Drippy Church Mountain hike

Ready for our Thursday outing

Interestingly, as I was getting ready to write this post, I looked up our first wilderness hike from last year, and it was only eight of us heading up to the Church Mountain meadows. Today was similar, except that we had fourteen of us, and we expected that the weather would improve as the day progressed. That was what we hoped, anyway. Light rain and mist greeted us at the trailhead.

Columbines are in bloom

Not far from the trailhead, I saw that these native columbines are in abundant bloom. It was green and lush everywhere we looked, except for when we looked up.

Our environment on the trail today

There were only a few times today when we cast a shadow on the trail; most of the time it looked like this. Not really raining, but a heavy mist hung on us most of the day. I kept expecting that any minute it would begin to clear, and we would have at least a tiny view of the gorgeous mountains that surrounded us, but it was not to be.

At the meadows

We reached the meadows and saw that they are still covered in deep snow, and it became obvious once we left the shelter of the trees that it was not just drips from the trees that kept us wet, it was raining lightly.

Today's lunch spot

We decided to climb up to a place where the trees might shelter us while we made a quick but satisfying lunch stop, rather than head out onto the snow and slog a ways towards our usual place, when there would be no view at all. It was not really cold, but everything was damp and once we stopped, everyone began to get uncomfortable. We didn't linger there for long.

Melanie's picture from our lunch spot

The amount of snow in the meadow is similar to what we saw last year, as you can see from the above link. Other hikers had gone farther; you make out their faint tracks across the snow. Who knows how far they went? We were ready to take our return trip back to the cars once we finished our lunch.

On our way back

Although everyone isn't in this picture, I wanted to document our beautiful surroundings as we headed back. Most of us were warm enough, even if we weren't exactly dry. It was good to be moving.

Monotropaceae

We saw this relative of the Indian Pipe family, an interesting fungus. The plants of the Indian Pipe family are saprophytes, meaning that they have no chlorophyll and they feed on dead organic matter in the soil. You can read more about them here. I've seen them many times on these trails, and they are always a curiosity. Melanie took the above picture; those are her trekking poles in the background.

Almost back to the cars

As you can see from this picture, a light rain never really stopped, but we didn't mind too much since we were soon to be warm and dry. We only hiked around six miles round trip, but there was plenty of elevation to make up for it, with a steady uphill hike of somewhere around 2,500 feet (800 meters).

I was grumbling about the wetness of the day, but we no sooner got in our cars to drive home when the sun began to emerge from the clouds. And about halfway home, we realized that the rain and clouds did not extend to our home turf. We had driven more than an hour so that we could hike in rain, while it was DRY at lower elevations. But it was very beautiful nevertheless, our first High Country hike of the season. We will be back to Church Mountain again this season.
:-)