East Hunter Canyon Road

I did not do any major hiking this weekend due to a sleuth of assignments I needed to finish. This was hard on me, as the weather this weekend was back to its unusual warmth. It nearly hit 80F this afternoon, and instead of reading the last few acts of Shakespeare's "Twelfth Night" I took all three dogs with me to walk the entire three-mile loop off East Hunter Canyon Road. The trailhead is just three miles from my house.

I hadn't been up this road in I believe a month. There were a few target shooters in the side trails, as usual, but no one off the main trail. It's these shooters that I am afraid of, and take the dogs off the road to get away from the sounds.

All three were delighted to get outside. I walked a pleasant pace, just wearing a t-shirt and my jeans and carrying my Canon S90 with me. The sun was just dipping below Miller peak, which created a bit of a haze in the west, but otherwise the warmth, the lack of any cool wind, made me realize how much I long for spring to pop up in the high desert.

It's been so warm lately that the honeybees are up from their hibernation and eating the miniscule pollen they are finding in my birdfeeder. The rosemary bush, which normally has its blue flowers available for the bees, all died off in the coldsnap from ten days ago.

I stopped briefly at "Site Boston," the sycamore-shrouded campsite popular with target shooters. Unfortunately, many shooters shoot at the live oaks instead of targets they bring, and to my horror discovered another downed oak tree that had collapsed from the bulletholed wood. How long the tree had layed there I do not know, but its leaves were already dry. Broken glass from beer bottles and plastic also lay around. Drunken rednecks had once again shot up my forest.

Now shooters are aiming at the next oak to kill off, as the neighboring young tree is showing signs of smallarms damage. A forest ranger had told me that shooting at live trees was against Forest Service rules. Apparently shooters are either not aware of this, or the Forest Service is unable to enforce their laws. Either way, this dead oak is the second tree to fall in this area in the last two years. At this rate Site Boston will be nothing but a barren hole along a foothill.

I tried not to let the dead tree annoy me. We resumed our loop hike first walking in a northerly direction before the trail curved west and then turned sharply east again, returning back to Site Boston and our final stretch.

I briefly took the dogs down an illegal trail to get away from incoming vehicles. It was also shadier there.

This entire adventure took no more than 70 minutes. It's not going to replace any awesome hikes I could have done this weekend, but it's better than nothing. We are expecting three more days of springlike warmth before another cold front hits us from California