Slate Canyon

Outing 5 of the IUHC: Jeffry, Walter, Scott and mike showed up for the Slate Canyon hike. The grade was a little steeper than I expected but much of the trail was shaded by trees which made for a very pleasant morning. Walter, Jeffry and I left the parking lot at about 7:10 not knowing that Scott parked down on the paved road and was walking up. Luckily we stopped a mile up the trail to take photos and Jeffry placed a small sized geocache. Scott came walking up to join the group. The four of us continued on with Walter and Scott falling back busy talking neighborhood gossip.

The trail was a well maintained jeep trail/forest service road. It appears to be used to service a buried water pipeline feed by springs in the canyon. We encountered a bit of wildlife on this trip. We noticed a nice size lizard on the trail and then Jeffry spotted a decent sized snake on the trail that I walk right by. We got some photos of both, see the flickr link at the bottom. On the way down we encountered a large number of colorful butterflies (maybe colorful moths) gather and fanning their wings near a very small trickle of water crossing the road. I had remarked earlier that I had not gotten any good photos of butterflies on my hikes this year. We spent quite a bit of time taking photos since the butterflies were allowing us to get close.

There was a fork in the road that we passed by a few miles up and Jeffry figured out we should have gone the other way a few minutes later. We backtracked the small distance and got on what we thought was the correct road. It turned out that the road ended before we made it to Knight Spring. We tried hard to find the trail including a valiant effort by Scott bushwhacking up the side of the canyon. We decided that previous "wrong turn" might lead us to the correct trail. We met another hiker looking for the same trail as we headed back to the Y in the road. It ends up we didn't find the originally planned trail or any trail to Knight Spring. We made lemonade with the one lemon we found and decided to change the goal to hike to the pass at the northeastern corner of the canyon. Walter's had enough and decided to head down.

Jeffry, Scott and I started up the one hiker wide trail to the pass. There was lots of lush vegetation encroaching on the trail that we plodded though. Luckily it was dry so we didn't get wet. There were a lot of bugs and the bed of the trail had a peculiar rut that looked to me like a motorcycle tire. It made the walk like a long sobriety test. We reach the pass at about 10:30am. We sat down and rested and each of us ate our snacks or lunch.

The decent was uneventful except for the butterfly/moth photo session. We reached the trailhead parking lot at about half past noon. I gave Scott a ride to his car. My GPS track says the whole hike was about 9.4 miles, a little longer than planned but enjoyable non the less.

Photos GPS Tracks: kml gpx