Monthly Archives: September 2009

Watching the Purdue/Norte Dame game and it is totally stressing me out.  We are always getting hit with penalties……gggrrr  I love my Purdue football, but they stress me out big time……

As you saw from my tweets, we went for a hike Wed.  Two different maps list it hike we took from 9.3 mile – 9.7 mile…..according to my pedometer we did 12miles….which is what it felt like.  It ended up taking us 8hrs & 10min….our 12mile hike last year took us 8hr & 20min.   So I was totally not happy with our time considering it was 2+miles shorter.

But as we look back on it, we didn’t take into the fact that we were starting at 4400ft so the air was thinner. Our total elevation increase was only 1400ft, compared to the 2900ft last time….but unlike last time, this wasn’t just straight up and straight down.  We went up and up…..but then went back down a couple hundred feet so we can cross a muddy glacier river and then back up and up….lol  So looking back, that did slow us down.

The most frustrating part hike was the when the trail went through the ski slopes.  The trail was barely wide enough for single file and it was so deep, like it was cut out that you keep tripping on it and had to keep yourself from falling on your face.  That really slowed us down.

So that was the logistics of the hike.  =)

Taken from the parking lot of a different trail head.  We were looking for ours.

But it really was a beautiful hike, it felt like more adventure then a hike.  We hiked through the forest, on the side of ravines, down “gravel” pit (for lack of a better word), had to cross the 1st glacier river we ever crossed and lost count of how many streams and falls we had to figure out how to cross.

Words and pictures doesn’t do this justice.  This ravine was stunning.

Hiking on down, so we can get to the slope on the other side.

You can barely see the trail we took down the side of the slope to get the glacier river.

The muddy glacier river we had to wade in.  Luckily hubby thought ahead and we brought our beach shoes that we got in FL.  That came in handy, the water was very, very cold and went just below my knees.  This pic is about 10ft about the river.

One of the many mountain waterfalls.

The ski lift looks so high, but imagine about 15-20ft of snow underneath those chairs come winter.

I didn’t think my camera got this!  This is from one of the ski slopes we crossed.

Umbrella Falls, about 2-3 miles before the end of the trail.

I will say, no more 10+mile hikes.  We are thinking of more like 5-8miles.  Because by the end our feet/toes and other parts are hurting from the extreme up and downs.  Of course, it doesn’t help that we were carrying over 20# pack wise.  90% of the stuff we had in our packs we didn’t need, it was all emergency stuff…like extra clothes and food, in case we were stuck on the mountain over night and first aid stuff.  But it is much better to be safe then sorry. =)

We did skip the gym the day after the hike, but only that day.  We did end up going Friday and even with our aches and pains, we did really well, surprisingly.  So we are pretty proud of that.  Last year we couldn’t move for like 3 days….lol  We still have some aches, 2 of my toes are feeling weird, but not too bad otherwise.

I spent Thursday trying to catch up on my work from Wednesday, but mentally it was a bitch…..lol  My brain had a hard time focusing.  But I got it pretty much caught up on Friday with a few lose ends to do, nothing unusual.

Today, I have just been doing a combination of personal and work projects, more personal…..like catching up on a bunch of mags that have piled up on me.  So I’m pretty content that way.  Now if Purdue would win this game, it would be a perfect day……gggggrrr