pollen and trailheads

Today I tried hiking near the top of Mt. Lemmon to see if I could get out of the pollen in town. The trailhead I wanted, General Hitchcock, was closed, so I went up to the Green Mountain Trailhead at about 7000 ft. The pollen was a lot better (but not perfect), so mission mostly accomplished.

The trail went over a pretty steep ridge to start, then to an unmarked junction, and then ironed out and was fine. I turned around after about two miles because I wasn't sure how well I was going to make it back over that last ridge before the car. On the way back, I met a couple of confused hikers at the unmarked junction, so I showed them my map and pointed them the right direction.

Then I went out to the parking lot and wondered where the heck my car was. There weren't any holes in the guard rail, so it didn't roll, I paid my fee so it shouldn't have been towed.... Hey, this isn't the trailhead, I thought, this is some vista where the signs are different and the parking lot is bigger.

I knew from the position of a marked trail junction that I was less than half a mile from my car, so I went back up the trail to the unmarked junction, took the really, really steep trail (thinking that it looked more like I'd expected it to), saw another, smaller unmarked trail junction, and ended up at my car in a huge cloud of diesel exhaust, which could explain why I had so much trouble going over the ridge in the first place. It wasn't that bad until I got into the exhaust.

So today I learned that people inclined to brain fog should really have their (deceased) dogs with them to give them funny looks when they take the wrong trail. She was good at that.