3rd short walk in USA

We went on another short, but really lovely walk yesterday. We headed further west, following the Rogue River out to the canyons at Grave Creek. Real Deliverance country - you could imagine the sound of distant banjos.

We stopped on the way at the viewpoint at Hellgate:

From there, we wound the remaining 15 miles or so to our starting point:

That was on the south side of the Rogue, but our starting point was on the other side:

The trail is narrow - walkers only - and over rocks in parts, with a precipitous drop down to the river, which is at many points well below the trail level. It was important to watch your footing all the time. Jo found it tricky occasionally:

The sign at the beginning said 2 miles to the falls and we stopped near some white water once my app told me we had travelled that distance:

The real falls were actually another mile on - not high, but plenty of white water:

Some rafters followed us down and managed to find a way down the falls:

On the way back up the gorge, we were warned about the proliferation of Poison Oak, which, I'm told looks like this - 3 leaves together, going reddish:

Really nice walk/hike. Total distance covered 6.2 miles, with an elapsed time of just over 3 hours, just 2 hours of which were actually walking. Full stats here - http://app.strava.com/activities/180302564

Another walk in the USA

Having done Upper Table Rock last week, it was only right that we do Lower Table Rock this week. The two plateaus are fairly close together and of very similar height (the "Upper" and "Lower" descriptions refer to their locations and not their elevation).

Not a good start when you see one of these signs at the start of the trail:

It's a 3 mile round trip up and back down the trail, but, on the huge plateau at the top there used to be a runway, last used in WW II, but which now just serves as a flat trail - straight out and back. It's nearly a mile long, so we did 2 miles on the flat plus 3 miles up and down, making 5 miles in all. Full stats here - http://www.strava.com/activities/178822402

A couple of photos as well:

The peak in the distance, just above my head, is Mount McLoughlin (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mount_McLoughlin)

Walk in the USA

I decided, whilst we were on holiday here in Oregon again, that I had to finally go up Table Rock (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Upper_and_Lower_Table_Rock), a prominent feature in the Rogue Valley. I'd never got round to doing it before but today was the day - and Jo joined me as we set off early morning before the heat got up too much.

There's two of these large volcanic plateaus - Upper and Lower Table Rock. They're not hugely high, but there's some nice trails leading to the large flat tops and they were worth a walk. My Adidas app let me down - all it recorded was elapsed time (almost 2 hours) - it doesn't seem to like USA for some reason.

Here's some photos anyway - first the usual wildlife warning signs:

On the way up and then on the plateau at the top:

The lower bit of the sky that isn't blue in the photo immediately above is actually smoke from the forest fires that were set off by the dry lightning strikes - some 2,500 of them on Wednesday alone - just south east of here. There is a camp nearby where hundreds of firemen from all over the state have been staying, in readiness to snuff out any threats to lives or properties.

We walked across this huge lava field to the other side to get a look at Lower Table Rock - our next planned walk:

Here's some of the fused lava rock on the way down:

Back at the start again: