Brandy's Adventures

We wanted to find a way from the trail network south of Garden Road to Garden Road Trail. I had seen segments of a truck trail on Google Earth but I couldn’t see a way to actually make the connection. We just got started and Brandy alerted on what I believed to be a coyote. She kept whining and pulling as I kept looking for what had her attention. Finally, I saw a dark-coated coyote about 100 meters away that was looking at us, then it started moving slowly away. It was joined by a second coyote and then the duo soon disappeared over a small hill.  We hiked to the top of the ridge near the trailhead, following it to the truck trail we had explored about nine months ago. The truck trail was so overgrown so that it virtually disappeared in several places.

Eventually, we came to a “T” and decided to explore to the right. The tracks quickly told us that it was a mountain bike trail. About a half mile later, the trail started up a narrow dry creek bed flanked by a steep hill on each side. There were several places where the creek bed went up almost vertically in about five-foot steps. I would like to have seen how the mountain bikers navigated that. We finally were able to follow the trail out of the creek bed, continued up the hill and then started down toward Hwy. 67. We hiked, with Brandy exploring the brush along the way, until we were within 0.2 miles of Hwy. 67. The trail appeared to lead to private property with a house and outbuildings, so we turned around and headed back up the hill. I set a GPSr waypoint at the peak of the trail and we headed down to the creek bed. I had to face the creek drop offs in two places to carefully back down since my boots were somewhat muddy giving me poor traction.

We returned to the “T” with the truck trail and continued on the mountain bike trail. We went over a small ridge and there it was, Garden Road Trail! We had found the connecting trail for which we were looking! The trail was now substantially less rugged than the creek  bed, with numerous switchbacks down the steep hill. We finally joined Garden Road Trail and followed it through the Sycamore Creek development  back to the starting trailhead.

I looked at our track on Google Earth and found that we had unknowingly passed within 100 feet of the top of Goat Peak. I’ve been searching for a trail to Goat Peak in order to find a geocache hidden there. Our hike was definitely a success!

Brandy is on antibiotics until tomorrow morning and has finished her sucralfate. The sucralfate has the appearance of chalk and was given orally three times a day in a slurry with a syringe. At first Brandy hated the sucralfate but Shirley and I praised her so much that at the end it seemed she almost looked forward to it.   The syringe made it easy as we just inserted it between the teeth in her closed mouth and squirted about two cc. for each dose.

We went on a six-mile hike yesterday starting at Ellie Lane.  Just past Table Rock, down the hill and at the bottom of the valley is a granite outcropping sometimes called “slick rock”. On the east side of slick rock is the beginning of an unnamed trail marked with ducks. We have long wanted to find a connecting trail from Ellie Lane Trail to the network of trails on the Ramona side of the hills. We took the trail until we lost the ducks but continued on in the same direction. Brandy led us on the game trail until we finally came to a truck trail, that became a gravel road, that became a paved road. Weeds and brush were growing in the middle of the road, but sand bags at the washouts indicated some low level of maintenance.

Our original plan was to return the way we had come, but according to my GPSr, the nearest point on Ellie Lane Trail was about a third of a mile to the south. Brandy led us on a barely discernible game trail that eventually disappeared and at which time I took the lead up the hill. A trail to the south soon reappeared, Brandy took the lead, and near the peak I realized that we had been there a few months back, approaching the peak from the south from Ellie Lane Trail. At that time we saw a group of hikers coming toward us from the north and wondered if there was a trail that we had missed. Now, at least, we had another way to the trail network on the Ramona side. Ellie Lane Trail peak lay before us about two hundred meters away.

We picked up Ellie Lane Trail, following it mostly south to Iron Mountain Peak Trail, then down the hill to Wild Horse Trail, then Ellie Lane Trail and back to the staging area.

Brandy’s nail is obviously no longer an issue for hiking. Ellie Lane Trail is extremely rocky with sharp rocks of many sizes and Brandy, as usual, seemed not to notice.