Marc's Public Blog - Hiking / Backpacking

We got to the Rhus Ridge parking lot s bit late (10:00), and unfortuately it was full (it's small), but we got lucky and people left not too long after we arrived.

hidden villa was still closed

interesting view of stevens creek, 280, and the spaceship

chipmunks are almost cute enough for me to forget that they are also rats with bushy tails

almost cute

getting higher

nice lizards

view is improving

new google campus being built

wait, what is this?

dragonflies

After a while, we finally got to the top and went to check out the multiple kinds of transmitters:

more antennas

And what goes up, must come down. The way down was steep and slippery. Unfortunately Jennifer fell and hurt her shoulder and elbow. We should have taken hiking poles:

the quary is by the trail

eventually made it by the PG&E trail, which we heard was miserable, so we didn't take it :)

By the time we closer to the bottom, the trails were one way, we kind of had to take one the wrong way to get back to our car without a long detour:

And eventually, after a longish hike, we made it back to the car, although it was a long detour back to the car (almost 14 miles in 5h45).

Here are the garmin connect pages:

Here are the stats:

                        Move Ovrl      Max Avg
     Dist    Time  Move Avg  Avg  Cal  HR  HR  Climb Desc
Day1 11.49   6h22  5h12 2.2  1.8  1848 157 114 2747  1120
Day2 19.95  11h50  8h05 2.4  1.6  3161 147 115 2351  3983
Tot  31.44  17h11 13h16 2.3  1.7  5009         5098  5103

I tried to be lighter this time, this is what I had:

Day 1: Drive from the Bay, Quick Stop by Dodge Ridge, and 11.5 miles to Mosquito Heaven Toejam Lake

close to our destination, you could already ride horses

We were at the trailhead ready to go by 11:00, no mosquitoes, everything was fine :)

smiling and happy, not knowing th hell we were going to walk into :)

nearby thunderstorm that we avoided

Eventually we got to Toejam Lake, which looked nice, except for the tens of thousands of mosquitoes that spent the entire time trying to suck all the blood we were carrying:

Arturo said the smoke the fire should have scared them, sadly it made no difference

I got the tent up as quickly as possible, and went to hide in it, the blood thirsty mosquitoes that had apparently just been born, were biting through layers of clothing

Got the tent up as quickly as possible, and went to hide in it

Was that about 50 mosquitoes trying to get through my 2 layers of clothes and get in the tent with me?

they also did their best to try and get inside the tent

and they also tried to eat my pack

Arturo stayed outside, good for him :)

Day 2: 12H / 20 Mile Escape

the river crossings were easy enough, only one was a bit tricky

interesting to see bacteria make oil

nice balancing

We took a few quick breaks in places were the mosquitoes were not as bad:

my new vivoactive 4 has a body battery feature, which seems to say I was running low :)

locust sex

this was likely the only place without mosquitoes, so we took a break

We had a few lower elevation camps where we considered staying, but by the time we got there, they all had mosquitoes, so we kept going:

Arturo found this nice snake

We eventually got to camp lake, and it, too, had too many mosquitoes, so we pushed on back to the car, almost 12H and 20 miles:

the mosquito net was definitely helpful

Eventually we got back to the trailhead, and by then, a mere 36H later, it was also overrun by mosquitoes. This proved that they literally were hatching as we arrived, bummer:

just shy of 20 miles.

I guess it was a long day :)

the vivoactive 4 did great, despite 12H of GPS tracking, it had 20% battery left

Thanks to Arturo for the trip planning and ride.