In Which I Am Out Of My Element

Last weekend, The Boss and I got what we thought at the time to be a great idea. With it being the first few days of the month, we thought we'd turn over a new leaf and try to make a point to get some exercise every day. The Boss suggested that we go for a hike somewhere instead. Maybe one of the mountain trails in the area?

I thought about it for a minute, and remembered this short 1/2-mile hiking trail on a mountain nearby. I had hiked the trail a number of times growing up, but hadn't been there in a good ten years or so. I looked it up online, and found some directions on how to get there. It was about a thirty-minute drive, and once I convinced The Boss that it would be a good starter hiking trail, we grabbed a couple of waters and got in the car...

... And promptly got lost. The directions I had written down were wrong, and our GPS couldn't find the place we were trying to get to, which, in hindsight, makes complete sense because mountains don't often have street addresses. We had been driving for about forty minutes before The Boss made me pull over and ask for directions. I spoke to a kind lady at a gas station, and she gave me a map and drew out on it where we needed to go.

We found the road she directed us toward with no problems at all, and were happily on our way to the trail, until the pavement ended about two miles down. We bumped and jostled our way down the road at a blistering 10 miles an hour, avoiding huge rocks and potholes, trying not to slide off the road in the loose dirt, and cursing the name of the woman who told us to take this road meant for big 4x4 trucks or SUV's when our little Ford Focus was clearly visible in the parking lot.

We had been driving on the dirt road for about ten minutes when I had a thought.

"Wait a minute," I said. "What if this is like in those horror movies, where the kind old lady convinces these two gullible schmucks to drive down this dirt road, come to find they are going the wrong way, only it's too late and they trapped and doomed to be made into wax sculptures by her creepy, malformed son?"

The Boss shot me a look that could melt steel and said, "Not. Funny."

Finally, the dirt road changed back into pavement, and we came to the road that the hiking trail was off of. The kind lady at the gas station had suggested we try one of the gated trails that the maintenance vehicles use to get to the top of the mountain to work on the transmission towers. Somehow forgetting that this was the same lady who sent us on that horrible dirt road, we found the gated entrance, decided it looked decent enough, and started hiking.

The trail wasn't too rough to start with, but after about ten minutes of walking, it started to get steeper. And steeper. And steeper still. I didn't have a pedometer on me, but I figured that even with taking a few short breaks to catch our breath, we should have reached the summit of this half-mile trail within thirty, maybe forty minutes of heavy walking. There was no end in sight just yet, and we didn't want to be quitters, so onward and upward we went.

After an hour of hiking and still no summit in view, The Boss and I started to get wiped out. Granted, we don't usually do this sort of thing, but even despite that, we thought we could handle a 1/2-mile trail. We had clearly gone further than half a mile and passed through some pretty miserable terrain, but we had no way of knowing how much further it was to the top. We contemplated turning around, but I didn't want to quit having come this far already. The Boss stayed put for a minute while I powered on through the next part of the trail, and at long last, reached a clearing. I called The Boss on up, and she joined me at what we called The Half-Ass Summit.

We planted our asses on the rocks on The Summit and rested for a while. Seeing the views from as high up as we were, it was clear that we had gone further than half a mile. We'd probably gone further than a mile or maybe even two, having been on the trail for over an hour at a pretty good clip, and there was still a long, long way to go until we would have reached the actual summit of the mountain. We were obviously on the wrong trail, thanks again to the kind old woman at the gas station.

I took a picture of the true summit of the mountain from where The Boss and I called it quits. You can just barely make out the transmission towers that mark the top of the mountain, and gives you a good idea of how much further we would have had to hike to reach the end of this trail:

It took us about a half hour to make our way down from where we stopped. We were exhausted and sore, but mostly glad to be done with the goddamn thing. We continued to curse the name of the lady at the gas station the entire way home, who either had no idea of what she was talking about, or got her kicks by sending what seemed to be unexperienced and overweight hikers on the worst roads and trails possible.

The real kicker, though? Once we got back to the car and had driven down the road (not the dirt one, we're not that stupid) about a mile or so, we saw a sign that said something like "Mountain Hiking Trail - Summit 1/2 mile".

I would have screamed if I hadn't been so completely exhausted.

We learned to important lessons that day. Never take directional advice from someone who smirks, and the next time we want some exercise, a few laps around the local mall would do just as well.