Hello Hikers!
Thursday March 3
Deputron Road, Danby — road walk
Our first time on this deserted country road. This was the scene just a few minutes after we left the cars. I wonder how many hikers would be immediately turned off by the puddling, and wish they hadn’t come out. I myself enjoy this type of messy going as long as it doesn’t last too long.
After a little while more, the scenery turned extremely beautiful. I started the walk with really no expectations of what we’d see; even so, I was surprised by the extreme deep-woods look of the road. This stretch reminded ne of the rim trail along Enfield Creek in Treman SP. Tiger and I are much too cautious to ever go exploring in the car on a road this rough, even though we have a 4WD — but one of our hikers actually drove the whole length before the hike.
We decided to do a road walk to accommodate our super-regular midweek hiker Good Dennis, who broke his collarbone in a skiing accident the week before. He normally uses two hiking sticks to deal with the bumpiness of our trails — but as you can see here, his right arm is now inside his jacket and his right sleeve is hanging down empty, so we decided to do a more or less smooth surface. It worked out well.
Official head count: 14 hikers, three dogs
We had a very strong sex-ratio imbalance this week, 10 ladies to four guys — all our ladies are extremely cute and I thought it was fun to have so many around
I’d never heard of this walk until earlier in the week — I put out a call to some of our regulars to come up with a really good new road walk — Hank (third from right) is a big bicycle rider and he discovered Deputron while riding — then it turned out that two of the ladies on the walk (who I didn’t poll) are very familiar with it too.
Impromptu birthday celebration when we got back to the cars — gorgeous morning, delightful time all around
More photos online:
Bonus: Annie’s photos of Marsh Road, just up the road from Deputron
Saturday March 5
Bock-Harvey Forest Preserve and Rieman Woods, Enfield
Lovely cool grey morning and a great walk if you like subtle shades of brown everywhere, which I very much do
If the “Bock” in Bock-Harvey sounds familiar, yes, it’s our regular hiker Dave B, in the background here with Joanna — they’ve been wintering over in NC but they were back home for a visit and it was fun to see them. Both are still recuperating from major surgeries — Joanna has a new knee and Dave had a big ankle repair done.
I’m color blind so I asked Tiger to tell me whether we’d seen any other colors besides brown — no, she said, and then she pointed out there are almost no evergreens anywhere along this walk except a very few planted as decoration around the few scattered houses.
I love scenery of nothing but muted browns and tans myself and we don’t have many hikes that are such a consistent mix of brown fields and brown woods
Official head count: 19 hikers, five dogs
Could a one-armed person do this walk comfortably? Good Dennis managed fine with his right arm strapped to his chest. There are two very nasty steep ditches he neeed help with, but so did some other hikers, including me.
More photos online:
Sunday March 6
Abbott Loop, north leg from Michigan Hollow Road to The Pinnacles look-out, Danby SF
I hope everyone’s gotten the message that the photos I embed in these hike reports are clickable again. I like classic group line-up shots in theory — but in practice they’re often wretched, faces too small, so badly focused you can hardly recognize people — I promise, at least you can enlarge any group shots I run here — just click once, and then click again or twiddle the wheel on your mouse — and they’ll always be in enough focus that they’re not blurry — though they may not be super-crisp.
I mentioned recently that I want to make up a list of our ten toughest hikes — I suspect this one will be in the final 10 — the trail’s really quite steep in several spots, and the uphills just keep coming
The first group of us just managed to make it to the look-out in 60 minutes — it took a few minutes more for the somewhat slower people to arrive — and a number of hikers failed to make it at all in time for the group shot — it’s always fun when you get to the top of the hill, it has a nice festive feeling to it.
Many scenic woodland spots along the way — a bit dark for taking photos but delightfully atmospheric
**
Official head count: 28 hikers, six dogs
More photos by me online here, including another version of the look-out line-up shot where the faces are larger