Today’s hike is called the Rim Trail vía Olmstead loop. We have 10 of us in the group. The valley has been socked in with fog for about three weeks. It’s low hanging and very moist and miserably cold. I was hoping to get above the fog and do some sunshine. Today was successful in being above the fog, but we do have a lot of cloud cover, which I do not expect to burn off today
Right from the trailhead we had beautiful open green fields. I think we’ll see a lot of a green color today with the season that we are in.
I find this large oak tree to be pretty interesting
We take a couple of small creek crossings, pass another junction and then continue along the creek trail. Fitting to its name is a small creek just off to the side of the trail. There are occasional clumps of rocks that have a very pretty green moss growing on them.
The hillside opens up with a number of large sporadic oak trees. Unfortunately, we have a little bit of fog setting in.
As we traverse up and down along the hillside, we are encountering a number of different mushroom species. Their variety always amazes me.
Just off the trail I spied a dead 6 foot or so stump that was covered in a fungi. I stamped it down to it and got a good picture of the hairy curtain crust.
Just after returning to the Trail came by this clump of Oakes covered in a beautiful mossM
We are back to more mushrooms
Alongside the trail, a number of California Polypody fern grow adding a beautiful color and shape contrast to the other foliage
We pop off trail in a circle of a logs for some snack time. After a short rest, we continued on.
After a little more trail we come to a ranch road, soon we get to an area of our trail that is flooded out. We turn around and take an alternate route through more ranch roads and eventually come to another section of flooded Trail. This one however, has a bridge across it just a little bit upstream.
We reconnect to the main trail and return to the parking lot with a total of about 8.5 miles for today.
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