We woke up early again and headed out to Canfield Mountain, a recommendation we received over burgers from the cook at Hudson’s the previous day. It’s pretty unassuming from the beginning–you simply park your car along a road in a neighborhood–and start up a hill on a well-traveled path.
However, it doesn’t take long before we reached what looked like mountain- and dirt-biking trails and had to climb up some pretty steep inclines. The photo below is looking down after our first ‘summit.’
Here I am, not realizing this was only about HALFWAY up the mountain:
We continued on, and our scenery quickly changed as the forest grew a bit more dense and the trails became steeper and rockier. Looking up:
Looking down:
After a final steep climb, we made it to the top! As I was cresting the top, I could see two guys on dirt bikes looking down at me with (what I thought were) puzzled looks. On the way up, we did see a lone woman and her dog (which made me feel a lot better, as I’d been starting to wonder if we were even supposed to BE that high), but I’m guessing the top half isn’t as well-traveled as the bottom half.
Check out the height on those trees!
On the way down, we weaved and wound around…and all of a sudden, we realized we weren’t in Kansas anymore. Thankfully, Andrew figured out we’d veered too far to the left (and were running the risk of ending up on the far side of the mountain!), and we were able to wind our way back and ended up only about a mile from where we parked.
Unfortunately, I forgot to turn my Garmin on when we started (grr!), but here is the elevation map of the way down:
By the time we got back into town from our epic, almost-in-Deliverance hike, we were more than ready for lunch. We’d heard good things about Crafted, a local beer hall and restaurant. I chose the chicken and waffles with bacon, fried egg and huckleberry sauce that was super impressive:
The damage:
I’m kinda a chicken-and-waffles girl, and this one was one of the best! The chives in the waffle batter and sweetened whipped cream on the side really put it over the top. Delish!
After lunch, we grabbed some souvenir t-shirts and headed back to the hotel to clean up before Andrew’s conference activities started up.
Yet again, I failed to take any dinner photos! We ended up at Sonrisa, a local taqueria, where they have music videos playing on giant screens. I couldn’t believe how much fun Andrew and I had splitting two tacos and ‘Mexican’ tater tots while re-living some of the 80s and 90s via Guns N Roses and Third Eye Blind.
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