Ride to Veerkamp's cabin and the top of Two Peaks

I went up to Tells Creek for a ride on Sunday with Gary McFall, Stuart and Brit Porter. I had ridden the Porter's horse Jake in the same area the day before, but I was able to ride my own horse Annie this day.

We rode out from the equestrian campground to Veerkamp's cabin along a very beautiful route. Stuart brought Doug the Sunday paper special pony express delivery. We were greeted warmly and we tied our horses up on the hitching post. Annie squealed at Jake and pulled back once before I retied her and she moved behind a tree a bit. She had some very exciting mare
behavior for all three geldings on the ride during most of the day,
but nothing too bad, especially in comparison with Kelsey the prior
day.

Any way we had some cold drinks (water and soda) with Doug Veerkamp,
the caretakers and Doug's wife and talked about trails and general
stuff. Doug told us about a new trail that the caretaker, Tom, had cut
this season and which they had just returned from riding with their
mules. Beautiful mules out in the bright green pasture. After that we
worked our way up towards Perl Lake and around to find the new trail.
We found the trail that we missed last year when Gary and Stuart took
us bushwhacking, Gary put up some new ducks and marked it better so we
could find it next time.

The new trail took us across the backside of Two Peaks and around to
the top of the second peak. The views were amazing and we had about a
300 degree unobstructed vista to the west. It was very windy and a bit
cold up there as well. I snapped some pictures with my iphone, but none really do justice to the view.

This trail was only one way out to the peak, so we turned back around
and completed our Veerkamp loop returning to camp through that amazing
terrain of woods and granite.

My boots stayed on wonderfully until the last mile. Somehow I managed
to lose the right front just a little way from camp. I don't think
that I have lost a front renegade before, so I am not really sure how
it failed. I had replaced the bottom velcro on all of them and they
seemed to be holding quite nicely for that rough ride. I retraced my
tracks but could not find it. Stuart is leading a camp-out for DHA
there next weekend and said he'll keep an eye out for it when they
ride that trail. At least that was one of the boots that had lost
nearly all of it's traction and was not something new. Hopefully he
can find it, since it does have a few miles left on it.

Annie looks good this morning after her ride and has just a small
amount of filling in her legs. She seems much happier with me now that
we rode and is not as spooky as she had been the past few days. I
think that I'll pull her out for a bath this afternoon and get the
trail dirt off.

National Map

I had no idea that the US government had spent so much time making a great web based map viewing tool. I just stumbled upon the site while trying to locate downloadable topo maps.

http://geodata.gov/