Hectic week... now presenting last weekend's mountain climb!

Pictures!

My little mountain-climbing adventure turned out to be more than I had expected. I only managed to convince one other person to go, thanks to the last-minute nature of my planning - Dan Cerillo from New Jersey came along for the workout. I woke up on Sunday after four hours of mediocre sleep, got ready, and we headed out. Proving to me once again that my sense of scale here is completely thrown off, we arrived at the trailhead by bike in about half the distance I had expected.

The weather was wonderful. Nice and cool. We started up the trail and immediately noticed a key difference in the maintenance level between this trail and popular hiking trails to mountain peaks in the US. Namely, that at the start at least, this trail is literally paved. Since there's a shrine at the summit, they've probably been doing maintenance and improvement on this trail for four hundred years. The paving eventually faded out, but the entire trail was exceptionally well maintained, and the steeper parts had stone or wooden stairs embedded.

The steeper spots were the other key difference from all the other summit trails I've done: there wasn't a single switchback. Through tacit agreement, since we were both there for a workout and to make up for laziness, Dan and I both just plowed ahead at the same foot pace no matter how steep the trail got. The trail was almost entirely shadowed by trees, which also had the effect of blocking the wind. By the time we reached the top, we had plenty of sweat to show for our pace. It was almost twenty degrees cooler (Fahrenheit) at the top than at the bottom, and it opened up to the breeze, which felt absolutely fantastic.

Overall the trail goes up something like 2600 feet in less than two miles, which makes it the steepest average slope I've hiked up. I felt marginally bad at the start, really good at the top, and pretty rubber-legged when we got to the bottom again. All told, we went from the dorm to the top and back in under 4 1/2 hours. That was a good day. I slept like a baby that night.

Monday was nothing special, but Tuesday things took a different turn. I've been delaying posting because I've been trying to sort things out. My next post will finally bring everything up to date.