The Facebook advertised, “Frank & Patti's El Moro Hike”

May 2nd, 2010 - This past Sunday our friends and family, Grif, Katie, Laura, Anjanette, Brittany, Alex, Laura, Dana, Chris, Patti and myself all went on our Facebook advertised hike in El Moro. Patti and I were both excited to see so many people come out. We weren’t expecting a lot of people to participate, and come out to the canyon for a day of torture. Actually, only the first part of the hike is a bit difficult. Once we hit the base of the hill that overlooks Emerald Bay, you walk about a mile straight up that hill. We took a few breaks along the way, but everyone made it up the hill just fine.

Along the way some of the girls collected little white rocks to spell out “Lucy” for her memorial. I loaded up my pack with a few larger rocks to add to Lucy’s memorial as well and it’s really taking shape now. This was our 4th visit to the site and with a little help, we want to eventually make a memorial wall with a hole in the center for flowers. Lucy was a large part of my life along with Lucy’s mom Kristen, and all of our friends, and I will miss her forever.

So after adding to Lucy’s site most of our group had other commitments, so we showed them the trail back down to the ranger’s station. They headed down the “I Think I Can” trail…. haven’t heard from them yet, but I’m pretty sure everyone made it okay. That group did get a nice 7 mile hike in.

Now, Patti, AJ and I continued on with our normal hike across Moro Ridge to Sommer Ridge and then took a left on No Name Ridge for the home stretch. Our total hike was 3.3 hours long and 13 miles. It was a really nice day close to 80 degrees and sunny, but the wind did start to pick up. Our original plans were to hike down to Crystal Cove for a picnic but thought it might be too windy so we all three drove to the bluffs in Corona del Mar overlooking the ocean. After we ate the great lunch Patti had prepared the night before, we were all three so tired that we could have taken naps right there on beach towels. On a funny side note, AJ really enjoyed the cookies Patti baked and ate almost a whole bag of them by herself. When Patti and I drove away, AJ drove herself to the back bay and hiked another 8 miles to work off those cookies. She blamed that on me, since I might have been kidding her a little bit, oh well. All in all we had a great time with everyone coming out. Hopefully we all will do this again real soon.