24th of July hike!

 What a great hike we did for July 24th!  We went up the Mill Flat trail that rangers have been clearing!  They had it cleared to within a half mile of being done, but it is so crazy after that there will be a lot of things that have to be done in order for it to be remade.  We met a group of 3 girl rangers coming down from working on it.  They had their big saw and said they had cleared over 300 logs out of trails this summer.  After we got to the end point of that trail we started back down and decided to take the Cut Off Trail up the mountain to get to the Summit Trail.  Neither of us had ever done it before.  As we were going up we sort of lost it, but then we saw a group of guy rangers coming down it with a horse and a couple of mules.  The girls had told us they had taken that route.  The guys told us that in order the clear the rest of the Mill Flat Trail it will probably take "lots of ologists" meeting to work out the environmental and other impacts that will have to be taken into consideration.  It was interesting in to talk to them.  Since they had just come down the Cut Off Trail it was easy to find after they headed down.  I really enjoyed this quicker ascent route to the Summit Trail.  It was so much faster, lower and easier than when we did it via Forsyth Trail a few weeks ago.  It was all very beautiful and there was still quite a bit of water around.  We looked at the view and ate a snack at the top and then headed back down to go out the way we had come.  I wasn't looking forward to the afternoon sun shining on us, but clouds came in and even sprinkled on us a little bit, so it was actually very nice.  We did a total of 11.36 miles and were pretty tired by the end.  We started at 8:30 am and came out at 3:30 pm.  We did it pretty leisurely like and ate lots of red and purple raspberries along the way.  We saw a couple coming in on our way back and other than them and the rangers we saw no one else.  It was a beautiful, peaceful day of hiking.

Then we came home and cleaned up and cooked a wonderful steak, baked potato, salad, bread dinner and had RB floats for dessert and then watched Mr. Destiny.  It was a really relaxing day for us. Happy Pioneer Day.  We did hear a great pioneer story on the way up to go hiking too.