This was my birthday hike – in figuring out where I wanted to go, a trip report on the trailadvocate.org site intrigued me. It was a report about someone finding a trail I stumbled across reference to in some old hiking books/maps. It was referred to as the Three Lynx Trail (maybe because it went all the way down to Three Lynx at some point?). Anyway, he found it and I thought it might be fun to follow his findings. I always love to find/follow abandoned trails. While I’m not as good at finding them as many others, the more I look, the better I become. I don’t think I’ll ever be as good as some of the seasoned veterans I know.

Anyway, the route was intended to be going up the Shellrock Lake trail to the “shortcut” trail (another old abandoned trail) over to the Grouse Point trail and then head up this trail to the junction with this abandoned trail. I started out on the “shortcut” trail which has blazes all over the place:

Made it up the shortcut trail, and then to Cache Meadow – I never get tired of looking at it:

Heading past the meadows and up Grouse Point, we came to the helispot overlook above Serene Lake – It is a beautiful spot with a great view of Serene Lake and Indian Ridge:

Proceeding a little further, we came to the junction with the Three Lynx Way trail – the tread is recognizable for much of the trail:

We continued southeast on this tread until we got to a clearcut, where the trail essentially disappears. We headed around the edge of the cut, looking for where another old abandoned trail intersected it. Unfortunately, we did not find any evidence of this other trail. We did, however pick up the trail on the southeast corner of the clearcut, and followed it out to the 4635 road. We headed across the road to see if we could find any evidence of the trail on the west side of the road, but the only thing we found was this (whichI really don’t think was tread):

While exploring this area, I found this cute little tiny frog hopping about – he was hard to get a photo of:

After searching for a while and finding nothing, we headed back up to the road to go back to the Cache Meadow trailhead. We then followed the Cache Meadow trail to the meadows:

And then back to the shortcut trail and down the Shellrock Lake trail back to the truck.

Although I didn’t find the continuation of the trail, it was neat to hike a short section of a historical trail. On the way out, I took a picture of this unusual thing:

I’m guessing this is some sort of water “cache” for fighting fires. It kind of looks like a small swimming pool. It was on the 5380 road on the way to the Shellrock Lake trailhead.

This was a wonderful way to spend the beginning of my birthday! Weather was just about perfect for hiking – not too hot and not too sunny.