Brown Canyon Loop trail (5.3 miles)

It's my last day of summer vacation. My last early-morning walk with Bill for a while.

Today's walk was much like Sunday's hike up Carr: steady and slow.  Bill and I met at 5:20am off Ramsey Canyon Road and the trailhead parking area and walked the maintenance road toward the Brown Ranch.  Sunrise was at 5:36am but the cloud cover was too thick to offer much splendor  The ground was damp from last night's lingering rain, and cool air kept me moving.  I only wore a t-shirt as a top, leaving water and pack behind in the truck.

Yellow sunflowers dotted the fields along the road.  There wasn't much variety here.  I spotted some white clover and the Golden Banner.  The one flower I saw here that I didn't see around Carr Peak is the Sweet Four O'Clocks (Mirabillis longiflora), white tubular flowers on spiny brushes.  The brush itself is rather nondescript, but the flowers make this brush stand out for a while.

We didn't see many flowers once we were in the canyon.  The juniper, pine and oaks must prevent flowers from growing here.  We spotted a few firecrackerbrush, some mushrooms, and saw some plays with light as the sun began to rise above treeline.  The woman with the young chocolate Lab Lance was out today.  When we hit the high part of the loop, we started running into the high school mountainbike team.

I was surprised to see no fresh water in the trough.  Neither Sadie nor Zeke would drink from it today.  They found some water puddle father up the trail.  I could tell there was a short flood from the rain, but nothing stayed.  We will need much more rain to get the creeks running again.

The one unique flower today was near Ramsey Canyon Road, growing from stalks in a ditch.  This flower stalk had white spherical bulbs and bees were digging into the flowers.  It looked so out of place in that ditch.  Perhaps it was a stray domesticated hydrangea, but then the leaves didn't match.

Cool air had been replaced with warm air as we finished our walk.  It took us over two hours, but we weren't concerned.  With our schedules filling up again, we won't be seeing much of each other unless we continue our evening walks.

I was concerned, however, of my itchy, runny eyes.  I waited 15 minutes for the Dollar General in Hereford to open at 8am so that I could get some generic allergy pills.  I'm not starting the new school year looking like a blood-shot zombie.