Not Every Hike Is a Good Hike

     In preparation for an 11-day, hut-to-hut hike in the formidable Dolomite Mountains of northern Italy, I have been hiking strenuously day after day. Last week I decided to do the Mule Mountain trail, not far from my home. At 4.7 uphill miles, 9.4 round trip, it makes a good training hike.

    At the trailhead, another woman was just setting out, with her poodle. She asked if I had done this trail before, and I said, "Many times. It's one of my favorites." I stopped to adjust my boots, and she walked on.

    She must have thought I was daft. The trail was a nightmare. Weeds overhung it. I kept having to stop and pluck foxtails and burs out of my socks and shoestrings. I had to thread my way through poison oak. 

    Pretty soon I caught up with her where she had stopped to consult her guide book. Her dog was covered with burs. He looked like my socks. I explained the trail to her and passed on by, telling her she could pass me when she caught up with me.

    I never saw her again. She must have turned around. Smart woman.

    The trail left the shade of the forest and crossed a large open hillside, with patches of shade from a single tree every now and then. The temperature was over 90 degrees. I was hiking directly into the sun. I had lost my hat. Sweat poured in rivulets down my face. My shirt was soaked. The trail hadn't been maintained for years. Stiff arms of shrubs commingled across the trail, their pointed branches poking, scratching, and bruising my arms as I busted through them. 

    And then, suddenly, a reprieve from misery: a coyote appeared on the trail, just ahead of me. We looked at each other for several long moments before the coyote turned around, trotted a few steps, and disappeared downhill. 

    Finally I could see the trail's end, half a mile ahead, uphill. There was one tree between me and that goal. "If I can get to that shade," I thought, "then I can get through the open area beyond it and to the trees at the trail's end." 

    But it was beastly hot, and I was still having to battle through shrubs. I thought about turning around, but I reminded myself that if I were in the Dolomites, I wouldn't have the option of turning around.

   Then I thought. "I'm not in the Dolomites." Abruptly, I turned around. 

    When I was a child, I used to play a hand-motion game of going on a lion hunt, my hands imitating walking, slogging through mud, swishing through grass, climbing a tree, seeing a lion, and running back through all the obstacles with the same hand motions, now in high speed. That was what it was like on the Mule Mountain trail that day: faster now, through the bushes, through the poison oak, through the burs, and at last back at the trailhead with as much relief as the hunter in the game.

    My hat was sitting on a fencepost at the trailhead.

    "In the Dolomites," I thought, "I would be at a rifugio, sitting on the deck with a beer."

    At that, I drove into Jacksonville for an ice cream.