Hiking in Pacheco State Park
Yesterday morning, David & I drove out to Pacheco State Park to go hiking. The last time we had been there was just over five years ago. This time, we did a much longer, more strenuous hike, but still had a great time. The route we took was the full length of the Spike's Peak trail to the South Boundary Loop, to the Canyon Loop East, to the Pig Pond trail, back to the parking area. When we first started hiking the weather was a bit crazy. While the sun was out, a huge fog bank was blowing through, partially obscuring the sun for minutes at a time. And the wind was crazy. After an hour or so most of the fog had blown through and we were treated to some amazing view out to the east, where we could see well into the Central Valley (out past the wind farm & San Louis Reservoir). We also saw a nice variety of wildflowers for much of the hike. One bit of adventure was once we got past the Spike's Peak area, the trails are poorly maintained. In fact, we couldn't even locate the proper trail at all for a while, and we started hiking through knee high grasses. I'm not sure if this park doesn't get much visitation, or if we just happened to be there too early, but we saw less than 10 people on the trails the entire day (and all of them were once we were heading back north towards the parking area). We did the full 7.5 mile hike in just over 3 hours, which is decent time.
All of the pictures are posted HERE.