This hike was a relatively easy hike, but being that it was the first long hike of the season, it pretty much kicked my butt. I took a photo at this mile marker. We hiked a little beyond this one, then turned around and walked back out of the canyon as we knew it was going to be an up and back. Fortunately, the return trip was down hill. We had side excursions tacked on looking for geocaches, so overall, the hike was something slightly longer than 14 miles.
One of the things that I tried for only the second time on a hike were trekking poles. I'd received a nice gift certificate and so this was one of the first purchases I made with that. I've used trekking poles one other time on my climb to the top of Mt. Lassen several years ago and it came in handy, but I've never seen a real need to have poles before, so I never went out and got any.
However, I have decided to up my hiking recently, so I decided to invest in the poles. The first time out was a good test because I was walking on relatively flat surface. You develop a rhythm when using the poles, and it went very well. They were a little awkward when looking for a geocache. How do you hold two trekking poles and a GPSr in your hands? Two hand and three things don't work too well, but I managed.
In the future, I believe that if the hike is predominantly a hike, then two poles will be used, but if the hike is predominantly geocaching, then perhaps I'll just bring along one pole for stabilization and for poking and probing into holes where geocaches might exist, or where snakes might exist.
The next time I go out, I'll get to experiment with the gaiters I purchased yesterday. Near the end of this hike, I got really tired of having to wade through fields of foxtails looking for non-existent caches. So I went out and bought some gaiters which fit over the top of your socks and shoes keeping those nasty things out. We'll see how they work out.
No comments:
Post a Comment