Saturday encore ~ The view from 10 MNN

Last Memorial Day weekend, Smooch and I found ourselves with time on our hands and not a brain in my head, 

so we hiked up the mountain I see from my bedroom window. A year later and we I still haven't recovered. 

But it made for an interesting blog post, so I'm publishing it again. 

***

The first thing I see when I open my eyes in the morning is a great big mountain. This mountain has been staring back at me for almost six years. For some inexplicable reason Sunday morning, I decided I needed to see what the mountain saw when it was looking down at me.


I spent a few minutes on Google Earth plotting our hike to the summit, then Smooch and I hopped in the truck and drove to the trailhead. Now I happen to define hiking as "any walk on an unpaved surface." Since Smooch and I go "hiking" every day, we are very experienced hikers. Why, some days, we hike 3 or 4 miles without blinking an eye. How hard could it be to hike 3 or 4 miles up the side of a mountain?

Really hard.

Are we there yet, mom?

Up and up we went, hiking for 45 minutes, resting for 15, hiking for another 45, resting again. I'm not sure how many times we repeated that cycle – delirium may have taken over.

One of my favorite things about hiking is snacking on trail mix, so we did alot of that. And we made quite a fashion statement, hiking in our matching backpacks.

We walked through acres and acres of trees that had been scorched by the wildfires that I had watched from my bedroom window when they were burning.


We stopped for lunch at what I thought was the summit, but now I'm not so sure - next time I think I'll take a map. At any rate, I was able to look far off into the distance and spot the shiny metal roof of my house. Now I know what the view looks like from 10 Miles North of Nowhere and that, afterall, was the whole point of the trip.