West Ridge Trail out and back

When Coppertone and I arrived at Tolay Lake we were initially disappointed and dejected.  The parking area was completely full.  We had never seen it so packed with cars.  We were not aware of any event going on there.  As we drove away Coppertone had the brilliant idea of checking out the equestrian parking lot, which was almost empty.  We did check for signs and didn't see any indication that non-equestrians users were restricted from parking there.

Packed parking lots, strangely, do not always mean packed trails.  We lucked out in the regard.  Because of where the equestion parking lies it connected us directly to the West Ridge Trail, which was our main target for today anyway.  And although we saw people now and then on the trail and always seemed to be within sight of someone (but remember, with no trees you can see forever!) it was never crowded.  All of the people in those parked cars must have been somewhere else.  Quite a lucky break!

As I mentioned we just hiked out along West Ridge Trail until we felt tired enough and then doubled back to our trailhead.  We did not make it out to the Bay View Vista spoot at the end of the trail.  I estimate we were about half a mile from that point when we turned around.

We had been to the Bay View Vista spot in a previous hike, so we've seen the views available there.  Besides, this was not the day for vistas.  It was hazy and visibility was pretty low.  So we did not miss out very much on this day by turning around early.

We tried to find a couple of geocaches on the way back and failed on both attempts even though we found the spots where the caches just had to have been at some point.

Despite the low visibility and 0 for 2 record with geocaches we considered ourselves quite lucky to have been able to hike on our preferred trail without too many people on a day when we initially thought we were going to be sent packing.