Beautiful Winter Sunday Hike

The weather was beautiful today, so, after Mommy and I took my morning walk and Mommy did her chores, and scraped all the ice off our driveway, we were happy to have 1 1/2 hours left before sunset for a hike.  We went to the preserve closest to our house as is our habit when we don't have a whole lot of time.  We knew the trail conditions wouldn't be great because of the big New Year's snow and then the warm day of rain followed by a cold night and another warm day, but we were surprised that there were only three other cars at the trail parking lot because the day was so nice.  Then we saw the trailhead.

Solid ice (The building is a bathroom. I hope nobody had to use it really badly today!)

Mommy hadn't brought our ice skates so we picked our way past the hockey rink, um trail head, on the snowy sides. Once in the preserve we found that the trail was icy, but not Zamboni smooth ice like the trail head, and after about 50 feet (which we figure was the average walker's tolerance level) the trails became much better.

Much better trail conditions

Lots of good smells.

You can see that the snow was still rather deep just a little way off the trail.

We headed for the one mile loop, but because we were walking much slower than normal we ran out of time before we could do the whole loop.  So after finding a lot of coyote poop and peeing on everything I could reach and waiting while Mommy watched a red tailed hawk hunt, we turned around and headed back to the car. We were passed by two other people and a dog on our way back and when we got back to our car there were still two cars in the lot and an impatient ranger waiting for us to leave so he could lock up.

It was a nice, if slippery .86 mile, 1 1/4 hour hike on a beautiful warm winter day.