My Bluff Empathy Run

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So I find myself in Vermont on Sunday the 25^th, the same day as my fellow Bimblers are challenging themselves to run the Bluff race.  I’m feeling a little sad to not be participating so NOV and I decide we need to step up and challenge ourselves too!  We discuss the rail trail that Forrest suggested but decided, “no, too easy!”.  So we take a look in the book at the concierge desk for trails but they all say “easy”.  After some searching, ah ha, we find what we’re looking for – Camel’s Hump Park in Huntington.

“Challenging” it says, ha, we laugh, let’s go, we have to feel what our friends are experiencing.  Off we go with our map and find ourselves on a 9 mile dirt road when Brian decides maybe we should turn back.  No, we’ve come this far.  The road finally ends and there’s a big parking lot full of trucks.  Where did they come from?  We get out of the car and like at a race, size up the competition, with their ski poles, camel backs, putting on layers of clothes, hiking shoes.  You get the picture.  We had our trail sneakers and water.  We thought ok, they must know something, we better add more clothes.  Then we  head to the trail entrance and there’s a sign in sheet “for rescue efforts” it  reads.  Uh oh, what were we thinking??  But off we go, we’ll follow the blue trail (since that’s all we see).  It seems well marked so we decide we’ll head out an hour and back an hour, we’ll stay on blue, no problem.  The trail goes straight up, there were no other connecting trails and it was all rock.  I thought we’d run when we could, walk when we had to, but running was never an option but we soon found we were passing people, ha! It was a beautiful hike, peaceful, beautiful, crisp clean air, wet  slippery rocks, a perfect empathy  “walk”.  After an hour of huffing and puffing up this mountain, we discussed if we should continue on to the top or head back as planned.  I wanted to get back in plenty of time to shop.  We went on a little further figuring it was going to take us half the time to get back down.  Boy were we wrong.

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It took just as long going down .  We seemed to notice that the people going up were all in pairs but the ones heading down were alone.  Could it be that they stood and laughed when their partner fell on their butt (going down) like my partner did???  Hmmmm.  We were relieved to finally find the car, we thought we had taken a wrong turn because it could not have taken so long to go down hill.  Now the lot was overflowing with cars and there were big groups heading up the trail.  Someone asked how icy it was at the top so I think it was a good decision to head back when we did .  With sore knees and quads we still want to go back with enough time to check out the top of the camel’s hump.

We thought of you all the whole way and felt your pain and excitement!

To see more pictures, click here

Oddjob.