Hiking time: 654 minutes and 23.46 seconds, or 10 hours and 54 minutes, my longest hike in the last several years. Got on the trail at 7:15 AM, got back to the car at 6:09 PM. This was a 15 mile round trip hike that required 3,000 feet of climbing, the most ambitious hike I've accomplished in many years. I don't think I'll ever be able to do the steep hikes I used to do however.

Took 219 photos of which 136 made the cut: a large gallery to test your patience. Took an unusual number of selfies because otherwise the view might have tricked you into imagining a more modest girth on some of the trees and a smaller size of some of the rock formations. I hardly ever bothered trying to capture a realistic view of waterfalls (of which there are many along the trail) by upping the ISO so I could choose a fast shutter speed and freezing the action of water splashing and spraying. Instead, for the most part, I kept the ISO at 100 and just let the water blur like the way most people like it. So in this unusual case, laziness will meet with greater acceptance of the result.

There's a lot of stunning trees in the old growth along the trail and I'm not shy about illustrating them if I find the trunk unusual or its colors and conformations compelling.

There are many small streams crossing the trail, some of them hosting quite spectacular waterfalls in stunning settings. The runoff was very robust due to all the recent rain. The crossings were variable. Most of them were negotiated without mishap but I got a left hotfoot on the way out, and coming back -- aggravated by inattention due to fatigue -- I plunged into deep pools, resulting in the inside of my boots being flooded with water. This was most aggravating! Thank heavens no one was around to hear me loudly cursing. One crossing I found impossible to imagine without plunging my boots into pools of water 18" deep! Twice on the way back, I was force to remove my boots and all three layers of socks and when I rang out the socks there was enough water in them to fill my water bottles! Though the high water was frustrating for hiking, it was very gratifying for the photographer.

After hiking in moderately steep terrain with soaking wet boots and socks, it's a wonder my feet aren't ground hamburger. My Vasque boots would have chewed my feet to emulsified protoplasm. But my Danner boots did an amazing job of protecting my feet. I wasn't slowed down a bit because of pain in my feet -- respiration is what limited my rate of progress on the way back. The only hot spot on my feet after the hike is a small red spot on the outside of my left toe. No blister, but a candidate for mole skin on my next hike.

At one point there was a sign pointing in the direction of Cedar Swamp, at my 3 hour point from the start of the hike. This gave me the impression that I wasn't that far from my goal. But I was dead wrong. I was probably only at the halfway point, as it took me 6 1/2 hours to reach my destination from the trailhead. I was surprised at how steep that last 1/3 of the hike was before the Cedar Swamp. I certainly didn't remember that from my many hikes to this destination (the last time I took pictures on this hike that I have digital images of was May, 1999 and I didn't get very far, maybe 1/5 of the way to Cedar Swamp).

The last thousand feet of climbing was steeply through superb old growth, mainly Douglas Firs but near the Cedar Swamp, Western Red Cedars made their appearance, climaxing magnificently at the Swamp. I was really tired by the time I got to the Swamp. On the way back less than two miles from the trailhead, after descending rather steeply for miles, the trail starts climbing for at least a half mile and I was totally exhausted and just crawling along. But I definitely lived to tell about all this and the next day my legs didn't even feel tired and wanted to go again! The only physical evidence of stress was that small red spot on the side of my left toe.