Ice Cave Creek Trail 10-4-14

Beautiful fall morning was spent hiking up the Palmer Reservoir trail to Ice Cave Creek trail, then onto Swank, Winding Stair, and back down Winding Stair to Inlet and back to the reservoir trail.  Distance a little less than 6 miles (140 runtotal) and about 1300-1500 ft elevation gain.  After the turnoff all the trails are fairly easy - you feel the warmup going up the reservoirs as there is a decent incline there.  Ice Cave Creek area was very peaceful.  After the Inlet turnoff, Winding Stair earns its name with fairly relentless incline up to the overlook where we turned around and came back down. Inlet trail became a nice aspen meadow.  There were many people on the trail by the reservoir but we encountered no one on Ice Cave Creek or Inlet and only a few on Swank/Winding Stair.  We saw the Ice Cave Cliffs but chose Winding Stair over ascending them - so maybe next time we'll do that. This is a very nice hike that I am sure we will want to try again.

sumac

nice graffiti on dam

lower reservoir

late wild Strawberry

Ice Cave Cliffs from Winding Stair

Aspen grove on Inlet trail

upper reservoir

We went up orange to blue then left on purple, right on green to the #1 or so, back down green to pink and out orange back to the start.  Most is easy - harder parts are actually orange up to the reservoir and green past the pink.