Golden Ears and Mt. St. Benedict

...or "This Is One Way To Figure Out If It's Time for New Trail Shoes".

The real purpose of today's post is to see whether I can figure out how to post a link to a video that ISN'T on YouTube, but my producers, investors, and PR people felt that wouldn't make much of a title. My second choice, above, didn't make the cut, either.

This is a link to a 3 minute video. Click on it - there will be a quiz.

Let's see whether that worked. Or if you watched the video. Or both.

Start with an easy one: What was the video about? There are some hints above.
How many kilometres are mentioned in the opening scene?
Which famous Rat Pack singer provides the musical support?

Okay, that's it. If you haven't been able to see it and have any vestige of interest in acing the quiz, better not read on, because the rest of this post is one big spoiler.

That hike was a week ago yesterday, and it was pretty epic in terms of time, distance, and suffering.  Fortunately it was also pretty epic in terms of scenery and company, in spite of the thick pall of smoke that obscured the view a bit even at the top.

A couple of posts back was the hike from two weeks ago, up Mt. Strachan. In that post, I concocted a theory trying to explain the absence of people in the 10-20 year old age range from the hiking trails.  The hike a week ago up Golden Ears peak put the lie to the theory, so now there's a new one: people in the 10-20 group only do really tough hikes, probably just to humiliate old people on the trail.

All the images and video I have of Golden Ears are in the linked movie. It was a long 23 km round trip, big elevation gain at about 1400 m, the "middle" 14 of those 23 km were without ability to add water, and the "middle" 6 of those 14 waterless km were like doing a 3k Grouse Grind up and then down; about 1100 of the 1400 m elevation change is in a 3 km stretch. It's the kind of hike that has an emergency shelter at one end of it. We had to stop, rest, eat, and have a long heart-to-heart with ourselves before completing the last half km to the shelter. The peak was another hour and kilometre past that, and looked pretty intimidating, and we felt okay about ourselves for not even considering it. A lot of people camp overnight before the hard part.

The views were pretty great and would have been fantastic without smoke. The food and beer we stopped and had on the way home were unbelievably super fantastic. In fairness, Kraft dinner would have been life-changing. My feet were sore the next day. I haven't thought seriously about hiking boots in 30+ years, til last week. I think the better solution is to just not do hikes like that.

The day before yesterday was the more moderate but surprisingly exhausting Mt. St. Benedict hike.  12 km round trip, 1000 m gain, took us about 4.5 hrs. The description we were working with was pretty tangled up, so we ended up driving and walking about 1.5 km of road that looked like this, only in reality it's way steeper, twice:


And it moved like this when we were on it, too.  Talk about tough.

The upper (off that road) trailhead was the big mystery, although this picture doesn't convey much of a sense of wonder, other than maybe "I wonder how I was ever supposed to notice that?":


See it, that kind of little break in the bushes?  Oh, all right, yes, it's well flagged and hard to miss, once you have decent instructions on how to get there.  Which we didn't have.

McKay Lake, at about the halfway point, does a better job looking wonderful:

This was the for-sure highlight of the day, McKay Lake. This picture was from Reiner Tecklenburg.  By the time we got up high, the clouds had got down, got funky.  They just would not get back up again.

We went steeply up from there, into the clouds, in fact. I hadn't ever really fully appreciated how wet the bushes and trees hanging over a trail can make you, nor how much the temperature can change with elevation, nor how useless a cotton hoodie is in those conditions, until this hike. Here are a couple of shots of the "view" from the top:

This is where the breath-taking view of something far, far below would have been on a clear day.  We got the danger part but not the exhilaration part.  We got the really, really wet part, too.



Again...I made this one large in case you can glimpse something through the fog, like maybe a Norse god.

That was it! Lots of hiking these past few weeks. Next post, possibly a return to my more esoteric ramblings.  Probably I should not forewarn you like that.