10.5 miles, 1,300 ft. El Gain
As it gets later in the year, it becomes more important to be able to finish a hike before it gets too hot. This means starting earlier and either moving faster or shortening the route so it can be completed quicker. To facilitate both fast hikers as well as normal speed hikers, I'm going to try shorter versions of a route paired with a longer version a week apart.
This is the longer (fast hiker) version of the Eastern Loop that includes the fireplace as well as the Pine Lakes/WaterTower trail complex north of Thumb Butte. We will need to be moving pretty quickly to cover the 10.5 miles with 1,300 ft of elevation gain as well as taking a break to eat something along the way before it gets too hot.
If you're confidant in your ability to keep up your speed and handle the climbs, this is the hike for you. Feel free to sign up for both of them if you'd like although there will be a lot of overlap in the routes.
We'll meet at the Spence Springs trailhead off of Iron Springs Rd. This is the road that goes into Emmanuel Pines Camp, but has a parking lot right at the beginning. Starting here, we'll be able to finish most of the climbing before it gets very hot. APS is busy in the area around the trailhead re-routing and upgrading it's power lines, but that shouldn't be a problem for us.
We'll start out on 760 Noodle and turn off onto 707 Willy Nilly Tractor to climb up to 317 Pine Lakes. At this poing the route overlaps with last weeks route until we get to the fireplace. We'll head down 317 to the bottom of 316 Pine Lakes and take that up to 328 Piglet. Once at the top, we'll take 315 Water Tower back towards the Thumb Butte parking lot but will turn off onto 318 West before we get to the parking lot. We'll turn off onto 325 Firewater and follow it to the fireplace. If we haven't stopped to east something yet, the fireplace might be a nice place for that. Then we'll head over to 735 Tatanka and take that to the top of 721 Sidekick and follow that all the down to where we re-connect with 760 Noodle and finish the rest of it back to our cars.