2/3/2018 – Calico Road and Fish Creek

Date of Hike: 2/3/2018
Location of Hike: Down Calico road and Back Fish Creek
Weather during Hike: Misty to Sunny
Hiking Buddies: Zack and Thor
Start Time: 9:45 AM  End Time: 3:00 PM
Hike Distance: 4.8 miles  
Pictures: Link
Today’s hike was a “Get out in the woods” hike. I’d been working on the kitchen remodel and hadn’t hiked for several weekends, and I really wanted to get out. Thor needed some exercise too – especially since Jet was coming over for the Super Bowl the next day. I wanted to expend some of his pent up energy. I also took the opportunity to test out a theory we had – how much farther the dogs go than we do. I put my old GPS in Thor’s pack and then compared the raw data from the GPS to the raw data on my phone. I used the raw data since I figured a bunch of Thor’s running around would get filtered out by the “fix” program I use (which turned out to be true). The track from my Phone showed we hiked 5.11 miles – the GPS showed Thor hiked 9.17 miles! So even though Thor was by himself (no other dog), he still hiked close to twice as far as we did! It will be interesting to repeat the experiment when Ollie comes along – I will be it wills MORE than twice as far!

Zack joined us on this hike and he wanted to do some clearing up the old Calico road – the plan was to try and clear that and then head down to Fish Creek and clear that road on the way back – we didn’t have enough time to get the whole Calico road cleared, but we got close. We didn’t do much on Fish Creek since we ran out of time. I didn’t take too many photos since it was kind of a short day, but we did cut quite a few logs off the old road. I didn’t count, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it were 40 or 50 logs. We used my saw, but Zack did all the cutting since I wasn’t sure how Thor would respond to the the noise of the chainsaw. Amazingly enough, it didn’t seem to bother him. I did a bunch of lopping and clearing of the cut logs.

We started down the old Calico road, and short came to a huge messy blowdown. We cleared that, and then crossed Rimrock creek. After that crossing, I normally head down to Fish Creek (there is an old quad trail down), but today we continued up the Calico road. We cleared logs as we went, and while clearing one log, Zack saw this Pacific Giant Salamander- I didn’t get a good picture of him – once we saw him, he quickly scampered back under some brush – I was trying to get my boot in the photo for scale, but was too slow. His body was probably 6-8″ long and his tail was at least that long, if not longer:

We continued down Calico road to a point where the 120 spur met it. We had lunch there and the sun came out for a few minutes. After a quick lunch, we continued south on the 120 spur and quickly came to First Creek – this is what it looks like a little higher up the canyon wall (a little smaller than down by fish creek):

We continued down the spur road and a litlte farther Zack told me about this cool little waterfall below the road:

While he continued to cut logs off the road, Thor and I went down to check it out. A little farther down the road, we encountered this very large tree that had come down – one we did not cut:

We continued to the end of the 120 spur and then headed cross country down to the old road 54. We came in just north of Second creek. Once we hit the old road 54, we quickened our pace since we were running a bit late. We didn’t really do any cutting or lopping on the way back except for a couple of small trees. We made it back to the truck a little after 3.

A great day out in the woods in February. Nothing earth shaking happened, but cutting out a bunch of logs felt good and the weather really couldn’t have been better.