It’s officially backpacking season, and I was carspotting Hawk for an AT section hike, so he could clean up some pieces he previously missed. I figured while I was in the White Mts, I would do some hiking of my own. Thankfully it’s not all 4000 footers; there are many easy-moderate trails as well. And I had a list of spots I wanted to check out. Hummingbird was able to meet me up there to join in a hike, so I had company - and accountability. We ended up accomplishing quite a bit!
Summer solstice hike! 🌞 And of course I threw in a little shamanic ceremony at the summit. 🔥
I swear this happens every time. I knew it was going to be too much. But with mild annoyance, I went along with it. Heck, it was my idea to begin with. Although I would have made it shorter if I had my way. But still, I can only blame myself. I knew what I was getting into.
This weekend, Hawk and I finally had some time together to do a hike while the weather was decent. My body was quite broken on Friday from work, but thankfully I mostly slept it off. Still, I used my judgement and suggested we keep the hike moderate. I found a couple interesting sounding trails in the Sebago Lake area, and Hawk agreed to explore them with me.
I recently discovered that this "new" Belknap Range trail is less than 10 minutes away from my college. Ever since then, I've kind of had it in my head that I should hike it after class some day. It's a new requirement on the redlining list, so I had to get it sooner or later, and I've seen a bunch of posts on the Belknap hiking group from people who did it and enjoyed it. Plus the semester is ending soon, so my window of "why not since I'm so close?" is closing, at least until fall. Till then I'll have to drive a half hour from home to reach this side of the Belks. So I had a lot of reasons to hike here now. More importantly, after a string of dreary weather, the skies cleared and it turned out to be a perfect afternoon for outdoor activities, and I really needed some nature therapy.
My graphic design professor is pretty great. This week our assignment was literally to take a hike! Man, is that the best kind of homework or what? Our actual instructions were to go outside, take a walk in nature, and make observations, which we will later be applying to a typography project. Part of the assignment included writing a journal entry, so what better way to multitask than to use that as a blog post? Which, honestly, I may never have written, because once again we "just" hiked our oft-visited favorite mountain, Shannon. Is there really much more to say about it? Well, apparently yes, there is plenty. Read on to learn more about this gem, by way of my mindfulness hike of sorts.
A while back, Hummingbird and I somehow came up with the idea of doing a night hike with glow jewelry. Because, yes, this is what normal women in their 40's do for fun. (I'll bet you that's actually true, and if someone thinks it's dumb, they're probably just jealous of our awesomeness. ;-)
Technically this was a moderate loop hike, and certainly not excessive mileage, but this was still our first time hitting over 1000 ft of elevation gain this year. We even got a couple miles more than any of our other hikes this past month and a half. So not a bad start to getting back in shape, working up to climbing more mountains.
