South Side of Lake Hodges

That's actually some fun dirt over there on that wild side of Lake Hodges. You get pretty up there on the side of the hill on that side of the lake. And as dry as it looks, there are some nice patches of scrub oak forest, and of course some poison oak, and on Sunday there were snake tracks everywhere. I also saw what looked like an unmarked Kumeyaay acorn grinding pit (although there are marked ones too) and a hawk diving into the sage to catch a hummingbird. (The hummingbird escaped and the hawk voiced its displeasure.) But if there's a way to continue all the way along the shore past Fletcher Point (you know, where the flag is) and around the dam at the western end of the lake, I'd sure love to find it - so far as I can tell , south/west of the flag, a single track goes along for a little while and then peters out. Here's a nice slide show a very cool Everytrail user made of the section from Moon Song Court to the flag, and two pics from there:





A complete Lake Hodges loop would be pretty awesome. As it is, going through from Elfin Forest to Escondido where the 15 crosses the lake is pretty neat too. At one point I seriously considered swimming across to get to the more direct north side, but didn't know if it was legal (it's not) and didn't want to get run over by a boat anyway.


From trails.sierraclub.org.


From Medicine in Motion.


The result. I haven't had good old Cali trail dirt like this on me for a while. And I'm 48 hours out from any urushiol exposure with no effect so far, hopefully long enough for my T-cells to start whining about their Type-IV hypersensitivity (they're real crybabies when it comes to catechols with long side chains).