The Greatest Day Hiker Of Them All and her dog, Cookie, make their way along the Hotel Trail.
Hike: February 23, 2020: Hotel and Buck trails out and back to Brushy Mountain. 5 miles.
As hikers, we touch only one aspect of the second-largest municipal park in the nation—the trails, for hiking.
And of course most of those trails are also open to bicyclists and horse riders.
And then there’s paddling from the boat landing; fishing from watercraft or the dock at the boat landing.
Plus picnicking, access to the Appalachian Trail and, via the new Hinchee Trail, access to Salem.
And access to the park itself from four different parking areas.
But we get our money’s worth ($25 for a year pass) with the endless loops and variations of walks.
On this day we parked at Bennett Springs and headed south on the Hotel Trail, which skirts along the roadway for a distance and then begins to slant up Brushy Mountain. At the intersection with the Buck Trail, we took the left to take us the rest of the way up the mountain—to the point where Buck intersects with the Brushy Mountain Trail.
From there, we headed up the knob just south of the trail intersection, for lunch with great views of the side of McAfee Knob and the back of Tinker Cliffs, along with the Tinker Mountain ridge line that connects them.
We’d planned to take the Brushy back north and then down the Hi-Dee-Hoe, but with the too-long it took us to get up the mountain, we’d have been fighting darkness, and thus headed back the way we came.
