More hiking!

I went on another hike today. It's so great to be able to get out of the house and go on an afternoon hike at least once a week. The mountains are only a couple miles away, but it takes around 20 minutes to get there by bus. Even though the mountains are so close, it's still somewhat difficult to go hiking sometimes because a lot of trails are unmarked and you need a car to get to a lot of them if the micros don't go near enough to the trails. Sam, Audrey and I went back to Cerro Arco again today, but this time we explored some of the other trails in the area. We had to start up the trail for Cerro Arco, but then we turned on a trail behind a wooden fence that we had to hop over. The road took us into more of a valley than up a mountain, so we followed that for a while. We saw a rock face with bolts in it for climbing, and want to try to rent equipment to go climbing there some day! We were also next to a dried up river bed that looks like we could explore too another time. The trail we were on took us far back into the valley and we started finding some interesting microclimates with greener plants and it actually felt a little humid in between the mountains. We left the trail a little to wander farther into the valley, and scrambled up some rocks, and repeated a little of our bushwhacking from our hike on Friday to reach the peak of a nearby hill, where we could see so much more. We even saw cows out roaming in the hills! Up there we found a small trail that led further into the mountains, and we want to come back and explore that more. We read about a 9 kilometer hike in the area that we think this trail will lead to. We had to head down before going too much further, however, to avoid getting stuck with no sunlight. But it's good to know that there are many more trails in the area that we can hike other than Cerro Arco.