February 26, 2022: The Friday night before our trip, the weather looked relatively good, with little chance of rain for Saturday. Well, so much for weather forecasts. On Saturday morning, the chance of rain had quintupled to around 70% around noon or 1 o’clock, with the temperature hovering around 40° at best. Cold weather and rain can be a really lousy combination. Not wanting to be responsible for a bunch of cases of hypothermia, the trip leader Betsy decided to warn potential participants ahead of time. To her surprise, they all showed up anyway! These brave souls included Tom, Tammy, Will and Patty. It helped that there was no rain when we headed out to Stone Door, nor any ice in in that dark passage. We headed downhill to the Big Creek Gulf Trail, where we found the creek to be high. It provided an entertaining whitewater show as we wended our way upstream. We were not surprised to find that crossing over the creek on the spur trail to Ranger Falls was out of the question unless one wanted to swim. Somewhere along the line it started to rain, but we were all prepared for it. It never rained very hard and we continued to enjoy our walk back up to the canyon rim and along the scenic Big Creek Rim Trail. (Well, it may be a bit of an exaggeration to say that we enjoyed hiking up out of the gorge, but we all made it eventually.) Somewhere along the way, the rain stopped and was replaced by fog. One minute the gulf was there, the next minute it was gone! Surprisingly, this provide interesting variety as we hiked back to the ranger station. All in all, we had a good hike, even in the face of less-than-ideal conditions.
If you would like to see some pictures taken during this hike, click here.
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