Near my house is a small street that is maybe half a mile long. At each end is a hiking trail. if you go up the trail at one end you can technically go up the mountain, around the south part of the city, and back down the trail at the other end of the street. On the hiking map at both entrances it says it will take 6 and a half miles of hiking to do this.
I've attempted this many times, but never actually done it. Partly because my friends always get too tired, and partly because we end up getting lost. In both cases I end up just walking down a side trail back to a different street. Yesterday I was determined to make it all the way around. I brought my dog with me as I felt guilty that I was having so many adventures on my bike, while she was stuck at home.
We set out rather early as I figured most of my time would be taken up by just trying to figure out where to go. The main problem is that the trail seems to split every 100 yards or so, so you always have to try and figure out which way is the right way. Sometimes these splits meet back up, sometimes you are going pretty far the wrong way, only to have to go back to where you were and choose the other path. Needless to say this happened to me a lot, and there was a lot of backtracking.
Another problem is that in the rare instances there are signs, they say the name of the nearest thing, rather than the biggest. What i mean is there is a huge temple in this mountain and i figured that i would be able to find the way just by following signs for it. However there were never any signs for this big temple, instead the signs would say how far it was to the nearest landmark which was usually a tiny temple that I had no idea even existed.
As I said I got lost a lot. At one point i came out of the trail at a housing community and just had no idea where to go. Thankfully a rather serious looking hiker came by and I decided to follow him. I was hoping that he knew where the beginning of the next part of the trail was, and that he wasn't just walking to his home. Thankfully he did lead the way to the next part of the trail.
Besides the getting lost and having to retrace my steps, I did run into one rather bad situation. I was walking down one trail and it just sort of stopped. But for some reason i kept going, just making my own way through the side of the mountain. It was stupid as it was very slippery and most of my time was spent just sliding down the mountain barely on my feet. The worst part though was having to avoid all the spider webs with monstrous spiders on them. I figured that going down this part would put me out at the normal trail, but it didn't, instead I had to go back up the way I came which was even more difficult.
Surprisingly my dog took all this in stride. In fact I'm shocked with how easily she handled the whole thing. Many parts of the hiking were either straight up or down, where you had to actually hold on to ropes to pull yourself up. Somehow she was able to get up and down these parts without a problem. I never saw exactly how she did this though, as she was always behind me. My guess is that she learned how to teleport.
@skstein Oh yes we eventually made it to the end. Although the last half mile was the worst as I knew I had to go down, but I seemed to always take the wrong way. So I would go down to the bottom, see that it wasn't technically the true end, and just walk all the way back up and take another way down. I think I did this about three times before I reached the true end. It was grueling.
@skstein I think from the time I left my home to the time I got back it was around 4 hours. Granted a lot of my time was just figuring out which way to go, and having to backtrack after going the wrong way. I'm anxious to go back and try the whole thing hike the opposite way and see how long it will take.
March 14th, 2013
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