Day Trips- Mud, Rivers & Mountain Lions, OH MY!

So, my friends and I decided that we wanted to go for a hike this weekend. There are a ton of hiking trails near my house. Unfortunately, it rained the night before and was still raining yesterday when we were planning to go. After calling the park rangers, we found that the hiking trails were closed. :*( After texting back and forth for about an hour, we decided to just pick up a trail from one of the entrances near my house. I did not know which trail this was or where it went but I knew there was an entrance from the side of the road near my house.

When we first walked onto the trail, we could still see houses and hear traffic but we decided to keep going. Then we came accross this sign.

Mountain Lions??!!! WTF!!! I read online (and I've heard stories) that there are mountain lions in our area but seriously.....for us to go into their territory? OMG I think we were crazy. But we decided to go on anyway.

The first part of the trail was a muddy mess (thanks rain!). Basically we slid down most of the way. It was like mud skiing or something. We laughed so hard going down this hill. Our shoes had inches of mud stuck to the bottoms of them which made us laugh, then we kept sliding which made us laugh more. It was just out of control for about 10 minutes.

Then we got to this:

Do not enter?? So what do we do? We enter. And this is what was behind.

A cliff with a small little trail on it.

We walked a bit and then came to this:

A creek. Hey who put that there?? Rude.

Hmmm how deep is it?? (don't mind the socks....we brought extras just in case. She wasn't wearing long pants and she wanted her legs covered just in case there was poison oak so I gave her my London socks. ha ha)

Pause for a picture:

We contemplated how we would get across. We threw big stones to create a path. Then I figured nothing would help so I ran across. Getting my feet soaked.

They threw more rocks. Then decided to take off their shoes instead. Such resourceful girls. :-)

Freezing and rocky.

Oh look.....another river to cross. Yay us! :-\

This time I took off my shoes too. The rocks in this particular river were smaller and painful on the feet. (notice our shoes on the other side of the river in the picture below. We threw them over so we wouldn't have to carry them.)

Nature Girls! (?)

All in all I think we crossed 4 rivers. Went on a few REALLY muddy tracks. Almost walked into what we presume could have been a "lion's den". It was a really creepy cave like place filled with water. We chose not to go investigate too much. It was a little scary!! It was a fun little outing and I had no idea that was all in my own "backyard"!

We walked back to the car absolutely filthy. We took off our muddy shoes socks and went home and took hot showers to wash the nature off of us. ha ha. Then we ate Taco Bell and watched movies all night. We deserved the lazy afternoon after our day of nature. :-)