Kiara Tackles The Trails #17 - Wild Cherry and Dogwood

Ki and I decided to take Dad's advice to get to working on our uphill hikes and to not forget to work just as hard on our downhills, so we headed out for a lunchbreak hike. I figured we would just go to Leif Erickson as it is all uphill and then all downill (like a real mountain :-). Once there, though, I realized it is way too gradual to be of much use in training for this, so we decided to take some side trails that we've never ventured onto before. After a quick potty break with Ki and I BOTH in the port-a-potty (haha - that was fun!), we made our way up

We kept a fantastic pace and I was out of breath the whole time (yikes!).

We made it to up to where it turned into the Dogwood trail where we saw this very rustic fence someone built around a restoration area

and kept going until it ended shorty thereafter. I was surprised by how short Dogwood was (I mean so short it wouldn't really be considered a trail that should deserve it's own name), but when we intersected with Wildwood, we headed back down the way we came up. Other than a little knee injury (I was running at full speed and Ki decided to put on the brakes to play with a chipmunk or something - ouch!), it was pretty uneventful...
Until we came around a corner to find myself face to face with 3 guys (runners) "mid-stream"...and there were no streams around ;-)
Surprise! Surprise! Sorry boys.

We made it down to Leif and headed up the path. Right before we got to the 1 mile marker, we came across a Dogwood Trail marker, so I figured this must be the other end that we couldn't find before, so my curiosity got me and we decided to head back up this trail as it looked to be better than Leif for steepness. About a 100 feet in we came across a nice pile of human waste (right in the smack dab middle of the trail...c'mon on now, really? You couldn't scoot your butt over to the bushes?) and the remnants of several pages of Treasure Island. You never know when that book you packed in might come in handy...who needs the title page anyways, right?
No picture of THAT for you, though!

But...I did find some pretty flowers

And Ki found something under the ground that smelled really good

After I filled the hole back in so no one comes along and sprains an ankle, we kept forging ahead.

So...Where did we end up? Eventually back at this spot...

That end of the trail just wasn't marked. I had noticed this side trail previously, but since it wasn't marked, I figured it was nothing. We headed back down to Leif for a while and then back out to the car for a total of about 1 hour and 40 minutes of hiking. Not bad for a lunch break.