My husband and I first went there over a year ago for a short hike when I had just gotten the lightweight trail runners that would change my ability to hike. I went again in the summer to try a trail with some weight in an old backpack and found that the old pack didn't fit so well, that hundreds of ticks crawling up my pant legs makes for an unpleasant hike, and that wasps in the outhouses (coupled with those ticks on nearly every piece of vegetation) meant that it was a good time to figure out a way to pee standing up. The trails here are wide and easy, and I wanted to come back when the ticks weren't out.
It was 26 degrees when I hit the trail. Dressing for hiking in cold weather can be a challenge because you don't want to get sweaty since that leads to chills. I decided on just a T-shirt and fleece jacket on top and lightweight wool long johns under my regular hiking pants. I was chilly for the first ten minutes or so but soon warmed up. Everything but my face was staying warm, so I pulled out a bandana to get my nose warmed up. I think I'm going to spend my REI dividend this year on a wool buff/balaclava to keep my face warmer and so I don't look like a bandit, but that dividend won't come in until most of the cold weather is gone for the year.
Pyramid is a reclaimed mining site, so it's full of little lakes. In the summer, I saw fox, a snake, and deer, but today, I see only birds, though I hear a few deer crashing through the woods. This site is popular during hunting season, but I've never seen another hiker here. I saw mushroom hunters, a few fishermen, and a couple of equestrians during the summer, but today I saw just one person in a truck (maybe a ranger), and no one on the trails. There was another set of footprints from today on the shortest loop in the area, but it had been at least a few days, maybe more, since anyone else except deer had been on the longer loop.
Most of the trail surface was covered in leaves, with a few sections of rocks and gravel. The rain and sleet from the day before meant that everything on the trail was ice covered and crunchy. If bubble wrap were made out of ice and you stepped on it instead of popping it with your hands, that would be the kind of surface I walked on today. You could see every footprint in the crackled ice I broke with every step. I did slip and fall one time when I hit an icy rock. My left foot hit the rock and slid down behind and across my right foot in a move much like that of doing a crossover in speedskating, except I didn't get my right foot picked up in time to catch myself, so I went down on my hip but it wasn't too hard of a fall. I had a few falls like that when I was learning speedskating, so the fall felt familiar and I just popped back up and kept going.
There's not much to talk about scenery-wise in the winter when everything looks brown and dead, but this rock sort of looks like Minnesota if you ignore the upper left corner.
I don't spend a lot of time on breaks when it's this chilly out since that means breaking out another jacket to stay cool while I'm stopped, so the only time I sat down during the trek was for a 3-minute break to grab some snacks at a picnic table under a shelter (one of the few non-ice-covered surfaces I saw today), but I quickly decided to keep moving since I still felt pretty good. I was also trying out a new pair of shoes (Saucony Peregrins), so I wanted to beat up my feet pretty good today to see how they worked. The jury is still out on them, but they did ok. I'll test them out more before I review them here.
Pyramid has a number of walk-in camping sites that get almost no use as far as I can tell. This one is a bit over a mile from the regular campground, which also gets almost no use. I did an out-and-back to this furthest campsite to be sure I got a full 10 miles in since I think the regular loop is closer to 9 miles instead of 10.
The cold and lack of breaks started catching up to me in the last mile or so. I kept up a pretty good pace just to stay warm, but I was starting to drag and was ready to get back to my car. Thankfully, the last mile is easy and goes through an area with pine, so the trail is softer because of the needles.
This isn't a demanding trail, but I enjoy it for the solitude and because once you start the long loop, you're committed to doing the miles, so there's little temptation to bail out like I did at Pere Marquette last weekend. I'll try to come back here again before the ticks come out in force and/or use Permethrin on my clothes when I do come back.
No comments:
Post a Comment