Carley

Hiking Club Trail #30

HIKE DETAILS
Date: May 4, 2019
Location: Altura, MN
Length: 1.8 Miles
Difficulty: Easy to Moderate
Cumulative Hiking Club Miles: 84.4 of 197

2nd hike of the year and I am starting to be asked by more people if they can join us in our hikes - I love hearing that people enjoy our adventures and I love even more that they want to come along. So today we brought along my co-worker and friend Shannon. I let her choose the park and we decided to head down to Carley and ease her into this hiking thing with a short trail - that we assumed would be easy...

This park was beautiful but it wasn't necessarily easy. We also assumed because this park is small that it would be fairly empty even on one of the first 70+ degree days of the year... we were wrong we walked right into their Bluebell festival - which would have been great minus brining the dog who is anxious around lots of people. Good news most of the people stayed at the Park by the parking lot and the trails were almost completely empty. 

Flowers a finally blooming... bluebells everywhere! And this park has a crystal clear almost teal in color river running through it, almost reminded me of the glacier rivers in the Canadian Rockies. 

This path was mostly easy except for the river crossings. You must cross the river 3 times - the first crossing has no bridge of any kind so you just end up walking through it, knee deep with a rocky bottom. The 2nd crossing comes right after the first this one is one of those sketchy concrete step crossings but it was fairly level and easy. The 3rd which is right a the end of the Hiking Club Trail was by far the worst one - the same sketchy concrete block path as the 2nd except this one is not level, half of it is under raging water, it's slippery and at the end there is a very unstable board you have to walk on to get to a mud hill you have to climb to get out. Now we have to get 3 people and 2 dogs across this and one of the people is legally blind... this was quite the adventure but with patience and a lot of team work we made it across all 3 with no one falling into the river. WIN!

Because of the difficulty of the river crossings we were in this park a lot longer than expected for a 1.8 mile trail. And even though we were all a bit tired we headed over to Frontenac to do a little more hiking because it was such a beautiful day...

Lesson learned: Don't underestimate the small parks!!!