Iain writes:-

A misty morning saw two cars with a grand total of eight people heading out to Golden Ears Park. The threatened rain didn’t materialise but low cloud and mist, while obscuring the views, did provide some atmosphere. For the fungus fans this was a delightful walk, much photography ensued together with discussion around the suitability or wisdom of eating any of them. See the photos for lots of fungus..

The car park debate was to discuss clockwise rather than anti clockwise, for this loop, a decision spurred on a) by the fact that we’ve usually done this anti-clockwise and b) the world’s largest hiking group set off in an anti-clockwise direction, so clockwise we went.

We walked past Alder Flats for a while in the hope that a view might appear, alas, this was not to be, needed about another thirty minutes hiking to get above the clouds. So we stopped for lunch and talked about what might have been.

Having broken the back of the elevation at that point we completed our circuit back to the cars. Our timing was good as a few days later the park was closed because a load of trees had conspired to block the road in a treespiracy treevolution. The trail was well maintained, a steady stream of hikers and campers attested to the popularity of the trail and there was some discussion about going to the top of Golden Ears when there is more daylight and we can camp. We left that for another day.

see the route here from Iain’s Garmin GPSMAP67i