The creek. The route I want to do crosses the creek at one of the spots where there's no bridge. I've crossed without getting my feet wet before, but it was difficult even though it was during dry weather. There are some large rocks there, but there need to be a few more. So I went directly there, basically planning to do the second loop of the trail first, and backwards, if I could cross the creek. I tried, but couldn't quite do it. I got about halfway across, gave up, and then had a very hard time getting back to the side. But I did it.
So I continued up the center of the gulch, and climbed up to the ballfields. That part of today's walk overlaps the first part of what I wanted to do, but I headed East so that I'd get more miles in.
3.1 miles in 1:07, 6,659 steps, 437ft gain
I noticed recently that the OpenStreetMap view of the area includes just about all the trails. I was excited to draw my intended route on a clean map in MapMyRun so I'd finally learn how far it is and what the elevation gain is, but for some reason it only shows the trails when viewing a route, not creating one. Weird. So I pasted in two screenshots and drew what I wanted to walk onto the copy on the right.
It was nice to head up to the ballfields again. It'd been a while.
A lot of the trails are covered with tons of leaves right now, and they're definitely a major hazard. I'm not terribly worried about slipping on them, though I know it's possible. The main problem is that they're in layers thick enough that it's hard to make out the terrain underneath. Very dangerous, considering all the tree roots and big rocks.
It'll just get wetter from here on out. I need to find some more good, steep climbs that don't get all muddy.