Derek and I just plain had fun today. Derek’s car is AWD and we made it into the exit 38 parking lot and from there we trekked up to the Iron Horse trail. We headed east, looking for the McClellan Butte trail.
There were plenty of sights along the way.
A notable facet of this hike is that pretty much anyone could do it, at least some of it. With the exception of a little side-trip about a mile up McClellan Butte trail, it was fairly level. Except for the fact that we were in snowshoes, which are a tad cumbersome, it was pretty mellow.
Not much wildlife on view but we were not completely alone:
We hiked about 11.3 miles, most of it as I say pretty level, about 5 hours. Derek had to go to work but we had a great workout, particularly when we hit McClellan Butte. We didn’t go far (time consideration) but we proved we could do steep trails in the snowshoes.
We will be back in this area on Friday, New Year’s Day, with Jan and Jill and Finley. We will be doing a much shorter hike with them but we figured out where we could park the car for maximum views with minimum exhaustion.
Happy New Year!
Link to visualization:
http://adventures.garmin.com/en-US/by/djhiker/iron-horse-to-mcclellan-butte-12-28-2015/#.VoG8EJXlupo