This was actually the first of our hiking adventures, taken on January 2nd on a trip back from Fairfax. We were looking for a fairly easy hike on our way home, and found the White Trail Fire Road just off Sir Francis Drake Blvd. As we headed there, we found a nice parking lot and pulled in. It turns out we weren't quite at the trailhead to the fire road, but instead to one called "Sherwood Forest Trail". With a name like that, who could resist?
Plus it was a great parking spot! The only challenge on this road is that people are going pretty fast so when it came time to pull out into traffic when we were leaving I had to really take a good look and then gun it!
Sherwood Forest Trail is the little blue line below the dot showing the start of the trail. Immediately we were engulfed in a magical misty forest. The weather was foggy and the trees were dripping, but that made the adventure all the more special (albeit missing some views we would have had on a sunny day!).
Katelyn indulged me with a photo near the beginning of the trail. I found out later this really aggravates her, since she is all ready to hike and I am stopping to take pictures already. I am now trying to get at least a little ways into the hike before stopping! You can see the forest in the background and the condition of the trail as it had been recently raining.
I found the ferns, mossy trees, and raindrops in spider webs and flowers absolutely fascinating. As we got more experience hiking I learned that you can find this type of flora everywhere. Who knew there were so many stands of redwood trees around? Now that we are doing more hiking I have a whole new appreciation for the beauty of our state.
Not so fascinating were the banana slugs found on this trail. We have slugs at our house but they are the normal-sized garden slugs. Katelyn had to put her foot next to this one so you could appreciate the size of it. Yuck!
We wound our way up Sherwood Forest Trail and eventually found the fire road. It turns out fire roads are commonly used as part of hiking trails in this area, which makes sense since the county is already maintaining them. On the fire road we passed some teenagers mountain biking and noted the "dirt stripes" up their backs. I bet that makes them popular with the person doing laundry at home!
We went in one direction on the fire road and guessed that in good weather, there were beautiful views that we could not see given how foggy it was. The good news, if you needed to "tree pee" you'd have lots of privacy in this weather!
We turned back and went the other direction on the fire road. It seemed the path just "petered out", and again I am guessing you have great views back toward San Rafael in good weather.
We headed back and ended up taking the fire road to a spot near the highway. Turns out we had missed the turnoff for Sherwood Forest Trail (an indicator of things to come?). Katelyn pulled out the map on her phone and we back-tracked and found it. What a beautiful site!
For reference, my fitbit shows that on this day I took 14,141 steps and had a total of 63 minutes in desirable "exercise zones". Not bad for our first attempt at hiking in Marin!
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