Hello Hikers!
Beautiful cool gloomy morning on a fantastic new trail on Connecticut Hill — raw and blustery at the trail head, but lovely once we got into the shelter of the woods. The hike was a huge success — except for one very alarming mishap.
Near the end, one of our small dogs, Yoda, stepped onto an animal trap that was staked out not more than a foot off the trail. While the dog was screaming with pain, the people with him tried but failed to pry the jaws of the trap open. Luckily, we had a new hiker with us, Jan, at far right in the photo above, whose hand strength was powerful enough to loosen the trap jaws. We were also lucky to have with us our regular hiker John, a retired professor at the vet school, who immediately checked over Yoda’s foot for damage. Verdict: Somehow the foot wasn’t seriously hurt, and Yoda was able to walk out without evident discomfort.
Otherwise, we had a wonderful time. Here we are looking at a huge beaver dam across a gorgeous pond — couldn’t manage to show everything in the photo, but you can see the hikers were impressed by the sight.
Official head count: 27 hikers, six dogs.
I’ve felt for quite a while that Connecticut Hill is full of great new hikes for our group — the problem’s been that we haven’t had anyone who knows the area well enough to lead us around — there are many ski trails that make for fantastic hiking but they’re very hard to follow — anyway, now we have new regular hiker Dave B — he said there are three more trails he can take us around. He definitely has the right skills — Dave said he knows which direction he’s heading in the woods 99% of the time — and he wrapped up this hike in two hours, 1 minute and 54 seconds — outstanding job of pacing. (Always knowing the right direction isn’t all that common: Sixteen of us got completely turned around and disoriented on our midweek hike Wed in Shindagin Hollow SF.)
The Carter Creek trail has a wonderful mix of everything — much of it takes you along narrow old woods roads, which are much easier walking that the usual path full of roots and snags to trip you up
Everyone agreed this is a splendid new hike, and we all want to come back.
Click here to see 10 more shots online.
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We had four other photogs shooting photos of this hike — two of them, Iris and Jack V, already have albums up at our group photo-sharing web site HikePix2 — check them out here.