Day 2: Balsam Lake Mountain and Overlook Mountain

Woke up expecting gray skies, maybe rain.  Instead, there was a pretty pink sunrise.  Weather forecast backed off a little and said showers in the afternoon and evening.  I had already broken up the 6 fire towers in 3 groups of 2 based on estimated hike distances and Google Map driving times.  Since today looked like the best weather day, I decided to do the longest day.

Balsam Lake Mountain

I don't know what Waze was thinking.  When I originally did some estimated drive times, the time from the hotel to here was 1:45.  In the hotel parking lot, Waze said 2:20.  I don't know - traffic?  Back there?  Waze stood firm on my arrival time, even saying it was 40 minutes to go the last 8 miles.  That's 12 mph.  Sure, it's 8 miles of a dirt road, but it's flat and wide.  Then, Waze said 30 minutes for the last 7 miles, and 20 for the last 5, until we ended up arriving after a 1 hour 47 minute drive, which is fine.

Want to point out that there was no cell service in the parking area, but 3 bars of 4G at the top.  That matters later.

Once I got to the tower, the gray skies were really coming in.  Looking up at the sky beyond the tower, all you saw was an indistinct grayness.  From the top of the tower looking down and out, you could see the blowing mist against the background of the trees.  Very cool.  Reminded me of our Acadia National Park excursion in Maine on a cruise.

I never saw another person on this trail.  On the way back down, there were some very clear bear tracks in a soft, wet section of trail.  I'm 99% sure that I didn't see those tracks on the way up.

Ended my time here with a 3.59 mile round trip that included a 1207 foot elevation gain.

Overlook Mountain

So no cell service in the parking lot, right?  Waze is 100% dependent on network access to get a route planned.  I know Overlook Mountain was more-or-less back in the direction of the hotel, so I started heading that way.  I think I was almost halfway there when I finally got a bar or two of cell signal strength and got Waze to give me a route.  Luckily, I was on the right track.

There were a lot more people on this trail.  Met a bunch of dogs.  Talked to a young guy also working on the challenge who hiked up that hill like it was dead flat.  Just past the fire tower is an overlook that is also the site of an Earthcache.  When I got there, a met up with a mom and 2 girls, maybe 9 and 11.  We had a fun time chatting, so I asked the girls to help me with the Earthcache.  Mom nudged them in the right direction on one of the questions.

Where Balsam Lake was mostly a narrow one-person-wide path all the way up, this was wide enough to drive a car up.  If only they would have let me.

Tried to find a geocache near a small plane crash.  Never found it, but I did see some stuff that may have been from the plane.  To get from the trail to the cache, there was a rock face that you needed to descend.  There was one place where you could scramble back and forth with a little less risk of face-planting 15 feet down.  Made it down OK, but when I came back, it was very hard to tell where to start.  Ended up in the wrong place and really had to push to get up to the top.  Added an upper-body workout to the leg, heart, and lung workout.

And again, no cell service in the parking lot.  Or for several miles away from the parking lot.  I think I could have gotten to the hotel myself.  As it turned out, except for not taking one road that angles across and cuts off a few minutes, I was in pretty good shape.  Cutting through Woodstock with all the Friday afternoon visitors running around to get out of the pouring rain was something that Waze would have bypassed, however.

Ended up with a 5.11 mile round trip with 1653 feet of elevation gain.

Now I'm hoping the weather forecast for tomorrow gets a little better.