Happy Birthday to Me!

Cowboy surprised me with a boxed set of the trilogy "Hunger Games" and an awesome chest rig from Maxpedition.

He then planned a party with a handful of great friends for the weekend. We grilled, we ate, we drank rootbeer, we played Cornhole. What more could you ask for?

The next day we slept in, ate waffles with fresh sliced strawberries, and headed out for a run/hike at a new trail: Maxwell Falls in Evergreen. I can't recall how I discovered this trail online but it had great reviews and was dog-friendly even though it was relatively short for a run.

Maxwell Falls lower parking lot

The trail was supposedly a 4 mile out-n-back hike with some pretty falls at the end, therefore I figured I would start off hiking with Cowboy and then pick up into a run. I was going to run ahead then double back to check in here and there while also gaining some extra mileage.

The trail started out in a patch of thick woods and began climbing. Soft dirt with a lot of roots, I immediately liked it! There were a lot of people (it was Labor Day of course) heading back towards the trail head as we had started out later in the day. It was a beautiful forested run. Just a short distance up the trail was a large intersection in the trail. There were 4 different paths that branched off ahead of me. No signage but one single post to the path straight ahead of me held a yellow outlined arrow. I continued straight following the arrow.

I eventually came to a bridge with a fork in the road just past. Left stated "Maxwell Falls" while right stated "Cliff Loop". Hmmmm. I decided to take the right since I was far enough ahead of Cowboy that I could always double back and still meet him at the Falls. I texted him my plans and continued on when I got the go-ahead. Heading onto Cliff Loop I found the trail to be nearly void of people (YAY!). I did meet a couple with a dog who gave me great directions as to where this trail led to and advised me to "stay left of the next fork in the road. You will see a blank post in the middle of the fork." I thanked them and continued on.

I came to the post and kept left. I lost the trail a few times when the dirt began to turn rocky. I arrived at some truly cool cliffs so I figured I was in the general area of where I was supposed to be. The trail wound around up onto some cool cliffs with gorgeous views. I saw a few rock circles with old campfire ash in the center. On the edge of the cliffs some of the rocks held metal hooks for rock climbers to use. I could imagine this would be a great place to hang out, climb, and camp. Waking up to the sunrise off the cliffs and feeling the warmth spread along the boulders would be magical. 

The trail finally came to a "T". The sign post was a little confusing but I chose to go left and down which brought me to the Falls area. Just in time, I met up with Cowboy as he made his final ascent to the Falls. Sadly, our expectations were dented as the "falls" turned out to be just a small stream of water cascading down some rocks. I figure this event is much more exciting come spring with all the snow melt. Right now everything was so dried up. It was still pretty and we walked along the creek while Argos splashed and lapped. Then we kissed and headed back down the trail (I continued back along Cliff Loop).

We met up again at the bridge, hiked a little and chatted about the book Atlas Shrugged, and then I took off running again soaking up the glorious downhill.

We previously ended up buying a copy of Atlas Shrugged in hardback but found neither of us had the time or patience to pick our way through such an enormous volume. I ended up listening to the abridged version  on audio book and loved it while Cowboy was listening to the unabridged version. He would report back every so often as to where he was in the novel so that I could compare the two versions and see how much I "missed" by reading the abridged. So far I find that I didn't really miss a lot. The ideas and speeches were still there but slightly reduced with precision. The content was all there without all the erroneous details. I found her speeches to be amazing but incredibly lengthy. I mean, really, who talks like that...lecturing an individual for pages upon pages while the lecturee just stands there listening?

The book is a great conversational piece to dissect. You'd have to be brain dead not to thoroughly admire the noble and courageous speeches the characters deliver chapter after chapter. We both agreed how utterly amazing it would have been to have one of our former presidents such as Reagan deliver a speech by Ayn Rand (or even have her as THE presidential speech writer). Of course, you would have to have it be a president that would actually back up his words with some serious action for the full jaw-dropping effect.

Anyways, I would love to revisit Maxwell Falls for another trail run especially to check out those other trails that branched off from the main one. Maybe more around spring time and on a week day where there may be less people to navigate around.

My run ended up being about 6.5ish miles since I took the longer way around to the falls via Cliff Loop. If I would've taken Maxwell Falls trail the entire way it would have been closer to a total of 4 miles.