Napa County North Shore Trail Hiking Trip Report 3/19/16

A bit late on recapping our hike to Napa County on the North Shore Trail. We did this hike the same day I did the Lucky Run Half Marathon. My legs were good for a short hike and Hubby had picked this out for the fam to do. It was perfect, because it is a hike we could make as long or as short as we wanted and also has great views of Lake Barryessa.

From Davis, the drive was about an hour and 20 minutes. The trailhead is off of Berryessa Knoxville Road, Putah Creek TH and is just a small dirt parking lot. There are no bathrooms at the lot. Here is a map of the trail that I got from the Tuleyome website (a great resource for hiking).

Photo Credit: http://www.tuleyome.org/

If you look at the above map. We stayed on the trail to the right from the trailhead, which took us down closer to the water.

The weather was cloudy at the start of the hike but cleared as we kept on hiking. After following what we thought was the trail, it sorta just stopped and seemed sketchy to keep on going so we turned back and headed down towards the water.

There was no sign of the trail so we just kinda walked along the lake.

The lake is pretty especially with the mountains in the background.

We kept walking even though there was no trail and explored our surroundings. The kids found that the rocks were easy to break. They would kick them and the rocks would crumble with no effort. We learned quickly that where we were hiking was once before covered with water. The lake has gone down the past few years due to drought.

With it being an El Nino year, at least it has been raining some. I love that there is green, the green grass and the greenery you see in the mountains.

We did spot some interesting skeletons along the hike. We weren't sure what animal it came from.

We hiked to this downed tree where I took a pic of Hubby and the kiddos. This is where we stopped and enjoyed the views for a bit and then decided to turn around.

We never did find the trail.

We got in our share of breaks. Here one of the kiddos wanted to stop to drink some water.

 Lots of good picture taking opportunities. 

 One last look back at the lake pic before heading back to the car.

From the tree back to to the trailhead was about .79 miles according to my Garmin. I started it on our way back because I forgot to turn it on at the start. Overall, not a bad hike except there was not much of a trail to follow. We think that maybe the map is old and at that time, the water used to be higher and where we were walking was not on the map because it used to be underwater. If that makes any sense we should have just stayed higher to be on the trail, but even that was hard to find at the start. Anyway, it was still a good almost 1.6 miles total of good exploring with the kiddos and enjoying the views of Lake Berryessa.