Reading (For Dummies)

Same Freedom, Different Hill

I suppose I need to start going on these things alone. Not that I mind groups, I do enjoy the company from time to time. But it'd be nice to just eat gorp for a whole weekend, instead of worrying about other people's opinions on hot meals. The motivation behind that is, of course, the pudge on my belly. I was shocked to find things jiggling a few weeks ago when I went running. A daily regiment of 5k plus cycling a few days a week has kept things somewhat solidified, but it's scary to think that I need to keep doing this stuff my entire life. I'd rather be backpacking, as they say, so that's what I'm ending up doing a lot.

The plan was to leave Friday afternoon at 2:30, go to Elk Lake that night, hike two miles or so in. Saturday would take us up Hunter's pass to the top of Dix, and hopefully provide us a nice view of a few of the other peaks. Then back down the east side of Dix, where we could camp out on the way back south.

I arrived home at 2:30pm on Friday from a Sun Solaris conference to find my truck with a flat tire. It took an hour and a trip to the parts store to get the wheel off, thanks to rusty bolts (I even broke some Craftsman tools in the process), plus a bit more time to drop the wheel off at a gas station, and even more time to wait and see if a plug would work. It didn't, so I left it to be patched and balanced while I went home and packed.

The mad scramble of throwing things in my pack was fun, if hectic craziness can be considered fun. We got out and on the road around 5pm, and made it to the trailhead at around 10:30 thanks to a wrong turn made by me.

An hour in and we were at the first lean-to, where we spent the night.

Up at 8am, we opted to go up the steeper Beckhorn trail to reach Dix, stopping on the way around 1pm to admire the clouding-up view from Beckhorn Peak. Then it was over to Dix, and back down to Hunter's Pass.

I made the interesting decision to pick up a pair of cross-country skis that had been left on top of Dix. One of the bindings had broken off, no doubt whoever skied up with them had gotten a bit irritated at the prospect of carrying them down. Were I in the position, I would have. So I'll blame the hapless skier and speculate that he was probably Canadian -- it may sound stereotypical, but Canadians often come down to the Adirondacks and seldom clean up after themselves, a sight that I've seen with high frequency.

We didn't make it back to the lean-to until almost 4:30pm, and we were all exhausted. I cooked us up some dinner after Laura and Monica chopped our vegetables. While flavorless, our onion, broccoli, carrot, and couscous stew provided a bit of warmth and let us all tell stories...until the hour of 6pm, at which we all went to bed.

We woke up around 6am on Sunday, packed up, and hiked out. We were on the road before 8am, and back to syracuse around noon. It felt like a workday in that sense. These weekend trips are leaving me refreshed and giving me the motivation to return to work each Monday, so in a deeper sense it did not feel like a workday.