Cross Timber Hiking Trail

It rained yesterday and foretasted to be Sunny on Memorial day, so Yong and I decided to go to Cross Timber Hiking Trail by Lake Texoma for a long distance hiking on Memorial day, in preparation for climbing Mt Whitney. The trail is mostly shaded by trees but it is a hilly trail - per North Texas standard. We hiked 16 miles with total of 2500 ft elevation gain. The hiking poles are extremely helpful for hiking on this hilly trail - I could not imagine what could happen today without it.

trail head

portion of the trail is densely bushed 

I learnt quit a few things from  hiking of such a long distance in one stretch of time for the first time.

We were incredulous when Yong told me  the day before that the average speed to hike this trail is 2.5 miles/hour. Come on! We can walk 3 miles/hour in casual walking, I thought. But we completed the 16 mile hilly trail in 8 hours including breaks with our best efforts, almost exactly what he told me. The lesson learnt is that we should not extrapolate a conclusion when conditions are different.

Each of us brought 2 bottles of water and 2 bottles of Gatorade for this 8 hour hike. We barely had enough - we both finished our bottles shortly before we got back to the car. We should have brought more water.

Since the trail has dense bushes, we wore long pants, applied plenty of bug spray in addition to Sunscreen. Despite walking into Spider webs twice on the hiking trail, we got no bug bites on the whole trail.

A cove of Lake Texoma 

Cross Timber trail has beautiful scenes along the shoreline of Lake Texoma but it could become boring since it kind of repeats itself many times - same tress, same bugs, similar coves, and similar bird chirping .....after a few turns we felt we just passed a similar place a few minutes ago.

To me there were many variations - I heard the chirping of cardinals, mocking birds and heard the pecking sound from woodpeckers a couple times among other chirping I am not familiar with, I whistled with them!  The changing clouds and rock formation along the shoreline changed the seemingly same shoreline views; paying a little bit attention to the surroundings - I saw a well camouflaged dragon fly on a dead tree branch, tried to got a closer view of a camouflaged lizard on my camera, I saw different colors of flowers and I saw butterflies.

More fundamentally hiking in the wild for me is to exercise for a better body, to breath fresh air, and to forget about daily life and to have a total mental relaxation of mind. It is like a sign along the trail states - A Stairway to heaven  .... for both body and soul.

Our trail

Texas Sky

A well camouflaged dragon fly

A lizard

A stairway to heaven

The Lake Front at Chicago Downtown

I went to Chicago for a conference this week. The first thing I did after I checked in at Hyatt at McCormick Place on Sunday was to walk to the shoreline of lake Michigan. 

It was a cool Sunny afternoon, and I followed the trail map from the hotel to walk toward the lake front, and was pleasantly surprised to walk by the soldier field stadium (Chicago Bears' home). Despite steady cool breeze, the water in the first marina I passed by was as flat as a mirror - reflecting the blue sky and white yachts. Walking around the Marina I walked toward Adler Planetarium to view the silhouette of the Chicago skyline from this small peninsula.

A Marina

A paved trail

Chicago Skyline in the afternoon

Lake Michigan

The next morning I woke up around 6:30am and decided to run for 5K  and cool down in my usual pace. I brought everything needed for a morning run, running shoes, shorts, T shirt, sunscreen and baseball cap! Getting out of the hotel, I ran north through an area of apartment buildings, turn right through an underpass to cross highways and then an zig-zag overpass to cross rail ways, trying to follow the lake front trail earlier than previous day, I made a wrong turn before reaching 2 km distance, and quickly realized it since the soldier field - my reference point, was in the wrong direction. Corrected course, I turned around when I reach 3km. Instead of a silhouette, the downtown high rises were in the bright morning Sun.

I encountered runners or bikers every 1 ~2  minutes on the  lakefront trail - not too many and not too few. The portion of the trail from hotel to Planetarium is mostly tree lined for a pleasant 5K run and I walked 1 km additional back to hotel. After showering and breakfast, I still had plenty time before the conference kick-off at 9am.

My running trail

Chicago Skyscrapers in the morning Sun

The conference ended at 2:45pm on its last day. I had a short nap and decided to have a 10K walk to the navy pier directly, bypassing the Alder Planetarium.

It was a good extension of my previous trail: different views, close up of high rises, there are steel art work, and concrete art work along the way, and a big fountain in the park surrounded by the high rises. There were a lot more locals and tourists along the lakefront, on the lawn, on the pedestrian walk way, and bike way between the aquarium and navy piers.The long walk produces a new tourist attraction - touring lake front on Segway. In the end I walked 7 miles, i.e. 11+km for the round trip.

The Lake Front at Chicago Downtown is a perfect place for hiking, running or just wandering.