Idyllwild

I have way too many pictures to post from this trip, but it's the most fun we've taken in a while and I'm back on the blogger kick again - so here you go! Scott and I, along with friends Gerard and Yoppy went up to a closeby mountain town of Idyllwild for some camping, hiking and relaxation. You may remember that Scott and I went here before when doing a hike of the San Jacinto mountains. We didn't do a trek quite that hard this time, but we did do a lot of hiking anyway.

We found a great campsite (best one we've been to up there) called Stone Creek campground. We also had the best campsite in Stone Creek was was #5. We've got to remember that to get it again next time we go up. There was a lot of tree coverage and plenty of space away from other campsites. There wasn't a whole lot of flat land, but we found enough for a couple of tents. There were tons of these manzinita trees, too, which I absolutely love. They have a beautiful red bark on them and great, green leaves. We were there at the perfect time when they were also blooming!


Scott and I were alone on Friday night and got up and went on the Deer Springs hike up to Suicide Rock. The foliage was beautiful and the scenes magnificent. We kept seeing these pink flowering-like plants randomly placed throughout the forest. I'm not sure what they are, but they looked very striking, adding a lot of color to the areas. If anyone knows what these are and can let me know, I'd love it! There were lots of different types of trees as well and we read that the many different types of pines here is very amazing, but it is due to the quick drop in altitude. I'm not sure what this other tree was, but it was huge, so I had to have Scott pose with it.

I felt like we were back in Costa Rica again with all of the lizards that we saw everywhere we turned. This one was really cool with the blue belly. When we got close to them, they'd start acting like they were doing push-ups, which is apparently their stance when they are challenging something. We also saw two mating on a rock at one point, but I didn't catch a shot of this.



Once we got to the top, there were a lot of great views. We could see Taquitz (another big rock that Scott has rock climbed) across the way.

On the way back down, we encountered another couple standing and looking at a rock. We realized that there was a baby rattlesnake on it! The guy was a huge fan of snakes and we were lucky to run into them so that he could point it out to us. He even got it up on a stick and wasn't even scared as it crawled towards him! Apparently, baby rattlesnakes can be more dangerous because they'll inject all of their venom into you whereas an adult probably would not.

When we got back to the campsite, Gerard and Yoppy were waiting. We had a great night at our wonderful campsite (can you tell that nature makes me incredibly happy!?) There were pines cones as big as our heads there (Nancy - I knew you would appreciate this).

There was this bluejay that was flying all around our site as well, trying to capture any crumbs that he could.






As it started to get a little bit cooler, I didn't want to put on my hiking shoes again (feet were still sore from hiking), so I had to make due with the German look again (Helloooo, Joshuaaa!) Our campfire area was separated from the tent area and was a great place to spend the evening with cooking and enjoying the campfire.

We even got a visit from Pikachoo!

This was the wonderful view that we had in the morning getting out of the tent - how lovely and relaxing!



The next day, we did a hike up to the base of Taquitz, the rock that we had seen the day before. It was a very tough hike with quite a bit of scrambling, but had great views when we got to the base. We could see Suicide Rock that we had hiked to the day before as well as some people climbing Taquitz. Everything about the trip was really great.