Hiked with Lara and some of her friends from work.
It was a pretty warm day...lots of sweating. Middle stretch seemed to go on and on. Parked just past the high school on the left.

Found!! One Sony Camera out on Tiger Mountain Trail. Please call me if you lost the camera so I can get it back to you! 317-364-2284

It was our first visit to Tiger Mountain, and we didn't see the main entrance until the end of our hike so we started at the entrance closer to the freeway exit. We followed to Tiger Mountain #2 Peak trail, there were lots of signs and it was well marked. There were a few muddy spots, not very many though. There was a good section of the trail that was getting to be overgrown, you could still easily see the trail but you were getting brushed by weeds constantly, they were about as tall as me. Bugs were not bad though, I didn't get any bites. Apparently that trail was not very popular, we only saw other people in 1 spot about 8/10ths of a mile from the peak (thanks to the kind woman who told us the correct trail to take!) Peak #2 had a pretty nice view, and was very enjoyable until someone started up a bulldozer??? Haha. Oh well. We continued onto Peak #3, not as good of a view, though bulldozer-free. There were quite a few people and dogs there. On the way down we took the cable trail, with a surprising number of people coming up! I hope to be in that good of shape some day. Lots of loose rock, luckily no one slipped on the way down. I'm pretty slow, took around 2:45 to get to the top of #2 and around 1:30 to get down and back over to the car. And the weather was perfect! Not too hot, not too cold, just right :)

Worried about forecast for thunder and high winds, we hit the trail at 6:30am with the plan of thru-hiking the Tiger Mountain Trail. Our first mishap was missing the intersection of the TMT and the Cable trail, which we ended up taking straight up to West Tiger #3. We hit snow at about 2,000 feet and by the time we were on the Summit, the snow was 6 inches deep and the wind was pretty strong. We were unable to locate the connecting trail to the TMT, so we headed back down.

With tired legs but lots of time, we thought we still might be able to do the TMT, so we corrected our course and made good time, until we decided to make up our time by taking the K-3 Trail, which had the same grueling climb as the Cable Trail, with all the same slush.

We connected using the West Tiger RR Grade Trail, traversed a slide, and made it to the TMT, but in some way I still don't understand, ended up going the wrong way and hit Preston Trail. (if you're counting, that's goof #3).

After starting to backtrack, 4 hours after starting, we realized we had left the keys to the end vehicle in the start vehicle (#4). boy were we glad we didn't end up 16 miles down the trail only to be stuck! We ended up going back down the TMT on the sections we skipped, only to run into the closed bridge and having to skip rocks over the creek. And that's #5.

For all the mistakes it was a great early season work out, we didn't get rained on (although the wind blew hail-like chunks of snow out of the trees on us) and it was beautiful as usual.

I'm not sure the snow would have allowed us to do the full thru-hike, but we'll try again in a few weeks, this time with keys and more attention to the map.