This past Saturday, we drove over to Magnolia Ranch to hike and poke around some areas that we had not previously explored. It was a foggy morning, but the forecast was warm and clear.
The fog was mostly gone by the time we arrived, I guess it was around 8:30am. There was plenty of parking and we saw a few people walking their dogs or finishing up an early morning hike as we were starting ours.
There was some frost on the grass, but the air felt fine and fresh.
The light was great and it was nice and quiet, just the sounds of nature.
We followed a path that led into the forest and crossed a cool bridge.
The path opened up into a lovely space, as if we were walking through a landscape painting by one of the masters.
We could see the South Fork of the American River raging below.
This was an interesting mix of open space and dark forest clustered with trees.
There was a raven posing for photo on the side of the trail.
We saw more scenic views along the way, some uphill and some downhill - in fact, one of the trails we traveled on was called the Up and Down Trail.
We came across a structure that, according to the sign, was erected in 2003 for the movie, Love Comes Softly with Katherine Heigl and Dale Midkiff (never saw it, or heard of it).
As usual, we saw more people heading out, as we were heading in.
When we cross the bridge again, there were a couple of people on horses who asked us to walk back across to get the horses, who were afraid of the bridge, to cross behind us. They explained that one of the horses had a bad experience on a bridge.
There were a lot of people with dogs (mostly all were off-leash).
The parking lot was more crowded when we left. We hiked 9.9 miles with a 1,350 foot elevation gain.
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