We'll only do 12miles

So many hikes have started out that way it seems. To kick off the weekend my dad and I camped up at Garden of the Gods. We hiked the observation trail as the sun rose, in other words we ate our oatmeal in God's own breakfast nook. Well we were a team of three again this time around. Just the Blocker brothers and their dad. We hiked from the Lusk Creek area to a spot just south of Herod. Lusk creek is always a beautiful area to go through. It's nice being on this end of the trail now. Seems like there is just so much more to see. Lots of rock formations and the like. We had a few interesting creek crossings but none were anything like Max Creek, which is most fortunate.

I'd have to say that this hike took us upon some of the most interesting people yet. First person we met was an old cowboy like fella. Had his hat and horse, even spurs. We talked to him for a little while and got the standard response when we told him where we were ending our hike. Huh... We get a lot of people that will ask things like that "Where you all plan on camping?" "Near Cedar Grove road." "Huh..." And that is how it goes, the people we run across seem rather like locals, but never seemed to know where we are going. I suppose that makes us seem more like locals to them. But they're probably in a rut where they ride their damn horses on the same trail all the time, never go out to see what else is there. Which is something that I'd have a bit of trouble understanding. I love Giant City, but there are so many other places to hike around here. So many new things to see. I couldn't just hike there all the time. Let move on to the next interesting group we met. A couple of ol' silver hairs were hiking on another trail and we ended up meeting them at a junction. Well it seems they were looking for some fella who had been living out there with his wife and kid for a few decades now. They asked us if we had seen a house or anything of the like. We had not. So they told us of how they ended up where they are and kept on a jabbering. About the time they said they could tell we were brothers 'cause we had, "Nice teeth," was when we fixed on getting out of there. Dad told 'em to let whoever they were looking for that we said, "Hi," and we were off again laughing.

Well nothing overly eventful happened after we ran into them till about the time we came upon One Horse Gap. This was a cool little area with some bizarre rock formations. Naturally we had to climb up on some despite how tired our legs and feet were. You see... we had finished that 12miles a little bit ago and were well on our way to pushing 14. Most unfortunate part of this all is that the map was showing we had at least 3.5mi er so left. Well we had no other choice but to push on and boy did we learn something about how well this trail is maintained. It seems like they were running a new trail through here... maybe? Or they just decided to nail a damn blaze to every tree in every direction they could. The place was a damn catacomb. But we persevered and with our expert navigational skills only took one wrong turn and we figured that out fast. So we pressed on as we had to and enjoyed the gentle down hill over the last few miles on the way to the truck. We ended up hiking a solid 18miles.