A Proper Ass Kicking

 

Morning, the day after my demented sprint around the Frio Canyon trail at Garner State Park.

The sun is trying to work its way through the trees over there on the horizon so it must be time to get a move on. Hopefully a slower move on than yesterday. Perhaps I could manage to take a real hike this time and not run a friggin race against - well, nobody (in which I'm always the loser).

I don't know if that thought jinxed me or what! - But you'll see what I'm babbling about in a moment -

This morning, a Wednesday, right smack dab in the middle of the school and work week, seems like a good day to tackle the popular (for me popular is a bad word because it means people!) Old Baldy summit trail.

Except - because of roadwork one-lane-ing the only road into that area of the park and closing it completely to bikes and pedestrians, as well as closing off the riverside trails below the road that I might have used to bypass the roadwork on foot, I had to drive from campsite at the northern end of the park to trailhead at the southern end.

This meant dealing with automatic signals on either end of the work zone that are on an 8 minute cycle. (If you get to one of these just as it changes to red, it will be 8 minutes before it turns green again) Park people were told this work, along a tight, winding section of road perched precariously between river on one side and mountain on the other, would be finished up in March. This is October, and apparently now the contractor, who I personally witnessed packing up, rather wimpily, early for the day because of a very light sprinkle that lasted maybe 15 minutes, is claiming they didn't specify what year they meant.

Anyway, the next shocker, concidering it was mid-week and school is in session, was finding that the cabin-shelters lined up here one after the other on the right were jam packed with kid-heavy families that were busting out all over the road as I was trying to get to that trailhead parking lot ahead of me on the left.

(I had to use a photo from my trip here a few years ago because it wasn't safe for a scruffy old man to be standing there taking photos of all the little kiddies!)

Ignoring, or at least pretending to ignore, the hysterical cacophony of zooming tricycles, flying balls, ricocheting rug-rats, screaming kids, and even screamier adults, I parked, donned my pack, grabbed my sticks, and set off on the Old Baldy trail, quickly leaving the chaos behind since most still seemed to be embroiled in getting breakfast on the table rather than hiking.

And then promptly got my ass stripped off, shredded, and handed back to me on a platter in tiny little pieces.

Admittedly, from Pecan Grove Camping Area (Why anyone would willingly camp in this noisy, overcrouded enclave is beyond me!) to the summit of Old Baldy, that green dot in the lower right of the trail map, is a steep climb, but, despite the distance between those two points being just barely over a measly half mile, it took me more than an hour to get there! One quarter the speed I was moving yesterday. And I'm not talking a half mile of sight-seeing and lolly-gaging, I'm talking head down, one foot in front of the other, sucking air, trying not to die, plodding.

Unlike the Brother, who is one of the 4% that can't feel thier heart (which explains why he wouldn't know he was having an afib event untill he passed out, or rather, recovered from passing out), I knew my heart was pounding!

But that wasn't the issue. This is a phenomenon I first noticed in the '80's when hiking near Anchorage Alaska where many of the trails within afternoon-hiking-distance have an initial steep climb to get from road up into the Chugach Mountains. By the time I topped these initial climbs my heart would be pounding hard enough to make me question, despite what my ego believed, if my conditioning actually sucked, but it would quickly settle down and I wouldn't notice it for the rest of the hike.

Since I was being abused by what was essencially a stairmaster on steroids as I humped my way up Old Baldy one limestone ledge after another, the thumping heart, somewhere around 90 - 110 BPM which is normal full-on-exertion for me, was to be expected. But the light-headedness, wonky vision, and brief waves of almost-nausea - well this was new!

A wise person would concider turning back at this point, I mean, hell! This might be something that needs looking into! - But apparently I'm not wise.

Later I went back to my old, long obsolete even before I quit using it, mapping system which still lurks on my seldom used laptop, and pulled up the track of the last time I climbed this mountain in December of 2022 to see what sort of pace I maintained back then.

Neither maping system, the new one (Gaia), or the old one (Delorme Topo), lets you break down segments of the hiked track into time, just distance, so I manually sampled the climb portion of the 2022 hike in several spots and, though there was some sub 1 MPH samples, about 60% of the samples were in the 1 to 2 MPH range so covering the half mile of the climb would have taken significantly less than the hour it took me this time.

Oh, and by the way, in 2022 the 6.24 mile hike that included summiting Old Baldy took me about 5 hours at just over a 1 MPH speed.

Normal for me back then.

Todays hike, though only a relatively short 2 miler, took me 4 hours! An average speed half of what my normal used to be.

So now I don't know what to think!

Yesterday I raced around a 4 mile hike at twice my historical average speed, yet today I struggled to maintain half my normal speed on a hike only half as long!

Spoiler alert. I would do tomorrow's 5.21 mile hike in just over 4.5 hours. Pretty damn close to my historical average. If I was part of a statistical analysis I'd a been thrown out with the garbage as useless data!

To be fair, some significant events have occured between 2022 and now.

• I'm three years closer to dead
• Cancer (though I most likely already had that in December 2022. It just wasn't diagnosed until April 2023)
• Several surgeries
• Two rounds of chemo with a few serious side effects thrown in for good measure.
• The trauma of finding out that my brain is even more broken than I thought
• Eliquis.

I throw the eliquis, a blood thinner, in there because the Brother, who's also on eliquis, swears one of the side effects is to suck all the energy out of him, leaving him crashed on the couch in-between short stints of activity, and this crossed my mind when Old Baldy was kicking my ass.

But I've  been on the crap for two years, over two years, and haven't noticed a significant decrease in energy during that time. Maybe an increased willingness to take it easy once in a while, though I think that's more to do with being forced by the cancer to pause and evaluate my life, my future - but no big loss of energy. Besides, lack of energy or lethargy are not in the listed side effects for eliquis. Anemia is, but with all the blood tests I've had while on eliquis, thirty frigin two of them - so far, I think I'd know if I was anemic!

I went back and checked, and since February of this year I've taken 21 significant hikes and bike-rides, not counting the laps I regularly subject myself to around the property. I don't remember any of those kicking my ass the way this one did. Physicly pushed and feeling it, yeah. Wore out and glad to be back at the trailhead, yes. But none of that other stuff, the light-headedness, wonky vision, and touches of nausea.

Maybe I had a few-hour bug? Or it was eating my morning plain-yogurt without added honey (I forgot and left the honey at home and plain Greek yogurt tastes terrible without it, but the chemo ravaged my gut pretty bad and the yogurt helps.)? Or perhaps I simply did something last time I was here that pissed the mountain off and it's punishing me for that this time?

I don't know.

Whatever the cause of the struggle, with determination, or perhaps just plain stupidity, I eventually made it up the mountain.

But I didn't stay and enjoy my accomplishment as long as I would have liked because people started showing up, and we all know people suck!

So I quickly gathered up my stuff, headed back down, giving up a portion of that hard-won elevation, crossed a narrow saddle, clawed some of the elevation back, wandered the spine of an adjacent ridge on the Foshee Trail, made a hard right, and a steep decent on the Bird and Wind Cave Trails back to the trailhead.

By this time many of the shelter-dwellers had packed up and left so it was a lot calmer at the base of the mountain than it had been when I arrived this morning. But I didn't care. All I wanted to do was get back to camp and chill in my chair with a model railroad magazine, my water-bottle, and a few crackers - maybe an M&M or two.

Sanity! (Or What passes For It Around Here)

 

If Dad's last pair of work gloves and Mom's thimble (tucked into the gloves) are on the dash it must be time for a ROAD TRIP!

Dad grew up outdoors (After his father lost the Plymouth dealerships and the big fancy house during the depression, they lived full time - in Michigan - in a tiny three-season cottage with a lake in the front yard, the woods out back, and the winter winds and loose windows leaving a dusting of snow across the furniture.), and Dad taught Mom, a city girl, to embrace the outdoors lifestyle too. (To the point where she was willing to camp in a borrowed tent with a two-month old me!)

As kids we camped as much as their jobs would allow and as retirees they spent months at a time traveling in whatever rig they had at the time. So now when I'm traveling they get a front-row seat because they're the ones that guided me to this feral lifestyle of mine.

Except this time it wasn't so much a ROAD TRIP as just a road trip. A short, mental-health break squeezed in between medical crap in an attempt to keep the monsters at bay. An escape from the shitty "realities" of "civilized" life to my more basic happy-place.

Publicity shot, not my image. That's  the Frio River and Mt. Baldy

My options for a quick trip here in Texas are limited and I've used most of the obvious choices many - many times over the past 40 years. So this time I chose the popular,  but seldom frequented by me therefore still relatively new, Garner State Park, about 4 hours away.

Because it's popular (the weekend following my stay, the three-day Indigenous Peoples' Day weekend, nearly all of the 300+ campsites across 8 campgrounds were booked and a Saturday dance was scheduled in the dance-hall.), it's a place I generally avoid. In fact this would be only the second time I've been here. Oddly enough, the first was one of the last trips I took before I got shut down for a while by the cancer diagnosis.

By intent, I managed to snag a site in the least popular, water-only, limited river access, farthest from the main activities at the south end of the park, Persimmon Hill campground,

where, despite what the reservation website implied (I think they mark a bunch of sites as reserved even when they're not - Either that or they have an 80% short-notice cancelation rate!), I was one of only two occupied sites out of 34 on this loop.

One nice thing, among many, about the teardrop is that, once it's unhooked from the Ranger and the 90 pound bike is unloaded off the tongue, I can horse the 110 pound tongue around and move the trailer to the perfect spot on these awkward, two-side-by-side-short-car-parking-slots, tent sites. (No vehicles off the pavement!) Mesquite tree shading the east side, canopy protecting the south, and wall keeping the westerly sun at bay, because, though we had a comparatively mild summer, it's hanging on with a vengance with highs for 37 of the last 37 days above average.

The Frio Canyon trail - though in reality Frio Canyon is more valley than canyon -

passes by just a 100 yards west of my campsite on the otherside of a tree-line. So that’s where I headed my first morning there.

Being relatively flat, the Frio Canyon Trail is a good first-day pick that also connects to the backside of the Nature Trail located near the main entrance for just a little extra kick,

and, along the west side of the Canyon trail, there's a number of information posts

designed to entertain as well as inform. 

The logs you're supposed to try scampering on like a squirrel at this post are gone. Probably too many complaints from helicopter-parents raising little snowflakes that are going to be ill prepared for the bumps, scrapes, and challanges of real life. Though, on the entertainment side, I'm not sure trying to flap my arms as fast as a bat is a good idea.

I came out here to decompress. To recenter myself. And I'm on a nice quiet (Didn’t run into any other hikers at all), nearly flat, non-technical trail doing what has worked for me for over 60 years, putting one foot in front of the other in a non-urban setting,

yet somehow I managed to tear through the trail at a pace not that much slower than what I maintain when doing workout-laps around the property!

Not sure what the hell was going through my head. Probably nothing if my parents and teachers were to be believed.

My normal recreational hiking pace is just over 1 MPH (I tend to stop and lolly-gag a lot) so this hike should have taken around 4 hours! Where the hell did I think I was off too?!

Maybe it had something to do with the helicopters?

Within a quarter mile of starting off this morning the trail skirted a large open field with road-access that was being used as a staging area for training flights. There was a Texas Parks and Wildlife Department chopper, as well as one from the Texas Department of Public Safety (the state cops), and a chopper from some US government agency all lined up in the field waiting thier turn with the refueling trailer. Over on one side was a whole mess of people in tactical gear getting briefings and equipment.

For the rest of the day, and at least the next two days as well, the choppers would take off, head out to thier respective training areas and the personel would practice getting winched down ro the ground and back up. Then the choppers would come back to staging, pick up a new batch of trainees and do it all over again.

Point is, helicopters and I don't get along all that well since I've been knocked out of the sky twice in them. So maybe that's  why I was triggered into churning around the trail like a cartoon character with its feet on spinning legs.

Whatever the reason, I spent the rest of the day talking myself down off the ledge with a (forced) leisurely turn around the park on the bike (roads only, ebikes are not allowed on Texas State trails, not even rails-to-trails trails) stopping often to inspect campsites and record the ones worth trying out (the emphasis here, as it is in so many public campgrounds, is on water/electric sites with many of the water only sites, the ones I'm  interested in, looking like afterthoughts, so not as many fit my preferred requirements as you might think.),

and hanging around on the river bank doing nothing in particular.

Maybe I'll do better tomorrow.

A Potpourri Of Hikes & Bikes

 

Blog-wize I'm still stuck in Illinois (This was all several weeks ago but I tend not to blog realtime because I'm a paranoid old cuss who wants to remain in the shadows.), waiting for my appointment to go pick up the Wife from her sister-visit.

But I wasn't just sitting around like a mushroom on a fence post (I have no idea where that came from but when shit like this pops up ya just gota go with it!)

What follows is a collection of hikes and bikes that I occupied myself with during the wait, in reverse-chronilogical order in which I did them because somehow that seemed to make sense when I sat down to write this.

One last shout on Tunnel Hill Trail

I was under instructions not to pick up the Wife untill around 1400 on Tuesday. Because the pickup point was only a little more than 3 hours away I had some time to kill after I broke camp that morning, so I finished off my portion of this trip with one last bike ride from Vienna, down the Tunnel Hill Trail to Belknap, a small collection of homes with a trail access point.

This section of the trail is mostly flat and it's a pleasant, but not awesome, 16 mile out&back ride. 

If you are so inclined and have the time, about 2/3 of the way down to Belknap there's an access point to a section of the Cache River State Nature Area where you can trade the bike for hiking shoes because there's a complex of trails along the Cache River back in there.

Bell Smith Springs

Bell Smith Springs was the last stop of a three-hike day on Monday,

though the short stroll I took here could hardly be called a hike. (For a better look at the trails check out my 2017 visit here.) By now the day was getting on and school was out. Several mothers had turned up in the parking lot with loaded minivans in an attempt to burn off thier kids excess energy

Steps cut down through the side of the canyon

on the steep trails. Admirable, and a wholesome activity, but not my scene, so I didn't hang around long.

On my way out I did poke my head into the Redbud campground just to look around. Nothing much has changed since I last stayed here, except that the well-pump seemed quieter this time. Not quite so chalk-boardy

Jackson Falls

Jackson Falls is an interesting spot, even on days like today when the water's not running.

The steep canyon walls make this a popular climbing area with a number of pitches to choose from.

Those same steep walls that make for good technical climbing mean that there's two seperate trail-systems in here. One up on top and another down below, with no direct connection between them. You either pick the trailhead for the upper trails, or go on down the road a ways, actually right to the end, to the trailhead for the lower trails.

BTW, you might get away with 2-wheel drive back here on FR 494, but it's a fairly primitive, one-lane road in rocky terrain that fords several streams, so high-clearance is recomended.

Today I stuck to the North Bluff Trail up on top of the canyon.

If you take this trail far enough

and look back over your shoulder at just the right spot near Railroad Rock, a little beyond the official end of the trail, you can get a glimpse of the active BNFS tracks taking advantage of the narrow-bottomed canyon on thier way north out of Metropolis down on the Ohio River.

Millstone Bluff Archeological Area

While I was in the area this year there was some re-paving work being done on SR 146 between the campground and Viena, so I was going north and using SR 147 instead to avoid the construction delays, and that meant I went past this small sign several times.

So come Monday morning I decided to stick my head in there and see what it was about.

Turns out there's quite

 an interesting little site back in there.

After figuring out that the self-guided tour starts behind the trees at the far end of the parking lot, and then slogging up the unrelentingly steep trail,

assisted by steps in the more challenging places,

you get dumped out on the edge of the bluff itself, something that would be called a small mesa in the west.

To make the area up here even more defensible than it already was, the edges of the bluff are also guarded by an encircling stone wall. The same sort of stone wall that gave Stonefort its name.

And as you follow the trail around the bluff

it just keeps getting

more

and more interesting.

OK, not something I would notice untill it's pointed out, but here is one of the 1500 year old depressions left in the ground by a family home.

Makes me wonder how many other sites I've just obliviously wandered on by during my thousands of miles of hikes over the years.

I wonder if there's an Amateur Archeology 101 class I could take to highten my awareness?

There's one spot up there where a platform lets you look down on a relativly flat rock surface without actually climbing on it.

If you look hard enough,

and with the assistance of an adjacent "key", you can pick out millenia and a half year old petroglyphs (carved into the rock as opposed to painted on pictographs) there below your feet!

Anyway, that's it. Now it's time to head back to the chaotic,  frenetic, confusion of the St. Louis area to collect the Wife and head on back home.