Elevation Gain: Approximately 2500 ft.
Time: 11:50 am - 5:20 pm
Weather: Sunny turning to partly cloudy with a few sprinkles of rain.
If there was ever a week that I didn't think I was going to get out and hike, this was it. Saturday was graduation at my school. The ceremony began at 6 pm, but I had to be there at 4 pm to help with parking, and I had a graduation party for a student running from 3 to 5 pm. After the ceremony ended at 8:30 pm, we went out as a big group of faculty and staff to celebrate another year, but also give special thanks to those colleagues not returning in the fall. I got home, exhausted at 1:30 am. I slept until 10:30 am. I was so tired, and I still have all my finals to grade. I had done some research (on wta.org, of course) the days before. I knew I was going to hike in the Capitol Forest, since it is close to Olympia. I was going to attend another graduation party after the hike in Olympia, but I was not super excited by hiking the Capitol Forest.
I got into the forest boundaries with no problem, but soon my GPS was telling me to turn where roads no longer existed. I meandered around on logging roads, taking a spider web network of one lane, gravel roads with surprisingly few pot holes. My phone told me the location I got off the wta site was in the middle of a dirt road. There was no trail around and no place to park. At the intersection a few hundred feet away, there was a big, red truck with a huge horse trailer. There was room for my Subaru, and there was a trail crossing at the intersection. It was already 11:45 am, and the party I was going to end at 7 pm. I got my gear on and hit the trail with my phone set to record the walk. I recognized the trail name from the notes I read, but I did not have a map. I was out to go find one and use my cell phone to back track if I had to, but I did not want to. I was close enough to Olympia and the surrounding area that I had cell reception and could actually see where I was on a map.
I walked for a solid hour before taking any real breaks. Then I took a 30 minute lunch. I looked at the GPS, and it read 7.66 in the stats for this track. This is the point on the hike where I start thinking I am a hiking machine. I didn't feel like I was going that fast, I actually felt slower than usual and really tired. But my cell phone said the statistics, literally. And I do mean literally, at one point the phone announced to me the distance and speed at which I walking. I should have known something was off when this happened. I remember just this week I updated the My Tracks app on my htc Aria. I love this app, and it only gets better with each update, but I forgot that the default settings are always in metric units. I love the metric system, but I think like every other American. I think about distances in miles, feet, and inches. When I realized my mileage mistake, right before writing this blog, but not before boasting to several people at the graduation party after the hike, I changed the settings to show statistics in Imperial Units.
So the rest of the hike, now feels a little weird. I was hiking down the Mima Porter Trail #08, and there were consistent mileage markers every half mile counting down. They weren't on the whole trail, but I remember seeing them from 5.0 all the way to 0.5. It was taking 10~12 minutes on average to hit each one. I know that means 3 miles per hour, I even did that math in my head. Why didn't I catch the units before saying something to all my colleagues?
I was going to follow the the trail down to zero. I assumed when it ended, I would hit a trail head. I did see more a few more people as I walked. I saw hikers, and bikers, and horse back riders. Despite seeing a couple people, I felt alone while hiking. There was a map when the trail ended. After making use of it, I continued on back the way I came back to take a right at a trail junction I passed, and I think I could spot on my map and on the map at the trail head. I was also able to see where I parked, looking at both maps together. I walked back, all the while, thinking I was cranking out big distances. All this checking my phone, recording tracks, and trying to take pictures since my camera was left at school Saturday, took a toll on my terrible battery life. My phone was dying, which is why I stopped recording the track. I had to keep using the app to get back to my car. I had stopped recording when I got to a road, and walked the last 5 kilometers or 3.2 miles on the road. The trails were awesome, but I need a map when I return.
Orchid: Seeing my car, I felt lost at points on the hike.
Onion: Mileage psych-out.
Picture:
Google Map
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