trail time

After our tasty breakfast at the No Worries Cafe, we continued into Park City to hit the trails.  I've said it before, but the Park City trail system is just spectacular: sprawling all through the greater Park City area, well-marked (mostly), accessible to pedestrians, cyclists and people a-horse.  If we didn't have to work - and, thus have to commute to SLC daily through Parley's Canyon - we'd love to live in Park City.  But we don't (and gosh it'd be difficult to leave the Cottonwood Canyons) and so we just enjoy it over there whenever we can.

Natural snow.  More, please!

We didn't really have a plan for our hike but we did have a map, so we figured we were okay.  The trails were mostly clear of snow except on the north-facing, shady slopes; some spots in the trees were muddy but out of the woods everything was nice and dry.  The weather was pleasant - partly cloudy and warm - and we saw just a couple of MTBers finishing up their rides.  We had the place to ourselves.

Right here, that's the spot

The route we came up with netted us just over six miles:  starting at the Spiro trailhead (off Three Kings Drive), we went up Spiro to Eagle (in and out of aspen groves), to the Crescent Mine Grade which took us across numerous Park City Mountain Resort ski trails, to a PCMR access road, down Crescent Ridge Road  back to CMG, which dropped us off right under the PCMR mountain coaster.

Man-made snow

Views were decent, given the not particularly blue skies and the past-peakedness of the foliage - it'll look a lot better with some snow covering those hills.  We did come across this wonderful old mining remnant, the solid and beautiful King Con ore bin, so sturdily built that it looks like it'll last forever.  It's really fun to find all this history out in the mountains.

King Con ore bin

After our hike we decided to stop by the Wasatch Pub to see if they had any of the new Alta 75th Anniversary Ale.  They didn't but we had a couple beers anyway - it would have been rude to leave without drinking any.