Had my first purposeful alternate route to the trail today! There have been a couple times so far where I’ve lost the trail and bushwhacked to get back, but hadn’t abandoned the trail on purpose yet.
Technically I did that twice actually. One I knew was coming, a four mile section that for like 20 years had been closed off and only technically opened this year. It’s a habitat for an endangered frog and the trail hasn’t been touched in 20 years so that was an easy choice to take a road walk and a side trail back to the pct.
I did call an audible, however, a little before I hit that. In short, I decided to road walk a little further to avoid a steep uphill and downhill. In what became an 18 mile day, missing that extra 2000 vertical feet change over four miles was huge.
What I wasn’t expecting, however, was the tunnel.
When looking at the pretty zoomed out picture of the terrain, there was a part where there wasn’t a clear road. But I had assumed that was from overgrowth or something, not a tunnel. I was a little nervous about it (what if a car came flying through?!) and alllllmost backtracked to the pct tread but decided to press on.
Oh and I summited Mt. Baden Powell, the fourth tallest peak in the range – that was pretty cool.
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