Hiked this with a small group of scouts today, starting from the Upper Trailhead at Middle Fork Campground, and hiking all the way to the Tenerife Trailhead.   Had a great hike.  The upper portion is open secondary forest, the middle portion was the old CCC road bed often blasted from a steep wooded face.  The lower portion is a current DNR road through old glacial moraine at the base of Mt Teneriffe.   Much of it was shady, but the sunny portions were pretty hot today.  There were some dicey creek crossing, especially the Blowout Creek crossing.  Total hike 13.5 miles.

Up Bessemer Rd to CCC trail - to CCC extension trail to the campground and back.  A few trees across the trail - everything is quite lush right now - a pessimist would say it's starting to get overgrown. All the creek crossings are non-issues - the swollen spring flow is done.

My girlfriend and I hiked about 6 total miles of CCC Blowout paths. Which is the exact Blowout trail is unclear. We kept right as we went up the utility road and veered off that road onto a path that was minimally overgrown and easy. Caught a good view! There are many stream crossings, but they're easily negotiated. Strong winds kept the bugs at bay, mostly, but the season is upon us.

Our hiking group of seven women are enjoying our longer spring hikes in the valleys to prepare us for the shorter and harder hikes in the mountains.  Although this hike is very easy, there were 17 water crossings....only seven that required boulder/log crossing.  This made the hike more adventurous and it became a challenge on who would return with the driest feet!  After 8.5 miles roundtrip, not a single one of us won...but we didn't care :)

This is a great hike for a couple of reasons. First, I came up Middle Fork on Saturday and as usual there were quite a bit a cars for the more popular hikes and in the entire 9 miles I walked I only encountered 4 people! Second, it's very easy. I walked with my two dogs off leash and it's a well maintained flat trail. Third, yes you are walking through second growth forest but it's still a walk in the woods. There are numerous spots with great views of nearby mountains, cool streams and mini waterfalls where my dogs would splash and swim. This trail guide says you will see old growth but I took the route described and all I saw was stumps. It's still a very uncrowded, peaceful, beautiful trail in the woods! The one thing is that this time of year there were a couple of stream crossings that would be difficult to get over with kids or as an adult with out getting wet. My dogs had no trouble getting across and I didn't either really but some places took a little more planning so my feet didn't get soaked. There was one area with some bugs but nothing too bad.