- Joined
- Aug 4, 2009
- Messages
- 6,234
I got up at 6:30 yesterday, swallowed a piece of ballogna and a cup of joe, threw on a wool sweater, a pair of light North Face canvas pants and my Minnetonka softsoled mocs. I stuffed my tomahawk and Koyote Leuku in my belt, grabbed my camera and my 12 dollar Eddie Bauer compressible daypack, threw some pipe tobacco and a 32oz bottle of water in it, and ran for the hills to try to shoot some foxes as they were coming out of their dens. There's 3-4 dens within a 1 mile radius of my apartment, the tricky part is beating Yuppie John and Yuppie Jane to the trailhead so their Jack Russell/Black Lab duo doesn't run all the foxes to China. Before I got to my stakeout spot, my camera batteries croaked... so I turned around, sprinted home, grabbed a handful of batteries and ran back out. By the time I got back to the trailhead Yuppie John and Yuppie Jane were already there with their dogs-crap. I decided to make the best of it and continued down the trail running the camera, figuring I'd go for an hour long hike to start the day off on the right foot. An hour later I was making 5miles/hour easily, feeling no pain in my arthritic legs. So I just kept going, figuring once my water was half gone I'd turn around. By then it was snowing pretty heavily, which is odd because Accuweather said it was to be warm and sunny. I was still comfortable dressed as I was so I kept going. I wound up summiting a peak at 6500 feet and covering 25+ miles. An hour after the snow started, it had stopped and the solid cloud cover became cloudless skies. As I summited, I could see a storm system brewing behind the peaks farther down the trail, so I figured I'd turn around and high tail it as fast as possible back to the trailhead. The storm caught up with me-2 minutes later. I had descended maybe 50 feet from the peak and the wind picked up from 20 to 65 mph, and the heavens opened with a deluge of ice chunks. Wearing no cold weather gear other than a wool sweater, I got hammered for what seemed like 2 hours. Later I found out it was merely 15 minutes. My hands were completely numb by the time I stepped into my apartment, but I had over 900 pictures to upload. Here's the results. Lessons learned, carry at least a hat, gloves and some kind of pullover, no matter how warm it is or is supposed to be. I've never done this hike so ill prepared, usually I carry a full survival/BOB rig with me, but my legs were feeling good and I had to take advantage of it.
http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2032624&id=1606500107&l=d2bb7151c5
http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2032624&id=1606500107&l=d2bb7151c5
