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First Hikes 2020

2020 has sure been a strange year. With the COVID-19 pandemic we have not been doing our usual traveling. No trips to exotic places. No wargame conventions. Not even our usual trips to Utah canyon country in the spring. Although Sandy and I and Abby have been taking lots of daily walks in the park in out neighborhood, I haven't even gotten out to do any real hikes locally. To add to the restictions imposed by the pandemic, it has been a cool wet spring. I decided that since it was mid-June and the weather finally looked good for a solid week, it was time to get out into the hills for some serious hiking.

I could have gone to Hulls Gulch or Bogus Basin but I wanted to go somewhere that would be less crowded for my first hike. That way I could let Abby run free rather than worry about a leash. I spent some time studying the foothills in Google maps and found a trail that was close to Boise but didn't seem to be well known - Five Mile Gulch. At least it wasn't well known to me. I had never heard of it.

The trailhead was on Shaw Mountain Road a short distance past Rocky Canyon, a place where my friends and I would go rock climbing many years ago. In fact it's the only place I ever got hurt while climbing. I was top roped and reaching over a bulge when my feet slipped. With my arms stretched way over my head, my chest hit the rock pretty hard and I cracked a rib. Nothing serious but I was sore for a month. But I had never gone further down the road and didn't even know there was a trailhead nearby. So even though this was close to home I would be exploring.

Google maps said it would be a forty minute drive from my house to the trailhead and that's exactly how long it took. Abby was very excited. As soon as she got a sniff of my backpack in the car she knew that we were going hiking. When we parked at the trailhead there was only one other car there so it looked like we had the trail pretty much to ourselves. As soon as I opened the door Abby flew out of the car and was ready to go.

We hadn't even gone fifty feet from the parking lot before we had to cross Five Mile Creek. There was quite a bit of water in it for a small, seasonal stream. Like I said before, it had been a cool, wet spring. There was no bridge - a bad sign just starting out. On the right there were some branches lying across the water making a very small bridge. Not logs, branches. It didn't look like a good choice for an old hiker. My balance isn't what it used to be and I didn't want wet feet before I even got started. I might have been able to do it if I had brought my hiking poles but they were sitting in the garage. On the left there was one rock near the middle of the creek. It was barely clear of the water so it was very wet and looked really slippery. I took a chance though and a long stretch to the rock and then a longer jump to the other side got me across. Reversing it would be tougher but I figured I didn't have to worry about that for a couple of hours.

The trail followed the bottom of Five Mile Gulch for the first hour. We were never far from the creek and crossed it several times. Fortunately after the first crossing, all the rest had bridges. I was grateful even if Abby never bothered to use them. It was a bright sunny day with a few scattered cumulus clouds and the temperature was in the mid-sixties - perfect hiking weather as far as I was concerned. Abby must have thought it was a bit warm though because every time we crossed the creek she would stop and lie down in the water. A lab just can't stay dry.

I was surprised at how many wildflowers there were. I'm used to seeing arrowleaf balsamroot all over the foothills in April but it's usually gone within a month. I thought you would need to go much higher to find flowers in early June. Maybe the flowers were blooming late because this spring had been cool and wet. Maybe I just don't hike in the foothills much this time of year when it usually starts to get hot. Either way, it was quite pleasant to see all the flowers. There were sunflowers, primroses, lillies and lots of others that I have no idea what they were. I'm not good at identifying flowers other than very common ones. I don't worry about that too much though. I always remember the lesson of the story that the great physicist Richard Feynman told - that names don't constitute knowledge. They were still pretty to see.

According to the map there was a whole network of trails in the area accessed from several trailheads. My plan was simple though - hike up Five Mile Gulch for about an hour and then turn around and head back. But after following the creek for a while the trail started to climb up a side valley to the northwest. Eventually it made an ascending traverse up the ridge that formed the west side of Five Mile Gulch. When it was time to turn around I could see that we were getting close to turning a corner on the ridge where it turned into another side valley. I'm always anxious to see around the corner or over the hill so I decided to keep going a little farther.

We reached the corner right at noon. From this point I could see all the way down Five Mile Gulch and just barely over the lower foothills to the Treasure Valley and Boise. I could also see a trail traversing on the other side of our new valley and heading back down towards the road. I checked my map and sure enough, we could do a loop. It was a little longer than the way that we had come but it was up high and promised nice views the whole way.

After rounding the corner we continued to traverse into the side valley. The floor of the valley rose rapidly to meet us and eventually we reached a wooded area where we crossed a creek. Then came another long traverse, a short climb over a saddle to cross over into another valley, and from then on it was all down hill. That always used to be good news because it meant the rest of the hike was easy. But in the past year and a half I have started having trouble with my knees, so down hill is not my favorite hiking anymore. One of my goals for this first real hike of the season was to give my knees a test and see how they did. Good news was that they worked fine and I did the loop with no problem. Bad news was that I definitely felt it, at least in one knee, and had to be very careful.

Eventually we came out on the road at another trailhead, fortunately only five hundred feet from the one where we had parked. In a few minutes we were back at the car. According to the GPS in my phone, we had hiked six miles with a thousand feet of elevation gain in two hours and forty minutes. Not bad. When I got home I looked it up and learned that we had done a loop on the Five Mile Gulch, Watchman and Three Bears trails. It was a nice hike with varied scenery on a beautiful day. We had the hills to ourselves most of the time too. We had only seen six mountain bikers and two runners in almost three hours. A good find for a trail so close to home and a good start to the hiking season, even if it was a little late.

In fact it was such a good start that I decided to go again the next day. Instead of exploring this time Abby and I did an old familiar hike. We drove up to Bogus Basin and parked at the upper lodge. We hiked up to the top of Shafer Butte, a walk we have done many times before - even once at night.

Our hike the day before hadn't been that long but I was glad that I was ready to go again. Abby was too. She started to make a fuss about getting out of the car as soon as we got close to the lodge. We were a lot higher than the day before so even though it was a warmer day it was cooler where we were. We took the easiest way up, following the service road up the north side. There were quite a few patches of snow on the north side and Abby had to play in every one of them. She would lay in the snow, slide along, eat the snow. She was having a blast.

Even though Bogus is quite popular in the summer we had the mountain mostly to ourselves. We saw three people, with three dogs, just as we left the lodge. Abby was too interested in sniffing all the animals in the brush to pay any attention to the dogs. We didn't see anyone else till we reached the top where there was a couple with two young children who had come up a different way. They kept to themselves, climbing up on the lookout tower. Since I have been up there many times I didn't stay long to admire the view. To be honest, with all the stuff they have built on the top of the mountain I don't consider it a very nice place to hang out.

The hike up and down is quite nice though. I decided to do another loop today and went down via the Face trail. The long traverse across the south face of the mountain is my favorite section of trail at Bogus Basin. Along the way Abby jumped off the trail and went flying down the slope after some animal that she had seen or heard or smelled. I yelled and she pulled up just short of a steep rocky dropoff. She was sensible and gave up the chase and came back to the trail.

The steep downhill part came after the face traverse. The good news was that I felt better going down than I had the day before. When we got back to the car my GPS said we had hiked four miles with 885 feet of elevation gain in two hours. Not a big hike but it was good to get out in the hills two days in a row. It was a good start and I'm looking forward to doing lots more hiking this summer and fall.