Like a river that don't know where it's flowin'...

...we took a wrong turn and we just kept goin'.

Jerry and I took a hike through Daley Ranch in north Escondido. It contains a number of natural vegetation communities including lush oak woodlands, coastal sage scrub and chaparral, grasslands, and riparian areas (as the linked page tells us).


It's got some views of distant hills and freeways. But mostly it's got hiking through the chaparral.


They tell us that there are over 20 miles of trails. Jerry and I walked along a lot more of the trails than we had planned.


Jerry remembered to tell me to take my hand-held GPS device. That was a good thing. I had intended simply to record our walk and maybe post it here. But it turned out to be much more useful.

We made a wrong turn.

And we kept on going.

Here's the map of our walk.

At the top, is a track from where we started (the top left end) to a loop that has another little loop on it. We continued clockwise from the little loop. We meant to continue where the track turns to the northwest.

But first we mad a little detour to the south.

We weren't familiar with the trails so we didn't know that we were seeing completely new scenery instead of going back the way we came. Finally I had Jerry get the GPS out of the backpack where it had been recording our journey. Sure enough, it showed that we were way off track.

So we followed its track back to our missed turn. Three miles back. The GPS saved us from my becoming a very grumpy boy.

I had taken a picture of a sign at that junction the first time we passed it.

I should have paid attention to the trail marker next to it.

On our side trip we saw a rock that looks like a reclining man.

And some nicely zhooshed socks.

Here's a picture of Burnt Mountain. It gives you a feel for the scenery we saw. All 11 miles of it.

It was a nice hike, just a bit longer than we had planned on. We need to see the south end of the ranch some day.

(Why is Blogger sometimes making such large amounts of space between paragraphs? It's making me grumpy.)