After a very wet February, we finally headed out for a hike in the Four Peaks Wilderness. The hike was to follow a trio of trails: Brown's trail, Amethyst trail, and finally Four Peaks trail, for a total of just over 4 miles. Well, that is not exactly what happened. The day started off great. Six hikers met at work at 6:30 AM. The team for this hike was Chetan, Sridhar, Suzana, Sudarshan, Sankara, and me. We couldn't all fit into my Jeep, so Sridhar volunteered to drive his Nissan. As we headed out 101 to 202 to 87 to get to the Four Peaks area, the sun came up - nice day for a hike. There are two ways to get to the trailhead: the short way - taking FR143 from 87, or the long way - continuing up 87 to 188 abd driving back south to El Oso road into the wilderness. The short way involves a 19 mile drive on FR143 which has some really, really bad stretches. The long way sends us an additional 52 miles on highway and then only 11 miles on a much better dirt road. So to limit the shock to Sridhar (and his car), we went the long way. Somewhere along the drive up El Oso road the sun dissapeared behind clouds. We arrived at the trailhead at about 9:45 AM. The weather was chilly and overcast, but not raining - yet!