25 years on the Giant

I've pretty much abandoned my old blog and I wanted to write about my hikes, so here we go...

After living on the side of the Sleeping Giant for 25 years, my entire family has officially hiked all the trails, becoming Giant Masters as noted on the www.sgpa.org website. Shortly thereafter, we started figuring out how many of the trails Sadie, our dog, has done and decided we could get her there. So mainly Pat (my wife) and I have pushed to get Sadie there in the last few weeks. It has forced us to hike trails we haven't in years.

In making the push, I've started hiking more regularly and doing longer sections in the evenings, squeezing as much as I can into the shorter time after dinner before dark. One evening I hiked the blue trail to the left over the little bridge by the river and had to carry Sadie down the last steep drop. Then we walked under the quarry, ablaze in the sunset, and missed the turn onto violet to the left. We came back and walked down the stairs in front of the old ruins and over the rocks back to the bridge via the violet trail. From there, I tried to push it in the rapidly diminishing daylight on the Red Diamond trail to the left where I thought we'd get to Tuttle. But I missed a turn in the dark and I felt a little like one of the Sims when they keep bumping up against a wall. The "trail" we were on kind of disappeared and there wasn't time to figure out the right way. I even made some vain attempts to determine the color of the marks on the trees using the dim light of my cell phone.

Another evening I went up the Red Circle right from the backyard all the way to the Blue and turned right. We went up and over some impressive cliffs that have beautiful views in the sunset. Back down to the upper valley and across and up Hezekiah's Nob. There is something about that place. I need to find the origin of the name, but it's funny to me because I had a great-grandfather named Hezekiah Summers. So it's a great place to celebrate the end of this summer of this incredible year of 2010. We went down the blue and the wind was picking up and the sky was darkening. Sadie ran ahead but the trail turned right. I turned around and she was gone! Pat called to say she was on her way to pick us up on Chestnut so I told her I had lost the dog. Pat called again from the trailhead and said that she could not even hear me calling Sadie's name so I was farther in than I thought. We both kept calling and met in the woods. Then we went back to the van and called out the window while driving. I suggested we go home because Sadie at least has our phone number on her tag, unlike the first time I lost her shortly after we got her (another long story). Pat dropped me at home and went back. I called Evan to come right home and just after I hung up with him, Sadie trotted out of the woods from our usual exit on the left even though the spot where I lost her was deep in the woods to the right. I called both Pat & Evan and was thrilled to see her and amazed that she had found her way.