I May Not Be Smart But I'm Consistent

 

OK. After an easy 6 mile day yesterday I decided enough with pandering to a bum foot and knocked off an 8+ mile hike today.

Actually this was the hike where I discovered that I was heel-walking again on that bum foot that suddenly didn't seem quite so bum anymore.

So to celebrate I decided to finish off the hike by climbing the old road up to the overlook.

This little bit of abandoned road is steep enough that they eventually got tired of cleaning up bloody smears along the way and banned bicycles.

And it just keeps going up.

And up.

And when you figure you must be just about there you come around a curve and - - -

Yeah, it just keeps going up.

In fact it goes up for about 140 feet, a 100 story building, without a break.

And if you are a masochistic fool like an adventure, at the base, where you've already hiked almost 7 miles, you challenge yourself to put your head down and make the climb without taking any breaks and even though there's no one there to see you cheat - - you don't.

And on top of that, as far as viewpoints go it's not a particularly spectacular one.

Of course, once you get up there you have to get down again, via the switchback trail this time.

And just to prove - well, I'm not sure what the hell I was proving - I followed that up the next day with another 8 mile hike.

This time tackling the viewpoint first by heading up the switchback trail and back down the road this time - you know - for variety.

Then climbing the west ridge of the West Canyon before heading back down through the canyon itself.

And finishing up with one last pass

by Buck Lake.

I say last pass, because this was my last full day at South Llano.

And I managed to almost miss this sunset on that last day!

I ended my stay the next morning with one final trip up the trail to the viewpoint, and of course back down again, before breaking camp and heading back home on a 4 hour trip through Saturday traffic on a rear tire that had just started to go out-of-round the last 50 miles before I got to the campground at the beginning of the week.

Yep, a white-knuckle drive and though Lincoln still sunk into the tread up to his nose, I replaced both rear tires the following week. Not bad though. I got over 53,000 miles out of  tires with a very aggressive offroad tread and grippy rubber so soft there's only a 40,000 mile rating on them.