trails of light
I went on a short hike up to Donut Falls tonight. It was a lot shorter than I had expected but still a fun little hike. On the way back I saw a friend of mine who I haven’t seen in over two years and it was nice to get acquainted with her again. Back at the trailhead we realized we were missing some people who rode in the car with us. We didn’t want to leave them stranded, so we began to wait, and wait and wait.
The good thing was that during the wait I had an excellent view of a very starry night, unmarred by city lights. I got to see some spectacular falling meteors. Some of them left a huge trail of light across the sky, almost like a jet’s contrail.
We finally went home, but it turns out that the missing hikers had gone farther up the trail to see some mines and it took them a lot longer than they expected to descend the trail in the dark. Thankfully they all got down safely.
As one of the missing hikers, I can attest to the fact that it takes much longer to walk a loose, rocky trail in the dark than it does in the light. And saying we saw the mines may be a bit of a stretch, since our flashlights were getting weak by the time we actually managed to find them.
Thanks to the company I was in, though, it was actually quite fun. I also got to see a couple of really impressive meteors. On the downside, I’ll be very sore tomorrow and it’ll probably take an hour to clean all the crud off my shoes.
I can’t believe that I missed it !!!
I love that trail. If you can believe it, I used to mountain bike to donut falls when I wanted a little exercise with a pretty view. Maybe Carla and I will have to hit that sometime. Did you get all the way up to the falls?
Yup, we got to the falls but I never climbed up to see the actual donut hole. I was chatting with the friend I saw there and then we started heading down, but I’ll have to go up there again to get a look at the actual falls.