Difficult Hike at Golden Gate State Park

My younger son invited to me to one of my favorite state parks: Golden Gate State Park (no relation to the Golden Gate bridge).  The weather was excellent -- partly cloudy with temperatures in the high 50s.  Everything was great except for my level of fitness.  Too much food and too much idleness over the past six months had made me fat and lazy.  The six mile hike ended up taking us (that is, me) 3 and 1/2 hours.  I devoted at least 30 minutes of that time hunched over trying to recover my breath.

My son was a good sport about wasting half a day on a mildly strenuous hike that he would have finished in two hours without breaking a sweat.

My son and I originally planned to hike the 6.7 mile Mountain Lion Trail starting at the Nott Creek parking lot.  (Marked on the following park map with symbols of mountain lion paws.)  When it became obvious that I was running out of energy, we decided to take a short cut down Burro Trail (symbolized by the back end of a burro).  Finally, we gave up on trails altogether and took the park's jeep trail (shown as the black line) back to Nott Creek.

Despite my fitness deficiencies, I still derived some pleasure in getting out of town and enjoying the park.

For example, I enjoyed the footbridges.  Every footbridge in the park has its own design.  Some are built from tree trunks split down the middle.  Some are built from stout rough-hewn boards.  Some are cute little bridges like this one, which appeared to be constructed from garden edging logs from Home Depot.

There is a beautiful creek in the park.  My son speculated that gold flecks might get washed down from Windy Peak and deposited in the pool shown in this photo.  As we had neglected to bring a sluicing pan, we could not investigate.

One of the joys of hiking in the woods is discovering new plants and animals.  Here is my first observation of a plant that I have christened the Rocky Mountain Snowball Cactus based on its size and shape.