rivka | Entries tagged with hiking

The first day of the first year of nursery school, 2007:

The first day of the last year of nursery school, 2009:

I know this is the quintessential adult cliche, but: look how she's grown. Whoa.

( more pics of both kids under the cut )

On Saturday, Alex and I went hiking.

We've done it a few times before, and she asks to go hiking pretty often. But this was the first time we've ever taken the opportunity to leave Colin home and go off to the woods for what Alex refers to as "special girl time." She was very excited.

It was a beautiful day, with temperatures in the low 70s. Perfect for hiking. I decided that Cascade Falls would be a good short-distance, high-reward hike for a four year old, so we headed to Patapsco Valley State Park not far outside the Baltimore city limits.

I hadn't been up that trail in years, and in the interim they had reworked the bottom portion to prevent trail erosion. So I, um, missed the turnoff to the falls. Instead Alex and I climbed to the top of the steep ridge, meandered up and down a hilly path for a while, and then turned around and came back. We found the falls on the second try. Alex had a lot of fun scrambling around on the rocks and was very very proud to be able to cross the stream from rock to rock and climb up to the top of the waterfall. Our hike was made complete when we found a small snake swimming at the base of the falls and got to watch his progress around and between the rocks.

All told, I think we went about a mile. Maybe a bit more. Some of it was quite steep and slippery, so even with the short length it provided plenty of challenge and excitement. I was proud of Alex. I hope we'll be able to do it again soon.

Sunday at church we covenanted with our new minister. Seven leaders from the congregation (including kids representing the Religious Education program) charged Rev. David with leading us in various aspects of our church life, and then he spoke about his goals and intentions, and we all wound up the ceremony by pledging in unison to support each other in the mission and work of the church. It was inspiring. It's exciting to have a new beginning.

Have I said anything about the new minister yet? It's still early days, but I think he's going to be good. The most obvious early change is a vast improvement in congregational singing, which, frankly, was pretty wretched before Rev. David got here. (Q. Why are UUs so bad at congregational singing? A. Because everyone is reading ahead to see if they agree with the next line.)

Rev. David has a beautiful voice, and he leaves his mike on for the hymns so he can act as songleader. Also he asked the church to buy the new UUA hymnal supplement, which includes more contemporary and world music, and he's having us sing the same songs several weeks in a row to improve people's comfort and familiarity. Those changes are making a huge difference in how well the congregation sings, and since singing is one of my favorite parts of church it's making me very happy.

I know, I know, I only got to Tuesday in my recaps before they petered out... which is pathetic. In my defense: (a) the rest of SUUSI got really, really busy there, for a while; (b) the shooting at TVUUC has been dominating my thoughts this week and has taken me out of the shinyhappy headspace; and (c) let me just say that a head cold and the last vestiges of first-trimester symptoms combine very poorly.

But here I am. When we last saw SUUSI, I had fallen into bed achy and exhausted after a lousy hike on Tuesday afternoon, unsure about whether I'd be able to handle my Wednesday morning hike. ( read more & a couple of pictures )

I don't have anything on my schedule today, so maybe I'll catch up with my recaps? At any rate: Tuesday was quite the jam-packed day. ( Sometimes those who wander are lost... )

I got up very early Wednesday morning and managed to slip out for breakfast before Alex woke up, armed with my hiking gear. My father and I had registered for a hike up Sinking Creek Mountain, which turns out to be on part of the Appalachian Trail. ( Read more... )

( this one got oddly long )

I've signed up for a four-mile hike at SUUSI which is described in the catalog as "invigorating" and "strenuous." At the time that I sent in my registration, I was so very much not physically prepared for anything of the kind... but I wanted to be, and I figured that being registered for a group hike on a particular date would be good motivation to regain some hiking skills.

What with one thing, and another, and a whole lot of others, I haven't prepared much beyond walking to work a couple of times a week, which is about a mile and a half over mostly-level sidewalks, or pushing Alex's stroller about 3/4 of a mile (I think) to nursery school. When we visited my parents over Memorial Day weekend, I did a three-mile trail walk with my father and his dog; again, over mostly flat ground. That one had me fairly tired by the end of it. With three weeks left until SUUSI, I decided that this weekend I had to get some strenuous hill hiking in.

Patapsco valley State Park is my closest hiking option - a twenty-minute drive from my house downtown. None of its trails are very long, but they interconnect in such a way that you can piece together a satisfying loop. I decided to combine the hiking-only portion of the Buzzard's Rock trail with the Sawmill Branch trail, which makes about a two-mile loop - very steep, but very scenic. This used to be one of my favorite hikes. I used to access it from a remote parking lot off a rural residential area, which always felt a little creepy - this time, I realized that I could get there from a more well-traveled part of the park if I added an extra 0.4 miles each way on a paved trail.

That way, I also got to start and end my trip by crossing a swinging suspension bridge high above the Patapsco River.

( read more illustrated travelogue )

Tuesday was a peaceful day; Wednesday was anything but. ( in a good way, however. )

I decided that I was feeling better yesterday, and so

wcg and I went hiking in Patapsco Valley State Park. The afternoon was cool and overcast, with a few drops of rain, which meant that the park was much less crowded than usual. For the most part we had the trails to ourselves.

I'd picked out a 2 1/4 mile loop that was marked "foot traffic only" for most of its length (no mountain bikers or horses). We started out walking through scrubby woods over level ground and then found ourselves on the top of a ridge, the ground dropping sharply away to our right, with lovely views into the valley below. Just as I started to ask "I wonder why this is pedestrians only," suddenly the trail dropped completely away in a steep jumble of rocks, and we had to pick our way down using our hands as well as our feet. Okay, I don't think a horse could've managed that. The return loop wound its way along and through a wide creek, with more scrambling over rocks in places.

Patapsco State Park does a lovely job of marking their trails: bright paint blazes spaced close enough together that you can always look up and see where you're going next. Given that the trails intersect with each other pretty often, it's important to be able to distinguish that this is the Buzzard's Rock trail (yellow blazes) and this is the Sawmill Branch trail (red blazes). The only thing that marred our afternoon was the discovery that some asshole had come out on the trails with a can of brown spray paint and covered up the blazes. Usually, at a point of doubt, you could see a sliver of red or yellow at the edge of the brown patch... but it sure as hell made it hard when the trail was faint and you were looking far ahead for blazes to mark your general direction. What kind of person thinks that's funny?

I was glad we went, because it really was a beautiful hike. But I found myself pretty much exhausted afterward, and today my quads are sore. Obviously it's been too long since I was out there.

My family didn't do much in the way of tourism. Vacation always meant the same thing: two or three weeks at a rented cottage in the mountains, preferably near a lake. We'd swim and sail and have cookouts and attend instructive interpretive programs, and we'd hike - the Adirondacks in New York, the Rocky Mountains in Colorado, the White Mountains in New Hampshire.

I loved hiking when I was small. It's funny what I remember about it now: my mother saying look for trolls every time we came to a bridge or stream crossing, learning that don't talk to strangers didn't apply on the trail, finding usually-forbidden foods like candy bars in our lunches, drinking water and lemonade out of clear plastic bottles whose faded labels read sterile water for irrigation. A sunny hillside field beneath a firewatch tower, studded with wild blueberries. Clambering over every boulder we passed, while the grownups went around. My mother calling my brother Sport. "I want to be Sport, too!" "Okay. He can be Sport One and you can be Sport Two."

I went on the short hikes - suitable for little kids. I knew that when I grew up I would go on the big hikes, the ones my father took with my brother and oldest sister, for which they left the house before sunrise so they'd reach the summit and be down below treeline before the inevitable afternoon thunderstorms. And in the meantime, when I complained that I wanted to climb a real mountain my father produced what he called "Mount Severance" (which turned out to really be called Severance Hill), and taught me how to follow the orange paint blazes on the trees to what he obligingly referred to as "the summit." I marked my progress, and knew that someday I would climb the ne plus ultra, Longs Peak in Rocky Mountain National Park, more than 14,000 feet high. My brother climbed it when he was ten, I think, to much fanfare. I could see it from almost any point in the park, and from my vantage point it looked like a family rite of passage.
( this got very long )

Current Mood: contemplative
Current Music: Emmylou Harris, Green Pastures

Last weekend, I decided that I wanted to try going for a hike. I'd been really impressed with what I'd been able to manage the week before, and I thought another hike of about 1 or 1.5 miles would be fun and good exercise. Savage Park, a few miles from our apartment, promised on their website that they had several short hiking trails. It seemed perfect.
( the best-laid plans... )