Still Sore Three Days Later But Always a Good Sore

In a nutshell, this was just awesome. We planned this hike and hiked our plan. We were able to get a permit to stay two nights at Half Way Camp, which is 3-1/2 miles in, and summit on Saturday. We had Friday off and took our sweet time to get there, started hiking at 12:30 PM. This put us getting to Half Way at 4:30 PM and we took a bunch of pictures along the way. We set up camp and cooked Ramen Plus for dinner and enjoyed the deer coming right into camp on an evening when we really owned the entire camping area, really cool.
We were on the trail at 8:30 AM and thought we would be back at 5-6 o’clock. It was a long trek to the top and encountered rain at the summit. We reached the peak at 3:30 PM, did what we had to, and headed back down with the concern of running out of daylight without a flashlight. Gravity is always a great friend on the way down and a best friend on this day, lol. We had to re-up on water at High Creek Camp and that put us a bit behind, about 6:15 PM. We had good trail and tried to set a pace to get us back to camp between 7 and 8 PM, that meant a little double time pace. That’s a 2-1/2 to 3 mph pace to reach camp and we fell just a bit short. My girlfriend was a bit freaked out, as this was her intro to night hiking and we only had two phones with lights. I didn’t have any worries, but she sure did. I had to try a few different techniques and found leading, with her behind me, and the light shining for her, with the outer reach of the light from the phone a couple feet in front of me worked really well. It took longer because it was slower and turned the 20 minute walk into 35-45 minutes, but what a great day. YAHOO!!