

It’s the return of weekly rants and raves!  What have you been up to this summer?  Done any good walks lately?  Talk about ‘em here.

I was looking forward to having some extra walking hours during the holiday weekend.  I got to check out two new trails.  The first was in Mission Trails Regional Park in San Diego.  This place is huge — it will take a whole lot of visits to see all the hiking loops here.  On this day I was with my husband and it was 85 degrees so we chose a 3 mile loop around Oak Canyon and Grasslands.  We also walked down to the lake by the campgrounds.  Unfortunately, I forgot my camera.  On Saturday I did a 7 mile hike at Bernardo Mountain.  I’ll post about that in a separate entry.