Yesterday:
I woke up ridiculously early and caught the sunrise while enjoying coffee. Then I hit the trail early and did a 6 mile hike with 1600+ ft. of elevation gain/loss. I felt pretty good and managed the elevation well, despite my total lack of time to acclimate. The hike was beautiful…
I was done hiking pretty early, so I stopped for lunch and headed back to camp. Late afternoon, I saw something odd go by in the river. Something orange…and it looked like it might be…a person? I wondered what I should do. I wasn’t sure what I saw. Then I saw some other orange thing go by that looked like debris. Just as I decided it was nothing…a raft goes by looking wrong with two people in the water hanging onto it.
I realized these people were in trouble. They went by fast, as the current is swift, and it looked pretty bad. So…I called 911. Search and rescue came out, the police called back a couple of times to ask for details about what I saw, and the people were located downriver. They were pulled out and everyone survived.
What an unusual end to the day!
Today:
My dreaded Achilles flared up yesterday, so I was a bit limpy today. I decided to take a lazy morning, pick up the van keys at Fed-Ex, and have a nice lunch before hitting the trail. I took the Sandia Peak Tramway up to the top (I know, it’s totally cheating!). It got me up to 10,600 ft. where I did a 3 mile hike with just 600 ft. of elevation gain/loss. The hike was great, but I had some anxiety on the tram on the way up. I kept envisioning a cable breaking and all of us plummeting to our deaths. The ride down was fine. Go figure!
I hiked the crest trail over to the Kiwanis Cabin and the Sandia Crest area before I returned to the tram for the ride down. On the hike I had several moments of pure joy as I listened to the silence of the forest around me. Somehow, the occasional bird song and ocean-waves sounding wind simply adds to the sense of silence between. The pure rapture of walking through the forest, seeing the quaking Aspen, and enjoying the array of wildflowers creates a peace in me that can be found no other way.
On the tram ride down I had to laugh when a hawk landed on the opposite cable going up. The tram operator said the hawks love to ride the cable up to the top and then soar on the updrafts. I giggle as I watched the hawk go by, lazily perched on the cable, going for a nice little ride.
Tomorrow – I am planning a big one! I plan to hike the La Luz trail from the bottom all the way up to the peak. It will be 4,000 feet of elevation gain and about 8 miles. The nice part…I get to ride the tram down again instead of hiking back down. Hopefully my Achilles will hold up.