I guess I kind of knew it would happen eventually.
Month after month this winter my friends and I have headed off nearly every weekend for a hike, and, trip after trip, all we have experienced is Perfection. Great weather. Good trail conditions. Fun times by the bucketful.
I suspected that, one day, the law of averages would catch up with our posse and we'd have a dud of a hike... or at least a just-average, meh hike. And that's what happened Sunday.
Though we always put quite a bit of forethought into various possible trip destinations -- we study maps and hiking guidebooks, and we get online and read trip reports other hikers have posted -- in the end, the choice of where we'll go is always a bit of a crap shoot. We just never know exactly what we'll find…and that not-knowing, of course, is a huge part of "adventure."
The trail we did Sunday proved to be a cornucopia of difficulty and the only consistent thing about the conditions we experienced was inconsistency. We'd hike 20 yards of bare but often rocky trail, followed by a 20 yard snow slog -- sometimes fairly deep stuff where we'd posthole up to our knees. In short order we'd invariably come to a winter storm blowdown: a huge tree, blocking the way, and we'd have to do a laborious, tree bark scramble. This rough trail/posthole-in-snow-slog/blowdown-climb proved to be our outdoor adventure scenario for the whole day. It makes me tired just writing about it.
The good news was that, even had we wanted to hike fast, the trail conditions slowed our group to a snail's pace. Thus I saw details around me, little things, that I might normally have walked right past.
Somebody should invent a really tiny digital camera, just the right size for a snail, because I'm thinking that those slow-moving creatures might well have what it takes to be great photographers.
