Hiking Up Table Rock - Again
I'm sitting on top of the world
Yesterday Sandy and Mary Beth had a quilting class so since it was a nice day I took a hike up Table Rock. I guess they liked the pictures and my description - they wanted to try it the next day. Easter Sunday was cool but it was another clear morning so after the ladies had breakfast we took off for the trailhead.
This time I decided to take my DSLR along. That's what I used for the pictures in this post. Although they are definitely better than the ones taken with my Galaxy S5, I'm still impressed at how good the pictures taken with my new phone look.
This time we started by heading straight up to the cross for pictures. Sandy and MB took photos with their phones and posted them right to Facebook while they were there. Nothing like real-time social media. I tried to find some pictures on the stone ledges nearby that would look more dramatic. I posed for a couple of them but didn't have as much luck getting Sandy or Mary Beth close to the edge for their pictures. MB in particular looked like she was rather uncomfortable, even though it was only about five feet down to the ground below the rocks. It's emotional and not logical though.
Sandy in the bouldering area in the old quarry
Everyone still had plenty of energy left after our climb up so we decided to hike over to the Table Rock quarry. We followed the path which went along the top of the cliffs. I showed Sandy and MBA where there were bolts in the rock for climbing anchors at the tops of some of the technical routes on the cliffs. They didn't seem too excited to try out any of the climbs. They didn't even want to get close enough to look down them. I didn't tell them it was where we used to practice rappeling.
We passed the old quarry and the climbing cliffs and headed toward the east edge of Table Rock to look for a way down. At the far east end I found that there is a large new quarry area. Years ago when I used to go up to Table Rock to climb there wasn't any more rock cutting activity. But there is a major new area where rock is being taken out although I have no idea what it is being used for. Between the old and new quarry areas we found a break in the cliffs where the trail dropped down and we could get to the lower level.
Mary Beth and Sandy enjoying their morning hike
We took the trail through the bottom of the old quarry area. There are many large boulders left from the old quarrying operations that make it a popular bouldering area for Boise area rock climbers. Many years ago when I was an aspiring climber I would spend a lot of Saturday afternoons climbing on the boulders and cliffs, practicing for doing technical climbs on big peaks. Unfortunately it turned out that I wasn't a very good rock climber so I had to be content with general mountaineering, and as I got older, hiking. But that's been good enough.
From there we headed back. We were starting to get thirsty and a doughnut from the market was starting to sound pretty good. When we got back to the main Table Rock trail we were back to all the hiking traffic, lots of people, kids and dogs. When we passed a tiny yellow lab puppy I heard "Aww" from both Sandy and Mary Beth. Back at the car MB's MapMyRun app said we had hiked 4.2 miles. A good workout.
My artsy, fartsy flower shot
Preparing this post I did try one new thing. Several years ago when I set up the Darth Dog website I picked a particular size for the thumbnails of pictures that I embed in the text. My newest DSLR, a Canon Rebel T3, has a slightly different aspect ratio. So when I scale the pictures they are slightly distorted. But since the pictures from my new phone have a much different aspect ratio, I had to crop them to make them scale properly for yesterday's post. But if I could do it for those pictures I can do it for all of them. So for this post I cropped the pictures so the aspect ratio was correct before I scaled them. I have to admit that they look a lot better. Going forward I can do that for all of my new posts. It's not that much work. The bad news is that I will probably have to go back and fix the thumbnails for the past year and a half of posts now that I know I can make them look better. Oh well. I didn't have anything better to do.
