Cold Creek

Do you ever have days that are perfect? I had one of Monday. Lots of things made it perfect, including the time we spent Monday afternoon and early evening hiking at Cold Creek. It is beautiful there. If you plan on going, the turnoff is about halfway between Mt. Charleston and Indian Springs.

 

On our way up to the trail, we were lucky enough to see lots of wild horses just off the main road.

 

We hiked the Bonanza Trail, which is 8 miles round-trip. If you look up the trail on-line, you will notice it says it is a STRENUOUS hike. And it was!

Uphill the entire way.

I was a bit worried about Sadie, Sade, but she is full of surprises, and hiked more than she has ever hiked before. Often running way ahead of us:

But sadly, on one of her sprints ahead she tripped over a tree branch and skinned her hands and knees:

But she recovered fairly quickly, and soon was back to her happy picture posing self:

She asked me to take the next couple of pictures of her:

With a pinecone.

With a tree that she said was just her size:

And one on top of a tree stump:

She also spent a lot of time hiding behind trees and jumping out to "scare" each one of us. She succeeded every time. Or at least we pretended she did:

We hiked. And we hiked. And we hiked. For 2 hours. Uphill. We were determined to make it to the top. But alas, the sun was setting, so we had to skedaddle down the mountain. I was pretty impressed with Megan and Jackson. This is the longest hike we have been on, and they did great. Quite better than me. My endurance still needs improvement.

Random pics:

Eating Indian Paintbrush:

While on the mountain there was a bit of excitement. While hiking up we had been asked to look out for a 69 year old man who hiked up that morning, but hadn't made it back yet. We never did see him, but on our way down the mountain we heard and saw a helicopter circling overhead:

As we hiked down farther, we could also hear what sounded like a search party getting ready to hike up. But by the time we arrived, there was no one there. We saw a police officer as we were leaving and he told us they had finally found the man, who had decided to hike all the way to Pahrump, but neglected to tell anyone! As I said, it was a bit exciting. However, Eric pointed out that if the outcome would have been different, I probably wouldn't have found it exciting, but rather tragic.