Super Hike

Super Bowl Sunday - big deal. But my second post of the day!

Decided to take a late afternoon hike with Sadie. After this morning's depressing outlook that the ice-covered snow was too treacherous, a very warm day changed things more than I could have anticipated.

Thinking it was going to be too hard to hike far, we started from Chestnut. I thought I'd just go Green to the Y/G Crossover and loop back to Chestnut on Yellow. But I realized pretty soon that it wasn't going to be that bad. We got to the Y/G Crossover pretty quickly so we kept going. My plan was either to loop on Red Square to Orange or continue on Green and take the Red Circle home.

The snow was a little annoying and I soon discovered that I should have worn the snowshoes. Not often but every once in awhile one foot would crash through up to your knee or sometimes as deep as your thigh. When we got to the Red Square, it was not very travelled. As much as I generally take the path less taken, the more trampling on a trail, the easier the hiking. And Sadie seemed to want to continue on the Green.

As we rounded the corner, still crashing through the snow surface, perhaps a little more frequently, we came to the area I call "Little Italy" where the Red Square and White come almost tangent with Green so we still had the option of hopping over to the Red Square. But there were no tracks to be seen so we kept going on Green.

The sun was still about a fist at arms length above the horizon so we had plenty of daylight left. But things were soon to get beyond our control. When we reached the Red Circle, only one set of prints went up the steps which were buried under feet of snow. Sadie usually is the one who wants to keep going but she seemed pretty intent on going the way she knew was toward home. But I was concerned about the lack of tracks, so we kept going on Green.

Along the Green trail through the upper valley I started to feel bad for Sadie. She was crashing through the snow almost as much as I was where she had been mostly walking on the surface before. The plan now was to go to the Red Triangle but when we arrived at the Y/G Crossover, there were no tracks ahead.

I was getting pretty tired by now and had fallen a number of times. As I worked my way up the Y/G Crossover, I remembered the time that Sadie had run away from me around there. At some point in here I was thinking that someday my luck is going to run out and they're going to find me up there. When I reached the high point on the crossover, I called home because I was afraid they might be wondering where I was. They weren't concerned and I said I would be home soon, now that it was all downhill.

The trip down was harder than I expected but we got to the Yellow lookout and I took in the view for a bit. As we started off, I hit the only spot all day that the ice coating was impenetrable and it caught me off guard. I went down like a few other times, with my bare hands into deep snow. It had been so warm when we started out and I was pretty well heated up after the workout, but I only had a light sweatshirt on.

A little way down the trail, Sadie started wagging her tail and running ahead. I thought she was just excited to be in familiar territory but then I saw a head cresting the next rise. It was a lone hiker, I later realized it was the guy who always parks near our house. We talked for some time and then Sadie and I headed home.

I think the whole hike took us over an hour and a half. The conditions were better than expected in that it wasn't as impassable as I expected in my earlier post but the unpredictable one foot punching through the snow had me off-balance a lot of the time. Also, all the deep snow stepping had filled both boots with snow which was now water. When I got inside, I poured the water out of the boots.

It had been tiring but it was a super hike.