mirabela
Active member
After bunch of deliberation over the course of the week, we settled on Mt. Jackson via Webster-Jackson.
It was a long day -- we left the TH about 9:15 in the morning and returned in early twilight about ten hours later -- but we stayed warm, dry, fed, hydrated, comfortable and happy the whole time. The weather was glorious and the views from up high stupendous.
We did the whole trip on snowshoes; microspikes would have been the play of the day, but I was unable to round up a pair in Isidora's size on such short notice, and snowshoes were our next best option for traction. It worked out OK. We took them off for the last hundred feet for a short off-trail rock scramble that we improvised to avoid the topmost ice ramp of the official trail.
I think the hardest thing about the day for Isidora was staying interested in keeping moving on some of the lower stretches of the trail. She wanted to stop a lot early on, less out of need for a slower pace than out of boredom with the trudge I think. Naturally she noticed a thousand beautiful and interesting things -- ice-glazed moss, a gray jay drinking from a tiny trickle down a boulder, the buried waterfall she heard by pressing her ear to the ice, the ferns on the south side of a rock already green -- that I did not want to hurry her away from. After a while we talked about it being OK to hike and just enjoy the good things to look at, and being OK to hike to try to get to the top, and knowing the difference and being aware of which we were doing. I just didn't want her to be surprised or disappointed if we needed to turn around later on. She decided to get a little more disciplined about setting landmark or time goals for when to take breaks. This worked pretty well.
We debated heading down when at 2:20 we were half a mile and probably 600 feet below the top, but again she wanted to push on. From there, of course, the views open up and the step-by-step challenges of the trail intensify, and her enthusiasm and happiness grew as the top came into view.
Peanut M&M's, a gray jay convention, incredible views & digital movies on top, and a mostly joyful trip down the mountain punctuated by one short but scary slip & slide. She probably has a good bruise or two today.
Energy level was good all the way down; twice we leapfrogged a guy who had done a traverse over from Eisenhower and was moving along like a seasoned mountaineer does; each time Isidora adopted his pace and charged on down after him, banging out a quarter or half a mile in the blink of an eye. At the AMC highland center after the hike when we stopped to make a phonecall she was bounding up the stairs two at a time ...
All in all a fun and memorable day in the mountains, and one I think we can take as a measure of what she might be up for this spring and summer.
Our bronze-age rural dialup makes online photo albums impractical for us, so you'll mostly have to take our word it was pretty up there.
Matt & Isidora
It was a long day -- we left the TH about 9:15 in the morning and returned in early twilight about ten hours later -- but we stayed warm, dry, fed, hydrated, comfortable and happy the whole time. The weather was glorious and the views from up high stupendous.
We did the whole trip on snowshoes; microspikes would have been the play of the day, but I was unable to round up a pair in Isidora's size on such short notice, and snowshoes were our next best option for traction. It worked out OK. We took them off for the last hundred feet for a short off-trail rock scramble that we improvised to avoid the topmost ice ramp of the official trail.
I think the hardest thing about the day for Isidora was staying interested in keeping moving on some of the lower stretches of the trail. She wanted to stop a lot early on, less out of need for a slower pace than out of boredom with the trudge I think. Naturally she noticed a thousand beautiful and interesting things -- ice-glazed moss, a gray jay drinking from a tiny trickle down a boulder, the buried waterfall she heard by pressing her ear to the ice, the ferns on the south side of a rock already green -- that I did not want to hurry her away from. After a while we talked about it being OK to hike and just enjoy the good things to look at, and being OK to hike to try to get to the top, and knowing the difference and being aware of which we were doing. I just didn't want her to be surprised or disappointed if we needed to turn around later on. She decided to get a little more disciplined about setting landmark or time goals for when to take breaks. This worked pretty well.
We debated heading down when at 2:20 we were half a mile and probably 600 feet below the top, but again she wanted to push on. From there, of course, the views open up and the step-by-step challenges of the trail intensify, and her enthusiasm and happiness grew as the top came into view.
Peanut M&M's, a gray jay convention, incredible views & digital movies on top, and a mostly joyful trip down the mountain punctuated by one short but scary slip & slide. She probably has a good bruise or two today.
Energy level was good all the way down; twice we leapfrogged a guy who had done a traverse over from Eisenhower and was moving along like a seasoned mountaineer does; each time Isidora adopted his pace and charged on down after him, banging out a quarter or half a mile in the blink of an eye. At the AMC highland center after the hike when we stopped to make a phonecall she was bounding up the stairs two at a time ...
All in all a fun and memorable day in the mountains, and one I think we can take as a measure of what she might be up for this spring and summer.
Our bronze-age rural dialup makes online photo albums impractical for us, so you'll mostly have to take our word it was pretty up there.
Matt & Isidora
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