I Took The Path Less Traveled By: Spionkop Ridge South Castle July 5, 2018

Well the fire I had was Monday and I had plans to leave Wednesday for a 3 night back packing trip with my scout group. Well the fire changed my plans, but I thought I should at least go up the one day Thursday and hike with the boys (that was a good decision). So I took my oldest boy and we biked in the first 5 km like we did on Drywood, except this time we hiked to Blue lake and met up with the boys. As a side note there is ok cell phone service at Blue lake. We then took the cut line from the trail up to a pass as if we were going to hike Loaf and ridge walked all the way over to Spionkop Ridge. It was a pretty traverse and we were able to see down 3 of the 5 finger valleys of the South Castle. The scramble up to Spionkop was pretty good and was most likely the first scramble some of these boys had ever done. The views up on Spionkop were great. We had thought about going to Newman, but I was pretty tuckered and knew I had a long way to go to get out. In all the total distance covered for the day was over 30km. We returned to the lake and relaxed for a moment and put our feet in the lake. Then my son and I hiked/biked back to our vehicle.