The Toadstools......

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8:21 am - Wednesday - November 1st - Lone Rock - 51º F, humidity 56%, wind 8 mph out of the west.....forecast high for today is 74º F in paradise.....clear blue skies.  Woke up this morning to a 90% state of charge on our house batteries!

We were up a little later than normal Tuesday, but that's okay, right?  We're retired....we have no schedule.....at least for another week (we begin working our new job November 7th).  We have kept ourselves on Utah, or Mountain Time even though we are less than 1 mile from the Arizona border.  That means sunrise is not until after 8 am, which, in turn, means we usually don't get out of bed until after 8 am.  So, you might be wondering why we don't just switch out clocks over to Arizona time and get it over with.  Well, we have been living under Mountain time since mid June and we just hate having to adjust our internal clocks any sooner than we must.  We will be moving the Newell into Page, AZ on Wednesday, and driving the VW to SoCal on Thursday for the wedding I wrote about yesterday, so until then we are still on Mountain time baby!

Driving south on US-89 a week ago we passed a turnout called the 'Toadstools Trailhead'....I remarked to TLE that we should drive back there later in our Lone Rock stay and do the hike and see what the 'Toadstools' were all about.  Well, Tuesday became that day.  The trailhead is about 17 miles north of Lone Rock, and we arrived there in less than 20 minutes.

The Toadstools Trailhead is part of the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument.  According the trailhead sign the round trip hike to the Toadstools is 1.6 miles.....essentially an 'out and back' hike.  

Within minutes of entering the trail you notice the stratification in the surrounding hills....rarely do we see stratification like this......all the layers are pretty much parallel to the surrounding terrain.....usually we see it on the diagonal......

.....basically, after the first 100 yards the trail mostly seems to follow a dry wash as it twists and turns through the canyon gradually gaining altitude.....our total elevation gain was about 150'.  The other thing we noticed almost immediately is it was very hard to follow the trail.  It appears that people just walk wherever they wish making it very difficult to figure out which trail was 'THE' trail.  All that being said, no matter which trail you followed you would end up at the same place eventually.  

Within 20 minute we arrived at the 'Toadstools'........

.....yup, they do look sort of like 'toadstools'.   Here's my take on this hike.....if we hadn't just spent 3 days hiking in Bryce Canyon I think we would have appreciated this hike more, but frankly, Bryce Canyon is chock full of 'hoodoo' features just like these.  Nonetheless, it was an enjoyable hike, and the weather was perfect.  My Strava program showed we hiked just over 1.7 miles round trip.....no doubt we were off 'THE' trail on a few occasions....:-)

We arrived back at the coach around 1:30 where we both sat down to do some more reading.  Around 4 pm we decided to take our 'out and back' hike out to US-89, but limited it to just 3.3 miles since we had already hiked 1.7 miles earlier.  We tried to time our hike to arrive back at the coach in time for our 'happy hour' fire, but by the time we returned the wind had picked up nixing that idea.

After watching Game 5 of the World Series until almost midnight Sunday night I decided to not watch game 6, but keep track of the game on my smart phone.  As it turned out the Dodgers prevailed 3-1 and have sent this years 'Series' to game 7 Wednesday night.  It was much less stressful not watching game 6, but I am sure I will be tuned in Wednesday night for game 7....winner take all!

We watched more 'Mad Men' episodes until about 11 pm before heading to bed.....Wednesday is moving day!

Thanks for stopping by!

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