The weather forecast was being a bit flakey and waffle-ey for the past couple of days on when it was supposed to rain up until the day of the planned hike, and even today it couldn’t make up its mind if it was going to rain around 11, 1, or 3.

Good thing we went ahead and hiked anyway, because the weather was perfect and started raining at the end of our hike as we were finishing.

We had a really lovely view of the river for most of the first part of the hike, and then a nice walk through the woods under cover of the trees for some of the sprinkles towards the end.

We walked about 4 miles in about 3 hours with some water breaks. 464 foot elevation gain, and a generally nice social hike with our friend Elissa, though there were some steep areas we were all trudging up slowly.

There were some sections that we had get past some large rock/boulders but Gus was awesome and had no issues getting around. It’s so cute that he stops to make sure we are all following behind

We saw two deer in the distance in the woods, fish and turtles in the river, and a squirrel running across the path with something yummy in its mouth. Overall, more wildlife than our last hike which was neat.

I tracked our trail with an app called AllTrails, which seems to be the best one out there so far (been downloading a few to try out) and free is always a nice touch. I like that it shows you the trail (though further zoom in would be nice – I turned on the zoom feature on the iPhone which give a little extra), easy to search parks, easy to track trail, and seems to be the most intuitive so far. I have read that it seems to be a little on the inaccurate side in distance, and the trail / map we went on said it was 4.1 miles, where the app said we walked 3.5. Though honestly I mostly just wanted a visual track of the route we walked, not so much the distance. And for a free app on my phone I don’t expect everything to be accurate. I’m wondering if GPS coverage is also affected by cellular coverage. When we get into needing more accurate coverage, we’ll be buying an actual GPS device. I also like that it tracks how long we hiked. It’s easy to forget what time you started.