A Long Hike

Today was a long awaited long hike for Tim and I. Its been a while since the two of us had simultaneous free days and we made plans to hike Eagle Creek. The plan was to do the entire hike, all the way to the tunnel. For some reason I thought it would be a 4 mile hike, which sounded great. Turns out I completely made up that figure (my brain gets creative sometimes) and its way longer than that.
It was absolutely gorgeous, mostly going up on the way in, coming back down the same trail going out.
The trail was carved out of basalt rock around 1920 and created by Italian designers. Its quite incredible how you easily walk along steep cliffs and meander along-side the Eagle creek. I loved it. Punchbowl Falls (the picture above) was absolutely magical. You had to walk out along some rocks in the shallow water to see this view and when I saw it come around the moss covered cliffs I had to catch my breath. The water is stunning. In the summer I guess people go swimming here, I'll have to come back and see.
It was a long trail, we got tired after about 5.5 miles in (you have to turn around and walk out the way you came) and had a picnic (baguette, wine, brie, prosciutto, chocolate...and water) and doubled back to the car.

We had reached a sign that indicated entry into a part of the forest that all the Douglas Fir are less than 100 years old because there was a forest fire and it described that the next 13.5 miles of the trail would be this type of forest. I thought the whole trail was only 4 miles long, so this sorta freaked me out and we stopped to picnic within a mile of this sign. The thought of hiking over 10 more miles only to walk back the whole way was daunting. Little did I know that the tunnel which is 6 miles in was just a half mile away, ah well, we'll have to try again sometime. It was an awesome hike. In the end we walked about 11 miles. It kicked my butt.

I saw this leaf in the trail