Hiking Dale's Ridge Trail

This week my sister and I hiked a "new to us" trail.   We had to run an errand in the morning and thought about finding a trail in that area, but that didn't work out.  So on the drive home, I suggested the Dale's Ridge Trail.  I had known about this trail for a while and my mom and I tried to find it once, but could not.  Since then, they've put up some signage, so it was easy for us to find it now.

To be honest, I thought this trail was going to be just a loop around the property. The website said it was a "Family Friendly" trail, so I didn't think it would be very challenging, or scenic, and was afraid my sister would think it was a bust!

 When we got to the trail head, I picked up a map (Safety First)! I am so glad we did, because the map came in handy.

The trail was wooded and it went by a creek which was pretty. I thought this would be a peaceful and relaxing walk along the water.   Pretty soon, we started coming upon blue painted posts with numbers on them. The numbers correlated with numbers on the map so we could tell where we were. This was a nice touch and later came in handy. 

What I thought was going to be a peaceful walk quickly turned into a challenging hike.  I was not expecting all these steps. This trail kept going up, and up.

We came across several "look outs"  and this was the first one.  I have been to some other trails where the look outs were named. I saw the sign and said "hey this look out is named "Dancer", like after the Reindeer.   My sister looks at it closer and says "No, it says DANGER".   We had a good laugh about that. 

The view from the top was beautiful. I love looking at the all the farm landscape.  We thought this was the top and that from here on out we would be looping back around to the beginning of the trail.

                                          We were wrong again. The trail just kept going

I have to say that parts of this trail were sort of dangerous and I would not call it "family friendly" as the website described.

When we got towards what we thought was the end, we saw these two signs on opposite sides of the trail. One said "Return via Switchbacks"  and the other said "Easier way back".  Hmm, seeing as the one sign said Easier Way Back, we wonder how much harder the other trail would be.   Since it was SO hot and SO humid ( and we left our water back at the car) we chose the "Easier way back".  Turns out, the easier way back was just a short path through a clearing and ended up at the end of a gravel road that lead down to the parking lot where we parked.  It didn't take us long to walk that so we decided to go back and return via the switchbacks trail.

Turns out the Switchbacks trail connected us back to that first look out and from there, we just back tracked back down the hill the same we we came up.  Although sometimes it is harder to climb down the hills than it is to climb up, that path wasn't any more challenging.

This actually ended up being a really fun day. I would not consider this trail to be "family friendly" but it wasn't the most challenging. You just need to take things slow when going up and down some of the rocks.  Now we are on the hunt for some more local trails!

Where was the last place you hiked? -M