Reading (For Dummies)

Hiking Exhausted

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Today Ferri and I went hiking near Frauenstein in the Erzgiberge Mountains. They are certainly beautiful. Especially today. A frost settled on everywhere lately. The temperature hung between -10 and -6C (I guess that's in the mid-teens to lower 20s in Farenheit). So it was a bit cold. But it made me appreciate more fully the beauty of GoreTex. I wonder if they make GoreTex pants....

The "snow" you see in the pictures is actually frost, accumulated fairly thickly.

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Frost

Strangely the frost grows in the direction that the wind blows from. An icy "fog" (which is what it is) sticks to things as it blows by. The fog was everywhere, but it wasn't ice crystals. More like water molecules that were frozen but isolated, awaiting the opportunity to form a lattice by attaching to another water molecule. It makes me feel like I understand how snow forms a little better now. It must be an interesting process in the clouds...

I think we hiked about just over 20km, but hard to say. I didn't bring the GPS. Ferri unfortunately slipped and fell into a creek on the way back...I can't imagine walking for several hours in this temperature with wet feet, but he didn't complain. He strikes me as a real mountaineer.