A Farish Hike ... Before Heading Home

Woke up to another crisp 38F morning with blue skies and sunshine ... and puffy white accent clouds. A quick bite to eat and then we began to break camp ... an easy enough task when there’s only an electric hook up to dismantle.

Checklists completed, we headed off for one last hike before leaving Farish. This time, we walked up from where we were parked at Grace Lake Pavilion to the trailhead for the Barn Trail ... .75-mile one way.

We were welcomed to the trail by a mule deer, which stood still long enough for me to take a “memory shot” with my phone. The wild turkeys — I counted four of them — were shy about being photographed. They quickly scampered up the hill and disappeared into the tree line.

After dallying a bit to take photos of the fall colors at the start of the trail, we continued up on the gently sloping dirt path. Then we got to a very short but very steep section that gave us a good cardio workout.

We expected the trail to terminate at a scenic overlook. We were wrong. The trail ended at the Farish office near the entrance to the property. Huh? Who knew that our site was so close to the entrance? The curvy road down to Lake Grace sure fooled us as to the distances involved.

Mui opted to retrace our steps and return to our site by way of the Barn Trail to move the Cruiser and hook up the toad. I headed in the opposite direction by taking a short cut across Wedding Hill to connect to the trail down to Lake Sapphire. From there I found a short cut to Lake Leo. I was hoping the moose that was spotted swimming across the lake yesterday while we were at Rampart Reservoir was still hanging out there. Nope, he’d moved on. So, I did too ... down the steep gravel road and back to the Cruiser.

We beat the 11:00a check-out from our site by 15 minutes. The drive back home was uneventful, with little traffic to slow us down. By 12:30p, the Cruiser was tucked into its storage spot and we were having lunch at home.

Our next camping trip isn’t until 6 October ... unless we manage to squeeze in another short trip before then.

[The online gallery with all of the photos from our three-day getaway is at this link: https://eenusa.smugmug.com/PhxCrzr/CO-Day-Short….]Read more