Today’s hike was literally just to get the dogs out of the house for a while to burn off some energy. We’ve been babysitting Otis for the past 4 weeks and he has a lot more energy than Thor can deal with. It was also for me to get out of the house – work has not been going well, and I needed some time to just relax and enjoy the woods.

We headed out a little early, as it sounded like the weather might be better earlier in the day. I was expecting to have rain and/or snow later in the day, but fortunately, it appears the rain came in a bit later than expected.

I decided to do MP3 because I love this trail and I was hoping we could get to it. I was curious how far we would get.

On the way in, on the the 4630 road we came across 3 pretty good sized deer who were making their way across the road. Once they saw us, they scurried up the hill. It was kind of a cool way to start the day. We got to the trailhead about 9:40 – here is what it looked like when we arrived:

We quickly headed up the hill. This trail gains quite a bit of elevation pretty quickly. We soon got to the first rockslide – there was a pretty good view of up on top where you could see there was quite a bit more snow:

As we continued up, the snow got deeper in places – mostly open areas. This is a more open area where it was probably a foot deep or so:

It was right around this spot somewhere, in a rockslide that had a new bit of blowdown. The tree kind of shattered, so I was able to use my loppers and handsaw to clear the mess. Unfortunately, when I was moving one of the pieces off the tread, it rotated and a branch came back and hit me in the forehead. It hurt, and left a nice bit gash on my forehead. Earlier on the hike I hit my knee and it hurt but I didn’t realize until later than it also bled – my knee and my head are pretty sore, but they will recover.

After clearing that spot, we continued up – I did some lopping on the way up to remove some of the brush. The snow continued to get deeper, but we were able to make it up to the point where MP3 joins the Rimrock trail, which is where we ate lunch:

The snow up here was probably 18-24″, maybe a little less in places – quite a bit less than other times I’ve been up here. I thought it would have more.

We ate lunch and I could tell Otis didn’t like it too much – he wanted to sit/lay down, but it was too cold for him. So we didn’t spend too much time up there. We packed up and headed back down.

On the way back down, I did some more brushing in some of the rockslides where it was getting really tough to get thru. I tried to pull out some of the new shoots rather than just cut them, hoping it would slow them down more.

The trip back down was pretty quick, even with the additional brushing work. We made it back to the truck about 1:30 – the dogs were tired and slept the whole way home.

On the way out, I stopped at an old cut area where you get a nice view to the south and west. I took a couple of photos:
Oak Grove Butte:

Fish Creek Mountain:

It was a nice, but short day out in the woods.