zig zag mountain

date hiked: june 3, 2006
distance (planned): 11.4 miles
distance (actual):
highest elevation: 5000 feet
elevation gain: 2400 feet
time: 10 hours

have we told you where we are from…originally? who cares, you wonder? you would be surprised how significant these simple facts are when hiking. kelli grew up in central oregon, where it snows. annie grew up in south florida, where it never even gets cold (but there is a csi miami so we’re even).

so east zig zag mountain was supposed to take us by burnt lake, to a lookout, and offer spectacular views of mount hood. no where did anyone mention snow. whoever heard of snow on mountaintops? (floridians…help me out here.)

picture this… (and since we really don’t have pictures, you really have to try hard) we are happily strolling along, up the trail, singing out loud and there is a creek to cross. for the official record, annie insists that it was a small river. for some strange reason annie decides to get a wild hair up her you-know-where and become “the fearless leader”. for those of you that have been keeping up…kelli is and should always be “the fearless leader”. so annie attempts to cross the small river first and lands in it. oh…and in case we are not being clear…she did not land on her feet. kelli on the other hand walks on (across) the freakin’ water without a drop on her. that halo/karma thing really works against annie sometimes. point is, being soaked from the thighs down should have been a sign! (annie would like to interject that it is possible that kelli pushed her into the river.)

back on the trail, heading up the mountain, we start to see patches of snow. sane people acknowledge that snow is not conducive to hiking without snowshoes. sane people also recognize that floridians + snow = fema. as we hike up…snow patches become snow drifts which become a hip-deep, snow-covered mountaintop! (atleast if you measure using annie’s hip.) the trail disappeared under the snow, annie fell and slid numerous times (we stopped counting when it reached the double digits), and even kelli went down once. by the way, trees stop you when you crash into them.

today’s poll:
do you think we turned around?
1. yes, of course, because we always err on the side of caution
2. no, we are suffering from an undiagnosed mental illness (actually…annie is diagnosed)

well, eventually, we had to turn around. you cannot loop without a trail. but this was the day we decided that the fact that we are both extremely stubborn means there is no voice of reason telling us to pack it in. (and despite the halo, kelli does not hear the booming voice from god offering directives.) we made it back to the car just as the sun was setting. fortunately for us, that insanity thing means we were cracking ourselves up the whole time.

This entry was posted on July 4, 2006 at 7:32 am and is filed under hikes. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site.