I hiked with the LL group. There were 25 of us. The hike description may make you breathless so hang on! We left some vehicles at the Pine St. play lot and drove over to North Mesa picnic area to start the hike.
We headed on a sidewalk downhill to the Roundabout and then went briefly uphill to cross San Ildefonso. We started walking on the Walnut Canyon Rim Trail at the northern edge of the golf course. We took that over to the North Pueblo Bench Trail, crossed the tall Pueblo Canyon Bridge, took a jaunt on the South Pueblo Bench Trail to the Acid Canyon Trail to the Ranch School Trail (but stayed atop the canyon bench) to what I call the Rogue Trail (a vertigo-inducing trail per a hiker) to Graduation Canyon (where we had lunch) then up canyon to our cars and the play lot where we had the usual end-of-hike soda pop fiesta at the picnic benches. It was a good hike of a little over 5 miles.
One of our hiking leaders opted to do only part of the hike. She and a married couple left the group at Orange Street. She met us back at the play lot but the couple skipped the get together.
I found out who built the Rogue Trail. I won't put his name here but he's a retired LANL scientist who worked with the Los Alamos Accelerator Code Group and truly did, as I had heard, go over to CERN to work. Yesterday, our open space czar told me that the first trail this man built (wish I had asked where) wasn't built good but said this one improved after the man attended a trail-building workshop.
The Rogue Trail is high on the south bench of Pueblo Canyon. Most places have an uncomfortably steep looking drop off to the canyon bottom. We met a doe on the trail today. The lead hiker held his hand up to halt everyone. The deer stood poised at the edge of the canyon looking cautiously at us. Eventually, she turned around and walked in the direction we were going and disappeared. A hiker in the back groused that she didn't care about seeing the deer and didn't see the point of stopping. But, if we hadn't, there was a chance that the deer may have panicked and tried to head down into the canyon and hurt herself.
The hiker who complained was getting hungry for lunch. At the lunch spot, with beautiful views down canyon of mesas east of Los Alamos, it turned out she had forgotten her lunch. Sorry to admit but I pretended not to hear and kept walking toward a scenic lunch spot at the canyon edge. Fortunately, others with extra food (I didn't have extra) came to her rescue!
Graduation Canyon spills over a steep cliff into Pueblo Canyon. The recent heavy rains must have created a spectacular waterfall because after lunch, as we walked up canyon, we saw flattened grasses indicating that the drainage far overflowed its banks.