Yesterday Michael and I planned a day of fun in Sequoia Nat'l Park. A reward for a month of consistently, missing only a few days, of working out for a month straight. We're training to Hike Half Dome on Sept 3rd. So we've been working out three to four days a week, gym, bike rides, hiking near Fresno. So I had planned for us to hike a larger scale hike as a reward for all of our hard work, i know we're freaks. A long hike as a reward for smaller hikes? But we love it. So we decded May 22nd would be a GREAT day to hike the Hard Tree Loop. I'd found it on the NPS website and thought it look like a very do-able hike.
With that in mind we left at about 11am yesterday and after passing through the Ranger Station with our new shiny Annual pass for the Sierra and Sequoia Parks, we parked and began our hike. Let me explain something to you though. Our trail head was about 2 miles off the main highway, but the road to the trail head, was SNOWED over. So we grabbed our packs and bundled up, because by the time we'd parked, it'd started snowing! SNOWING! :) yes SNOWING. But we're stubborn and thought , "Heck we just drove like 1.5 hrs to get here! We're not leaving without getting our butts onto that Trail!" or something like that ;) SO we hiked down two miles to get to the actual trail head... which meant that after we were "done" with our hike, we'd still have another two miles UP hill to get to our car. Those last two miles almost killed me, I'm not serious, but it was a challenging hike in ALL aspects of my life, Spiritual ( trusting God), Physically (8miles and five hours later, and I'm not even sore today! yay working out!) Mentally ( with the snow falling down around us hard, it was tough to stay positive) and Emotionally ( It took a lot inside of me not to just break down and sit right down where I was and say I'm done, I don't want to do this anymore!)
Once we FINALLY hit the "trail" we hiked in about two miles seeing LOTS of amazing things, stopping off to have a picnic on a log consisting of cashews, Hansen's pomegranate soda's and honey and Pb sandwiches, found an old "log" cabin, literally a giant sequoia carved out with a fire pit inside, 300 foot tall giant sequoias, and amazing vista's looking out into rolling mountains covered with trees soaked in fog. It was an amazing hike, very scary at some points, but we made it out Alive! Thank the Lord!!! As we went to bed last night, my husband was talking about ALL the fun points of the trip, I told him, " Hunny, I don't want to talk about the hike. It freaked me out, I didn't know if we'd make it out, can we talk about this another time?" And look at me now, not even 24 hrs later and I'm talking about! And honestly, CANNOT wait for another life challenging hike :)
