Today was one of those warm and beautiful fall days that I knew I would regret not hiking in...only I wasn't entirely in the mood to actually hike. In any case, I left with the plan to go up Tenerife. Had I actually stuck to that plan, there wouldn't be much to write about.
After you visit Kamikaze on the way up to Tenerife the trail starts to gradually move east and away from the falls. Today I eyed an off-shoot "trail" I have eyed before and thought to myself today I am going to see the "top" of Kamikaze...which as you can see from the first photo is a very sheer drop.
The "trail" quickly ended and before I knew it I was on one of my poorly planned treks which I usually only do every few years...long enough in-between for me to forget about the last one.
I didn't actually hit the "top" of the falls, rather I was above them (significantly) along the Kamikaze creek...so then I thought to myself, maybe I should see where this water feeds from. The creek itself is very pretty. I think for some reason I was building it up to be this hidden beautiful lake (not that there is one on the map).
From that decision on resulted in a day of wandering up creek, uphill and off trail. It was pretty but steep. And worse than that; the creek eventually broke off in two directions. At that intersection I got distracted by an uphill area which reveled some interesting caves which the photo doesn't capture well. They are less caves and more a network of extremely large rock that creates very deep area. This one looked lived in:
As far as my source finding...eventually I hit swamp, snow, and slash and the creek really spread out. Yes. It was that bad. There was occasional tree flagging by someone who was clearly marking trees. After some unhappy tromping around; I then had to make a tough decision, and seeing as I had left my map at home because I never planned to go off trail in the first place, I decided to go back the way I came. (After consulting my map at home, I made the right decision to turn back).
There were some good parts to the exploring that I wouldn't mind getting back to; but I will need some time to forget the not so good parts.
If only a packet of 12 fake mice made people this happy:
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