Hiking time: 533 Minutes and 5.64 seconds, or 8 hours and 53 minutes. No mountain axe, no trekking poles, no falls, just my tripod, which I only used as a tripod, not a hiking aid. I figured this hike was easy enough so that I didn't need any aids. Hike starts at an elevation of about 100 feet. Straight hiking distance from trailhead to wilderness boundary: 9.8 miles round trip, to a mere elevation of 900 feet, but ups and downs add a couple hundred feet to the climb. Also add 0.2 miles for the side trip to Metlako Falls (100-150 feet high, depending on who measured it) and back, and a couple hundred yards past the wilderness boundary, brings the total distance for the hike to 10 miles. Still, total climb is a modest 1,100 feet and the trail is mostly in fine condition with some rocky stretches.

This hike has been called one of the most spectacular trails in America. Along the way you encounter a half dozen waterfalls, old growth forest, gorgeous, towering canyon walls with beautiful formations and colors. The trail has many narrow, vertical drop offs of hundreds of feet to the creek below, but so long as you do not have to share these sections with hikers going in the opposite direction, it's perfectly safe, with a thick metal cable lining the canyon wall which you can hang onto to avoid stumbling and fall to your death. Along these cabled routes, the trail has been blasted out of the rock canyon walls. Unfortunately, this trail is as popular as it is spectacular and on weekends you're bound to encounter hikers going in the opposite direction in these hairy spots. That's why in these my retired years, I save this hike for weekdays to minimize the probability of such terrifying encounters.

I really needed this hike to exercise all the stiffness and soreness caused by that awful fall I had on my last jog, crushing my ribs against a curb. Lesson learned: don't sprint downhill! I feel much more healed up after this hike.

Weather started out cloudy but by the time I got to the spectacular cliffs above High Bridge (at 3.3 miles), the sun came out. First time I've seen blue sky in two weeks. That only lasted about 3 hours and it clouded up again. But it's been raining these two weeks and so Eagle Creek was roaring, making for spectacular viewing.

Took 252 photos, of which 115 made the cut. Lots of yellow Fall colors. Unfortunately, there is such rich, dense vegetation obscuring spectacular sights, it very often confuses the views for photography, so very often it looks much better in person than it does in photographs and I had to throw away many photos because of this.