Hot Hiking
Jun. 9th, 2008 08:08 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jayfurrIt's damn hot here in Vermont. It's been as hot as 95 degrees since Saturday and it's been humid too. Not fun when your body has mostly gotten used to cooler temperatures. And when one's house isn't really set up for air conditioning except in the bedrooms.
We went hiking on Saturday, hoping for cooler temps at altitude. Instead, I just about got sick from the exertion, from carrying too heavy a pack, and possibly from being a little under the weather. I'm usually the rough-and-tough one when it comes to a hike in extreme conditions, but Carole actually did better than me that day. We hiked up to Montclair Glen shelter on the Long Trail where a Long Trail work crew was awaiting helicopter loads of logs and boards to reconstruct the shelter. I'd expected that they'd be all but done by the time we got there but as it happened, they hadn't gotten their first load as of 2:30 pm, five and a half hours after they'd expected to have loads arriving. We were recruited to help, but when an hour went by with repeated false alarms and no loads, we sighed and headed off for the summit of Camel's Hump, two miles away. Partway there, I realized that a) I'd run out of water and b) I was really suffering from the heat. I insisted we turn back and Carole assented. (I own and should have brought a water filtration gadget that would have let us refill our Camelbaks from a nearby stream, but for some strange reason decided it wasn't necessary. I guess I hadn't really realized how hot a day we were in for -- between us, Carole and I went through about ten liters of water and could have used a lot more.)
Oh, as one might expect: the helicopter started arriving with its loads as we were giving up and heading back down the mountain to our car.
Click on this one a couple of times to see the tiny helicopter against the green trees on the mountainside:
The helicopter, closer up, with a load suspended below:
Carole at the old, soon-to-be-replaced Montclair Glen shelter:
Me near the shelter at the junction of the Long Trail and the trail we took up to the gap:
I was one hot, tired hiker when we got back to the car. We'd probably done about six miles all told, but those were six nearly freakin' vertical miles for a big chunk of the way.
We went hiking on Saturday, hoping for cooler temps at altitude. Instead, I just about got sick from the exertion, from carrying too heavy a pack, and possibly from being a little under the weather. I'm usually the rough-and-tough one when it comes to a hike in extreme conditions, but Carole actually did better than me that day. We hiked up to Montclair Glen shelter on the Long Trail where a Long Trail work crew was awaiting helicopter loads of logs and boards to reconstruct the shelter. I'd expected that they'd be all but done by the time we got there but as it happened, they hadn't gotten their first load as of 2:30 pm, five and a half hours after they'd expected to have loads arriving. We were recruited to help, but when an hour went by with repeated false alarms and no loads, we sighed and headed off for the summit of Camel's Hump, two miles away. Partway there, I realized that a) I'd run out of water and b) I was really suffering from the heat. I insisted we turn back and Carole assented. (I own and should have brought a water filtration gadget that would have let us refill our Camelbaks from a nearby stream, but for some strange reason decided it wasn't necessary. I guess I hadn't really realized how hot a day we were in for -- between us, Carole and I went through about ten liters of water and could have used a lot more.)
Oh, as one might expect: the helicopter started arriving with its loads as we were giving up and heading back down the mountain to our car.
Click on this one a couple of times to see the tiny helicopter against the green trees on the mountainside:
The helicopter, closer up, with a load suspended below:
Carole at the old, soon-to-be-replaced Montclair Glen shelter:
Me near the shelter at the junction of the Long Trail and the trail we took up to the gap:
I was one hot, tired hiker when we got back to the car. We'd probably done about six miles all told, but those were six nearly freakin' vertical miles for a big chunk of the way.
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