Lafayette–Moraga Trail, revisited
Today, a spur-of-the-moment walk, on a section of the Lafayette–Moraga Trail north of our previous hike there.
We parked at the staging parking lot, at the corner of Olympic Boulevard and Pleasant Hill Road, and started walking west on the trail. The Las Trampas creek runs alongside, in a deep wooded gorge.
Fuelled up with water from the fountain at Foye Drive—good, if a little warm— we pushed on until Glenside Drive, where Melinda’s “is it time to turn around yet?” questions got too insistent to ignore.
Walking on the flat makes it surprisingly easy to cover a lot of distance in a short time. I was surprised, totting up the mileage for this one, that we’d walked just short of 9½ miles. It didn’t feel like it. (“Oh yes it did!”, says Melinda.)
Part of that ease is due to the trail itself. It’s excellent: wide, shady, and quiet. Although it’s suburban, it’s set far enough from the roads that you rarely see or hear a car. The trail itself is quite heavily used by cyclists, but they’re a lot more polite here than on the Iron Horse Trail. The standard trail etiquette is that cyclists warn hikers ahead of them with an “on your left!” call: on this trail, at least, it works well.
[Update: I'm deeply suspicious of the map’s marked mileages; measuring it with a piece of string gives a five mile round-trip, which feels a lot more like what we walked.]
Categories: Hiking
We parked at the staging parking lot, at the corner of Olympic Boulevard and Pleasant Hill Road, and started walking west on the trail. The Las Trampas creek runs alongside, in a deep wooded gorge.
Fuelled up with water from the fountain at Foye Drive—good, if a little warm— we pushed on until Glenside Drive, where Melinda’s “is it time to turn around yet?” questions got too insistent to ignore.
Walking on the flat makes it surprisingly easy to cover a lot of distance in a short time. I was surprised, totting up the mileage for this one, that we’d walked just short of 9½ miles. It didn’t feel like it. (“Oh yes it did!”, says Melinda.)
Part of that ease is due to the trail itself. It’s excellent: wide, shady, and quiet. Although it’s suburban, it’s set far enough from the roads that you rarely see or hear a car. The trail itself is quite heavily used by cyclists, but they’re a lot more polite here than on the Iron Horse Trail. The standard trail etiquette is that cyclists warn hikers ahead of them with an “on your left!” call: on this trail, at least, it works well.
[Update: I'm deeply suspicious of the map’s marked mileages; measuring it with a piece of string gives a five mile round-trip, which feels a lot more like what we walked.]
Categories: Hiking
