I had been trying to find a day to hike Mt. Konocti with Steve for a few weeks, I had tentatively found a date (provided he got off work like he was supposed to) when I changed my mind. One day while driving over Mount St. Helena I noticed all the maples changing color and you could smell the bay trees. I decided this was the perfect time of year to attempt the Table Rock hike again.
The last attempt (4 or 5 years ago) we didn't make it all the way to Table Rock before we lost daylight.
We had perfect hiking weather and we didn't encounter very many hikers until the very end of our hike. We made it to the overlook without any problems.
Robert Louis Stevenson State Park covers some truly beautiful country.
We covered the trail up to and just past where we had hiked before. As we followed the trail we noticed some black PVC pipe running along a little stream. We both got pretty nervous not wanting to run into anyone's "garden" being nervous we somehow lost the trail. We tried a couple paths that didn't work out. So we back tracked trying to figure out where we went wrong. We did quite a bit of extra hiking around without finding the trail we were looking for. I was almost ready to head back and concede defeat a second time (we had planned on being back in time to pick Ally up from school). Steve convinced me that we should try one more time, he was much less willing to give in to defeat. This time we realized we had been so busy looking at the pipes we missed the (now very obvious) creek crossing and followed the trail up to Table Rock.
The view from Table Rock, looking down on Calistoga and the Napa Valley.
The rock itself is pretty interesting, some kind of volcanic rock covered in sharp ridges.
I'm glad Steve convinced me to try one more time and that we finally made it to Table Rock!
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