More hiking, work & lack of sleep

Last weekend was much better weather-wise than the one before. This time of year you never know when that snow is going to come that might make mountain trails icy for months. So with temperatures around 70° last Monday, Sherrie and I decided to do some hiking and caching. We started off on a trail we'd never been on and found a couple caches. After the second cache, the trail pretty much ended in a couple of primitive campsites. We could either hike back out the way we came in and then hike up another trail, or just head up from where we were toward the ridge where the next cache was. Being our usual adventurous (foolish) selves we chose the latter.

This view was a nice bonus on our "shortcut".
This mountain chickadee was also along the way.

About 900 vertical feet later, with our leg muscles burning we reached the trail on the ridge. We had been on this trail before and from here it was a pretty easy stroll to the next cache. There were more great views from here, St. Patty's Overlook.
The vertical rock formation in this picture is called a hoodoo. The haziness in the air was smoke from the California wildfires. It actually smelled smoky that day. What was bad air for us was good news for California, since it meant that the winds were now blowing west to east.
Here's a picture of me at St. Patty's overlook.

From this cache we headed down the mountain on a different trail.

Friday night, I worked the James Taylor concert at my 2nd job at the World Arena. It was a great concert, but it didn't end until 10:20 and we were short-handed. It was 2:15am by the time I got off of work, and I had to work at 8:00am Saturday at the zoo. Needless to say, Saturday was a long day on 3 hours of sleep. I took advantage of the extra hour of sleep last night, went to bed at 9 and got 10 hours of sleep, even though I had to be at church at 7:30.