When: Wednesday, May 20th, 2009
With: Solo
Goal: Beat personal record of time it takes to summit
Wilderness Peak is the closest hike to my Boeing Job in Renton. It’s a short hike, about 4 miles roundtrip, but it has a pretty nice elevation gain (that I am unsure of at the moment).
After slugging on my new Black Diamond pack, within it a ample water and summit raspberries (that I forgot about), and grabbing my trekking poles from their permanent home in the back of my car I was off on the trail.
At the beginning of the trail I saw a king slug (not official name, but what I’ve named him). He was at least 5” large and his coloring reminded me of a leopard. I really wanted to take his picture but that would have slowed my time down! [I was super bummed on the way down when he was gone from the trail]. After leaving the slug I thought that he would probably make an entire meal! [If you were desperate].
I kept a solid pace the entire way; breathing hard and working hard was the motto of the hike.
I reached the peak in 36 minutes and met an older couple who were working on identifying the bird calls of the surrounding birds. I am always disappointed at this Peak because there is NO VIEW whatsoever. A log book + no view = unacceptable.
I flipped through the logbook, looking for older entires to see how much I had beat my old time by but it had been recently updated and I couldn’t find any previous times. BUT I did find an entry from “Alison” who has the exact same handwriting as I do. I honestly did a double take, and had to re-read the entry to make sure it wasn’t really mine. I don’t know where one of the references she made was (which means it can't be me!), but she had exactly my same vernacular too (using “stoked” to talk about beating her personal record up the hill), and the handwriting was uncanny.
The way down was uneventful other than my realization that there can be 2” snails on the trail! I had no idea snails this large could live on trails (in VT we have super small snails, smaller than your fingernail but that's it). Also, there were a ton of other slugs. Mostly this black slug that just reminded me of a bloated leech and this other brown slug that had a really weird texture to half of his body (crappy photo above... the camera on my phone was not being nice).
After the hike I ran home to grab a quick bite to eat (including some strawberry rhubarb pie!) and then went to Alpine Class.
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