Back to hiking!

 Paul and I have been working to lose some weight and have made some progress.  One reason we decided to do it was to help Paul's arthritic foot not to feel so bad.  The extra weight he was carrying was making it worse and it has become very difficult for him to go on long hikes anymore.  He wanted to see it losing weight would make it so he could do some hiking and maybe even some backpacking again.  Then Ross called and wanted us to come a take a hike with him up to Blackhead Peak which is a place from their young times at their Colorado cabin.  Paul has done extremely well on losing weight and we wanted to test it out to see how it is working on his foot pain.  It has helped on our early morning neighborhood walks.  On Friday and Saturday we decided to do some bigger hikes at high elevation to get in shape to go to Colorado and see how the foot held up.  Yea!  It's really helping and we took a couple a great hikes. 

Friday morning we went up to Cedar Breaks where we hiked at 9,000+ feet and did a hike with 1200+ feet of elevation gain.  His foot (and knees) didn't hurt him and we saw the most spectacular wildflower display as well as revisiting a hike we did long ago to Bartizan Arch and Shooting Star Falls.  The arch hike was a little sketching near the end, but I made it and it was great to see it again.  We did about 5.5 miles that day.  Lots of uphill at high elevation.

Saturday we took a hike to Whipple Valley/North Valley on Pine Valley Mountain.  We hiked 14 miles and did an elevation gain of 1,282 in the process topping out at 9,505 feet.  It was a tough hike.  The weather ended up being perfect.  It had rained the day before up there pretty hard it looked like and that cooled things down.  We got an early start at about 8 am and got off the mountain at 3:15 pm.  We stopped as needed to breath on the uphill parts and rested a little at the top.  The flowers at the top were a palette of color...so beautiful.  The valleys were white with clover blossoms.  The forests we hiked through were beautiful too. When we hiked on up to North Valley the Bluebells and some other type of plant were so covered in dew that they soaked legs and our boots as we walked through them knocking it off. So beautiful!  And on the way down we got so lucky and had cloud cover over us almost the whole way so the afternoon sun wasn't beating down on us.  Loved both hikes.  They weren't easy, but we made it!  I'm so thankful that we can still get out like this.  We are 68 and 70 now and I don't know how much longer we will be able to.