#179 - The Big Hike - June 25, 2013

Cool thing from the last 24: Completed the hardest hike of my life.   I think my knees are actually ok after all!

The gray at the top is the Hudson River.  I'm looking
down the "trail" we just came up.  The line running
across from the upper right corner toward the lower left
corner is a train line.  We're about 900' up.
Yes, it's that steep.

I met my brother at the Mt Beacon trailhead (yes, that place again) at 8am.  He wanted to finish the hike before the rain came in the afternoon.  I had told Katrina I'd be home by noon.  Perfect alignment.  I figured, we had 6 miles to hike, 3 hours to do it in.  We could certainly average 2 miles an hour, couldn't we?

The hardest ascent complete.  Time for a little break.

The hike starts near sea level, and it's almost a rock climbing exercise getting up to the trail proper. It's marked with white paint spots on the rocks, but it's a 1000 ft vertical gain in about half a mile of horizontal travel.  Pretty crazy, but great views.   I followed Tim most of the way up, and early on there was a place where he put his shoe just above my eye level and he wedged it in a crack of the rock.  The picture and the sound it made belonged on the Discovery Channel or something.  It's something you'd expect to see on TV, not 25 minutes from your house.

6 miles of this deciduous forest broken by rock formations.

I had thought that we'd go up, and then it would be relatively flat from there.  Not so.  Not at all.  We climbed to 1000', dipped a bit, came back up.  We missed a trail marker somewhere and had to follow the blue blazes for a while.  "What in the blue blazes??" came to mind more than once.  It's really easy to lose a trail in the woods here because there is so little underbrush, so trails are marked with paint or little colored plastic disks nailed to trees.  The blue blazes did not have any trail associated with them.  Nothing at all, just a lot of blue markings that we followed.  We were lost (on a trail that was not the one we wanted) for about 20 minutes.  Then Tim recognized the terrain, we found the brook, refilled water bottles, wiped off the sweat, and got back on our way.  The trail took us up to the fire tower again.  This time it was not opening day, and it was a week day.  So we climbed to the top.  The breeze was magnificent, cool and gentle.  Exactly what we needed on a day that was headed north of 90 degrees.

Straight down from the top of the fire tower.

Once we were that far, I knew the rest was 2 miles, and really no up hill any more.  So the hike was great.

It was really fun to spend 1:1 time with my brother, though.  We've done things together over the last year or so - we've moved him twice, and maybe done something else.  But not much.  This day was just natural and easy.  We're getting used to each other, norming in a way that we hadn't before.  And we kinda decided that we'd try to do the Tough Mudder together this fall.  Look it up - it's a 10-12 mile serious obstacle course.  Looks crazy and fun.  I used to think I couldn't run, but now I know better.  I just have to be careful on the down hill., and I can cover a lot of ground without any problems.

The landscape unfolds from this height.

I got home an hour late from that, and spent the rest of the day finishing what I needed to do for Katrina and starting to prepare for my days home with the other kids.

She got home at 10.  I helped unload the car, and cooked 4 lbs of ground beef before konking out for the night at 11.