First Hike of the Season

We had our first hike of the season this weekend! I am of course referring to our annual Family Hiking Series, which this year began with the Ship Creek Trail.

As usual, I arranged to meet up with everybody at the trailhead at 2:00. This meant heading downtown to the parking lot of one of our local tourist shops, called The Ulu Factory.

I wasn’t sure who would be there. Mother usually goes to all of the hikes but was in Cordova this time with my niece Tara. I had heard from my friend Tina saying that she planned to go, but as you know sometimes other things come up. I was prepared to go it alone, but was happy to see not only Tina and her daughter Shannon, but also my sister Kelly and her daughter Laurel. I was even happier to see that Laurel had brought her son Corbin along too! Half-way through the hike, my friend Tuesday and her buddy showed up as well; but they were walking a bit faster than we were, so they headed off by themselves after a brief meeting with our group.

Ship Creek Trail is a nice, wide, paved path that winds along beside Ship Creek through the industrial section of town. It’s about 2.6 miles long, from the Ulu Factory to Tyson Elementary in Mountain View. It was only just opened to the public last year, but already I can see the bicyclers and roller-bladers are claiming it. Unfortunately, so are the homeless people – but we honestly didn’t see nearly as many as we had last year, so maybe they’ve moved on to a less populated spot.

Corbin, who just turned 1 year old a few weeks ago, rode on his mother’s back in a nice little backpack. He is learning all sorts of new words, and is a very happy little boy. He chortled and laughed pretty much the whole two hours we were out there. Once we made it back to our cars, we sat out on the grass a while, letting him stretch his legs a bit and get a change of diaper. He is such a doll…

Our next hike will be on the coastal trail, from Pt. Woronzof up towards Kincaid Park.