Hiking Challenge

Thank you to everyone who left such sweet and caring comments on my last post.  It meant a lot!  I'm still missing our sweet Salsa a lot but it's getting a bit easier with time.

I've always tried to respond to all my comments via email but I've been having trouble lately with most of them coming back undeliverable.  I've thought about posting replies under the comments but, if you're like me and generally just visit a post once, you'd never see any replies posted there.  So, I hope ya'll see this just in case my emails don't go through.  Hugs!

For today, I thought I'd post a few pics of the most recent hikes in my 52 hike challenge.  I've been keeping up pretty well.  The heat has arrived though and that will make it more challenging.  I think I'm behind by a week right now and we're supposed to have weather around 105+ this week and next.  We're planning to head down to San Diego one day to do a hike near the ocean where it'll be a lot cooler.  An idea I have for another hike is to leave before sunrise and get to the mountains very early to hike before the heat arrives.  We'll see how it goes.

My daughter moved home and that provides us both with a hiking partner for our challenge (she's doing  the 52 hike challenge too...in fact, she was the inspiration for me to do it).  We took her adventure cat, Sonora, on a hike with us a couple of weeks ago.  My daughter has trained her to walk on a leash.  When Sonora gets tired she rides in the backpack.  She seems to enjoy taking in the scenery from there as we hike along.  She's a unique and amazing kitty!

We had some "May Gray" days and took advantage of the coolness on this hike.  We hiked in and out through the fog and watched it blow by.  It was beautiful!

This hike is uphill to the top of a hill with amazing views where we can often see the ocean.  Some sections are quite steep as you can see in these photos.  It makes for a great workout!

We do this hike fairly often and it's interesting that there are always flowers blooming but we never know what kinds we'll see next because they're always changing.  Here are some we saw on this hike...

We had weather cool enough one weekend to do the Eagle Rock trail again.  It was so much fun to take our daughter to this beautiful area.  And, that she got to hike a part of the Pacific Crest Trail! There was a creek, huge old oak trees, and expansive views. That's me in this photo.

A couple of weeks ago, we took our daughter to hike around a beautiful mountain lake that we discovered last year.  It was so pretty that we were excited to share it with her.

It was so full this year from all the rain that the trail on one side was closed.  It was awesome to get so much rain this winter.  We needed it SO badly!  I hope we'll be as lucky next winter!

I found some wild iris' on this mountain trip!

We hiked the Santa Rosa Plateau again last week and were surprised to see large patches of purple flowers where the vernal pools had been just a short time ago.  Beautiful!

We saw bushes with brightly colored berries along our hike.  Some glowed in the sun like jewels!

There was one spot on the trail with a few flowers I'd never seen before.  They're so interesting with their freckles and fuzzy edges!

What's the weather like where you are?  Are you having to work your plans and goals around heat or rain or even tornadoes?  There sure is a lot of crazy weather these days!

Wishing you all a wonderful week!