Some New Trails, Some Old Trails

I did some exploring this past week and found two new trails.  The John Wayne Pioneer Trail follows 300 miles of an old railroad through Washington.  The section closest to me is mostly gravel with a few very short section of smooth and packed dirt.  It's very flat and has wonderful views of the Palouse.  Sadie and I ran a 20 mile section.

We had this all to ourselves.

Gravel's great for on-the-run foot massages.

The next day, we drove south for a recovery run on another new trail up to Puffer Butte in Fields Spring State Park near the Oregon border.  A friend came with us to check it out.  We didn't get much running in though; most of the trail was on the north slope of the butte and still under a lot of snow - the frozen, jagged, unstable, hard-to-run-on kind.  Of course, it was worth the views:

Near the overlook (with 30+ mph gusts).

Idaho and Oregon are visible from here.

Puffer Butte summit

All this spring-like weather has gotten me a bit ambitious.  I had another long run scheduled for yesterday, and I thought we could test out the higher trails on Moscow Mt.  But what was a little rain/sleet Friday night at home, was a lot of snow up on the trails.  The lower elevation trails received an inch or two of snow, but were still runnable.  The higher elevation trails weren't so runnable.  But Sadie loved it.

Winter still making its presence felt.

I might do another 5k this Friday night, and next Sunday (18th) is my 50k.  It feels good to run.  :)

Keep running!

 

-Scott