September 20, 2008
So a few days after doing Mt. Washington I had my first, first day of school. I am a first year teacher so that was a little scary for me. Hey, if I can do Mt. Washington I can handle a room full of 10 year olds. Now I am writing this 15 school days until our last day. Dad decided Mt Moosilauke looked like a good one. This time we finally convinced others to go along with us too. Yay for Katie and Heather.
We headed out from WV and made our way toward the mountain. We got stuck behind a slow moving red truck and it seemed like it took forever to get to the dirt road to the Moosilauke Lodge. Soon enough we were there and unloading the car. Unfortunately dad left the spout on his Camelbak in the open position and red Gatorade/water mix was all over the trunk and his bag. Luckily the Lodge was open so he could go in and fill up with water. Once he was set we were on our way up Gorge Brook trail. This seemed like a piece of cake compared to a month before. We went at a nice easy pace and for the first time I was almost comfortable hiking. One of my favorite new things has got to be getting above tree line. It is like a whole other world. Since Katie is a geologist I used this opportunity to have her teach me a thing or two about rocks since in a few months time I had to teach them to my students. I was not a very good student, I was struggling to name the rocks around me. Oh well. That kept me entertained for a little while as we got closer to the summit. The summit was more crowded then I expected since the trail wasn’t very crowded. We found a comfortable place to sit and had some lunch. We stayed a little longer then normal to enjoy the beautiful day.
Dad likes loops so we took the Snapper Trail to the Carriage Road. Now this is a fairly easy trail, not too steep or rocky.
Well maybe that was the problem. It was too easy and we weren’t paying as good of attention as we should. Heather fell and sprained her ankle. Ouch. She took it like a champ though. I offered up my poles, which she gladly accepted, and we took turns carrying her bag. Now we still had almost 3 miles to go to get back to the car. It took a while, but she made it and we only had to help her a few times.
Before the way down on the hike I was thinking about getting hiking shoes to use on dry warm days instead of using boots. Those thoughts are long gone. I saw how an easy trail could lead to an injury. This also made me realize how injuries on a mountain are different then on flat land. If it was much worse how would we have gotten her down? I was also very happy that I had purchased the poles a few weeks ago. Thoughts: All in all I enjoyed the hike. It was a decent hike but I didn’t feel like I was torturing myself. Maybe it was an easier trail or maybe I was starting to develop those slow twitch muscle fibers. Either way it was a good day for me.
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