Once you’ve managed to injury yourself on the trail, you have two options: wait it out on the couch with a supply of crisps and beer or keep moving (judiciously). While the first option certainly 🙂 has its points, I knew that the second was what needed to be done – but not overdone. Try roaring back into long hikes with a bad back, exacerbate 😦 the injury, and the couch will become a permanent home. So, I’ve been staving off ambulatory senescence with some short, but fun, local hikes. The current weather pattern of one or two nice days interspersed with days of storm and gloom has helped to enforce some rest and recovery time between days with increasing levels of hiking activity.
Today was forecast as a nice day (and it was, at least through the morning), so we did a loop around the Latgawa Peninsula at Applegate Lake. We gave this geographic feature this name because it is the only peninsula at the lake (with French Gulch to the north and Squaw Creek to the south) and is home to the minimalist (i.e., a flat spot next to the trail) Latgawa Cove Camp. The peninsula is also home to an assortment of trails that can be woven together year-round into any number of short and long loops. Today we started on the Payette Trail, climbed the Calsh Trail, dropped back to lake level on the Osprey Trail, and made our way back to the French Gulch Trailhead on the Payette – for a 5.7 mile loop that my back only complained about a little bit. 
Because it seems to be one of the Ashland Hiking Group’s favorite hang-outs, we stopped at the Boomtown Saloon in Jacksonville on the way home. The beer was cold and the fries were hot, so we were pleased with this culinary choice. 😀
Per LaLande (1995), the name of the Calsh Trail was derived in the early 1980s from the initials of the five Forest Service employees who planned the trail.
BOOTS on the TRAIL 
Leave a Reply