Days 5 and 6

Day 4, Friday, started with good intentions, as far as conditioning for hiking. However, my responsibilities with the family took over. I ended up subbing a half day at Glendale High School for the baseball coach. Which was cool because Taylor is on the team under a different coach. It was a good day.

Today, however, I kicked butt! Today was the first Saturday that we had no major plans. Thursday and Friday were off days, so I wanted to really push myself and put some miles under my boots. So, after a bit of a lazy morning, I took off around 10:30am and went to the Galloway Creek Greenway Trail. I hit the trail at 11:00am, straight up. It was a really easy trail with minimal elevation changes and no tricky footing (it's all paved). So, I wasn't worried about strength as much as I was worried about challenging my endurance. I wanted to hike 7 miles in 2 hours with a 20 lbs. pack. Of course, the entire way, I was thinking: Colorado is not flat, and this 20 lbs. is half of what I'l be carrying. So, I was excited about what I had done, but realized I had much farther to go. I feel like I did challenge myself by revving it up every time I started to slow down. I didn't want to just walk. I wanted to get on the move. I wanted to see if I could push past the exhaustion or the desire to quit. I successfully completed over 7 miles in exactly 2 hours.

One thing that helps when you're on the trail, whether it's on a mountain, valley, or paved sidewalk is that you have to get to where you're going. You can't stop. The motivation that comes from realizing that stopping and staying is not an option pushes you past the exhausted muscles and transforms your state of mind. You can't quit. Your car, or campsite, is miles away and you have to make it there before you stop. You have to get there before you can enjoy that "enlightening" moment when the weight drops from you shoulders and the constriction eases off your feet and you start eating that Clif bar, setting up camp and thinking about dinner.

A lot of times I'm asked why in the world would you walk that many miles with all that weight on your back? Well, other than the fact that you can't see a lot of the stuff I've seen in your car; you can't experience hearing a water fall, then coming around a corner to be blown away; you can't isolate yourself so completely in an RV; it's the sense of success when you get to the campsite. It's the ability to look behind you at all those miles and feet of elevation and say, "What's next?" Hiking challenges me on levels that I've never challenged myself before. Camping is the reward for a long day's hike. That's why we do what we do.

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Day 4

Day 4

Well, I took today off. No core strengthening. No hiking. No walking. Just planning. I talked to the buddy who invited me and we settled some things. Everyone packs their own food. Everyone cleans up after themselves and I'm going to get the rental car and they are going to pay me back. I'm going to get to Colorado by 7:30-8:00ish and set everything up with the car and first campsite.

We'll be staying at Olive Ridge the first night, them going to the Wild Basin Area for the remainder of our journey.

Today, I started planning my meals. I love backcountry camping. It's great to be able to plan out the meals and take time to really get an idea of how I want to eat and how I can prepare it on the trail. Jennifer was gracious enough to let me get a cookbook, too. This book is the coolest. There's also a Vegetarian one. Boy, hiking tastes good!

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Day 3

And Day 2 recap:

Yesterday I did what I said, I grabbed my new boots and loaded up a daypack. I knew I wasn't going to get lost or be out long enough to need food, so I just filled my new Camelbak with water and went to it.

First, however, I grabbed a fleece and added some weight to the pack to make it 20 lbs. and started walking. Our dog was so excited when I started getting ready, I took her with me. So, my 2 mile walk that should have taken 30-45 minutes ended up taking over an hour. It turned out pretty good. We mainly walked on the street so there was nothing really challenging as far as elevation or tricky footing. Afterwards, I jumped in the Jeep and drove the same route just to be sure of my mileage. Yep, 2 miles. Man, that's a long way from 10 miles...

So, today, I did the same thing: had the 20 lbs. pack and took off down the same route. I ended up taking a longer route just to add some miles. When I drove it on Tuesday, I thought is was 5 miles, but I double-checked today and it's just 3.5 miles. Hey, that's better than only 2! As I was walking along, I started to feel the rain. The forecast called for scattered thunderstorms for the entire week, but as the forecast was the same last week and didn't rain at all, I just took off in some cotton shorts and a performance T and planned on dealing with whatever happened. Well, it did rain. It started with the light sprinkle and then came the fat, drenching drops. It wasn't all that bothersome and as I came to the end of yesterday's route, I made the decision to keep going. After all, I was as wet as I was going to get. So, I trekked on through the rain with my toes nice and toasty. The boots have, after all, a Gore-tex membrane to keep the wet out and the warm in. Have I mentioned I love my new boots? Yeah, they're the best.

The rest of me was drenched, but I didn't mind. It reminded me of hiking the Ozark Highlands Trail on Spring Break my senior year. We hiked a 55 mile section from parking lot to parking lot, basically. It was day 3 when the rain came. Over halfway through the day (maybe 5-6 miles down the trail) when the rain started. We hiked through the mud and ended the day in a shelter that was carved out of the side of the mountain. Around the turn of the 19th century, they carved out the stone and shaped what they carved out into bricks and put them around the outside of the shelter stacked to meet the celing with two spaces for doors. It was just amazing sitting there on the floor of that shelter listening to the rain outside. Ahh, nostalgia.

But at the end of this hike, I was able to come home, take off my wet clothes and jump into a nice, hot shower. I finished the 3.5 miles in in just 65 minutes. That's better. I'm thinking about either doing that same route the next couple of days, or heading to the Ozarks Greenway Trail
that starts just south of where we live. That trail is 5 miles one way and I would have to go all the way down and back. I might leave that for this weekend or next week... Get into shape a little more, you know?

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Day 2

So, Day 2 comes only 7 weeks after the last post. Well, what can I say, it's been a busy two months. Taylor and I did get to Hercule's Glades. Aaron, the naturalist, tree-hugging, frog-licking, owl-petter, went hunting with his new uncle. Yes, I am aware of the contradiction, but the kid who cried over slaughtering cows for hamburgers wanted to go try to shoot a turkey. I don't know why or how, but that's what he wanted to do.

Friday morning, the day we were to leave, was spent with Aaron getting his hunting gear and license. Then, Taylor and I went out to get what we needed. We went from hunting stores to Wal-Mart to outdoor specialty stores. In order to enjoy the next day in nature, we spent the previous day entirely in the car. One stop was made picking up my new friends:

With Aaron headed to Waynesville around 6:00pm, we loaded the car and took off at 7:00pm to make the hour drive. We ended up arriving well into the evening and setting up camp, cooking and cleaning in the dark, but it was a good experience.

We took off at 9:00am on Saturday after a good breakfast and packing everything up. I stuffed as much in my pack as I thought I could carry and set off down the trail to Long Creek. We hiked a couple of miles and stopped to explore the creek a little bit. I brought some purification tablets with us because I knew we couldn't carry as much water as we needed. So, the plan was to hike to Long Creek, grab some water from the creek, then keep hiking. Now, this wasn't my first trip to Herc, so I knew that water is pretty scarce, but there had been several days of rain preceding the trip, so I thought finding water wouldn't be a problem. Well, that's what I get for thinking... Water, needless to say, was scarce. We ended up filtering water from a puddle through Taylor's, then using the tablets.

As we ate lunch, the ominous clouds to the south made me think another long-lasting rainstorm was approaching. Normally, we would have stayed and just hiked through it. Rain is your friend on a hot Missouri day. However, I had hiked ahead and tried to find the right trail that would cut northeast and take us to the eastbound trail that lead back to the parking lot. Well, the topo map that I had bought from the Conservation department didn't, exactly, match up with what I was experiencing on the ground, so I didn't feel like taking my son bushwacking through the forest and possibly getting lost until well after dark. So, we turned around and headed back. All-in-all, we did about 6.5 miles from 9:00am to 1:00pm, the last two, with Taylor in the lead, took us 45 minutes and from 800 ft. to 1300 ft. I was doing fine through the first few miles, even thought I was doing great, but then Taylor took off up the hill and I couldn't nderstand why my legs and lungs weren't working. The trek up the hill was a reminder that I haven't walked with 40 lbs. on my back up 500 ft. in a long time.

The weeks that have passed since then have been strange and full of all the little things that keep us busy. So, today is the day. I'm headed out with a loaded pack to get some miles on my new boots and try to get these legs into some semblance of shape. I have three more weeks and am going to try and get out everyday in order to push my body to a level of fitness that will keep me going in the mountains of Colorado. So, here's to walking 'til my legs fall off!

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10 weeks

Okay, here's the story. A good friend of mine called me last week and asked me to join him and a couple of guys he knows on a hiking trip. Right now, the destination is one of three places: Pueblo, CO, Tucson, AZ, or outside Las Vegas, NV. Vegas would be fun, after killing myself physically for four days, I could kill myself financially! How great would that be?

A little background: If first started hiking when I was in high school with some guys from my church. I live in the Ozark Mountains of Southwest Missouri, so hiking trails are plentiful. In two years, I had racked up almot 200 miles on the trail. The longest outing was a five day trip doing a 55 mile loop of the Ozarks Highland Trail in northern Arkansas. Everything I had was either on my back or distributed throughout the five hikers. Man, good things happen on the trail. We made up several random trail songs, slept in natural structures, tents and underneath the stars the last night. We hiked seven miles one day averaging 1500 foot elevation change, 14 miles another day averaging just a few hundred feet elevation change. We saw huge rivers and dribbling creeks, bright, sunny skies and torrential downpours. It had to be the most amazing nature trip I've been on to date (excluding, of course, my honeymoon). That was all 10 years and almost 40 pounds ago.

So, in order to get in shape for this hike, my wife and boys have decided to help me. I have ten weeks. Ten weeks seems like an eternity. I should be in amazing shape in ten weeks, right? Sure, that would take discipline, though. I'm not the best at discipline. It's not my forte. We have set up a training schedule. Each week, I'll increase the mileage and weight in a backpack with the goal of 15 miles and 40-45 lbs. in the pack. My thought is that if I get up to that mileage and weight, I should be able to do less mileage at higher elevation. I'm starting small: 1 mile, no pack on Missouri roads. I'd rather not overexert myself on the first week.

Next week is Spring Break. That means, no substitue teaching jobs and time at home with the kids. This should be the perfect week to take the boys out into nature and show them how the old man does it. I hope it turns out that way. Both have been in Boy Scouts, so they should be able to help with the camp responsibilities, so we should have a great man trip. Last time didn't go so well. We tried to camp out in their grandparents' acreage. Well, we got a late start and had to set up camp in the dark and the next day, I foolishly let them go off alone while I tried to clean up the campsite (leave no trace).

This time, we're going to Hercules Glades. That's my favorite spot in southwest Mo. I've logged several miles at Herc and know a lot of the trails by heart. There's enough elevation change to get a pretty good trail workout, but a limited supply of water. We've had a lot of rain this week, so, hopefully, we'll be okay.

Man, I can't wait! It's time to get out into the woods. Why? Because it's there.

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