Arethusa Falls

After the day of hiking blunders I made the day before, I awoke the next day resolved to hike to Arethusa Falls. This day, however, was overcast, so I hung close to campsite in the morning, trying to decipher the clouds.  There was to be some altitude gain on this hike and I didn't want to be caught in a heavy rainstorm or lightening at the top of some mountain. I waited until nine o’clock. and given the lack of wind and the fact the clouds weren't getting any darker, I decided to go for it. 

We walked the two lane highway to the trailhead and found ourselves going up a steep, rocky incline from the get-go. I get cocky when a trail that isn't high in the Rockies. Sure, this goes up a few thousand feet feet in a short span of distance, but its not at 10,000 feet, is it? Every time, such steep hikes at low elevations consistently kick my butt. 

You'd think I'd learn some humility. 

This trail was no different. we went up and up and more up. No zig-zags. No hairpin turns. Just up. Over boulders and trees and huge roots. Up and up and more up.  At the trailhead, the sign said the hike was "moderate" and one should plan on one hour to get up to the falls and one hour down. I soon adjusted this for me and my conditioning to anticipate closer to an hour and a half up and two hours down.

After going up for over an hour, Zoey and I finally encountered a couple on their way down. When I asked if we were close to the falls, and saw the pity that filled their faces, I knew that we were not. The first part of the trail was over roots and boulders. The second part of the trail was over recently positioned trail logs. Huge trail logs. Some hit me above the knee, and I climbed over these on my hands and knees. Three trail logs were too big even for Zoey. She gave a mighty effort to get up and over them, but I ended up having to go back down over the log and assist her arthritic hips up and over.

I don't want to tell the other people who hike this trail that Arethusa Falls was a bit of a disappointment. But, they were. True. They are the tallest falls in the state. But I was hoping to get much closer to them than the trail allowed.  

There was such a great distance between the top of the trail and the falls, that there wasn't any thunderous sound of water or any cool mist to cool my overheated body. It was pretty, but not as dramatic as hoped. The trail reminded me a bit of the Hanging Lake trail outside of Glenwood Springs, Colorado. But the end result was nothing close to the endorphin high one feels when finally reaching Hanging Lake and the waterfalls that tumble into it.  

Then we had the dreaded downhill trek. Dreaded, because my right knee doesn't support me when stepping down steep steps, so every step down had to be taken with my left knee absorbing my body weight.  Oh how I wished I had some climbing sticks! Zoey does better if she goes first down and I let her take the lead again which she did with gusto until she almost went tumbling down the side of the hill into a steep ravine. She didn't didn't recognize the soft shoulder of the right side of the trail and lost her footing and fell off the trail with only me holding her leash. Between her furtive scrambling with her hind legs, and the adrenaline pumping through my body willing my hands to not let go of her leash, she somehow managed to regain her footing and get back up on the trail. She never approached the right side of the trail the rest of the way down.

In the end, the trail up took us two hours, to reach the top and took us three hours to get down. My legs were like jelly when we finally reached the bottom of the trail.  Zoey and I savored our last bit of water before hobbling along the road back to our campsite.  As though the gods were holding their collective breaths while we hiked, as soon as we reached out campsite, the clouds opened up and it began to rain. It rained steadily all night long.