BUMMED
After work on Friday I took my son Jadon up the hill to go on an evening hike. It is rare he wants to go with me. I always ask him, and he almost always says no. I strongly suspect it is because I usually get up at bloody awful hours of the morning to go hiking. This time I would be going in the evening, and he said yes. Coincidence? Probably not.
Traffic was awful but we arrived at Squaw Valley Resort and started the hike in good time, however I underestimated just how long this hike would take, and I also grossly misjudged the off-trail section we would be doing. Off-trail section? There is no off-trail section, it is a fine, completely all on-trail hike up to Shirley Lake. Right? You forget who you are dealing with here. Well it was mostly on-trail, and although there are many indistinct parts, it is mostly marked and easy enough to follow, but it is still a tough uphill climb to the lake. There is a small waterfall along the trail that everybody stops and takes pictures of. I knew about this one of course. There is also a second small waterfall above it that I did not know about. It is difficult to get down to it and photograph it, and that is probably why I had not seen photos of it. Nonetheless I was able to get down to it without too much difficulty, but Jadon elected to stay up on the trail, safe and sound. Good choice. Nonetheless, I managed to avoid falling off the scary rock overlook.
Besides these two falls, there are two other bigger waterfalls in the area and this was my major reason to come on this hike, and this is why I was so bummed. The first one is off-trail. It looked so easy on Google Earth, but it turned out to be very brushy, much too brushy, with a difficult creek crossing as well. We tried, and maybe if I was by myself I would have tried to smash through that brush and cross the creek, but it was just really difficult. Because of all the off-trail shenanigans, it was 7PM by the time we got up to Shirley Lake. We had to go back down. As it is, we barely made it back to the car before dark, there is no way we could have continued to the second big waterfall. So yes, I got to see a couple small waterfalls I had not seen before, and Jadon and I had a fun time hiking together, but I was definitely bummed that I could not get to either of the big waterfalls. I will certainly be back again someday to attempt to smash through that brush.