Back in early January one of my hiking buddies sent me an email recapping the facts and figures for the mountain adventures we had done in 2013.
“If baseball is nothing but a game of statistics,” he wrote, “why can't hiking be, too?”
I understood that my friend was joking, because the reality is that we don’t do hikes so that later we can brag about how many miles we have traveled, or how high we have climbed on a peak. Our trips are more about breathing clean air, taking in the beauty of nature, recharging our spirits.
Still, the numbers were kind of fun to know. According to my friend’s journal, we did 42 hikes in 2013; traveled 391 miles, for an average of 9.3 miles per hike; and gained 105,404 feet (19.96 miles) of elevation, for an average of 2,510 feet per hike.
“If nothing else,” my friend concluded, “doing this calculation demonstrates that I have way, way too much idle time on my hands.”
Today I thought I’d post sets of pictures I’ve shot on hikes my friends and I have done the past three weekends.
The image above is one that a friend shot of me, laying in the high country snow and using a compact camera to make snaps of the others who were on the trip (I also carry a larger camera to use for more "serious" pictures.)
That hike was on the Icicle Ridge Trail in the Central Cascades, a route that begins down low in warm, spring sunshine, but climbs 4800-feet into snow.
And last weekend a friend and I headed to Mt. Rainier to make the long, snowy trek to Camp Muir at 10,200 feet, the spot where most climbers spend their first night when making the 2-day trip to the 14, 409-foot summit. We were in snow every step of the way that day but there was not a cloud in the sky. Most of the day it was warm enough that we hiked in just our base layer clothing, not needing jackets.
At day’s end we lingered on Rainier to watch evening light paint nearby Pyramid Peak a red-gold color, and a nearly-full moon rose to complete the picture.
