Duration: 6 Hours 11 minutes
Vertical Up: 3491 feet
I've been lazy lately. A recent bought with the flu combine with the dark, dark mornings of winter have conspired to keep me away from the treadmill in the morning. Combine that with a few good holiday meals and I've become quite a slug. I know I've put back on some weight but I'm too chicken to see how much.
Since the year was drawing to a close, I decided to end this year of transformation with a hike to the same place my year began - Daisy Mountain. I wanted to hike with some new friends and neighbors so I put out the notice that I was hiking. I was happy that six others decided to spend the last day of the year hiking up to the summit with me.
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I wanted to start the morning at first light so we agreed to meet at 7:30. As described here a couple of times, the hike starts out with about 1 1/2 miles of flat hiking. I have come to name this portion the "Parkside Penalty". As it turns out, if you start the hike up Daisy Mountain from the Anthem Country Club, you can avoid this long, monotonous section of the hike.
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Since I've described the hike a few times in this blog, I'm not going to go into details about the hike. The part of the hike that was interesting today was that I was one of the stronger hikers (and I'm not use to that). So the journey up to the summit was a mixture of tough verticals, tour guide and cheerleader. After a few hours we had all made it to the saddle area just below the first summit. This is where we shared water with two ladies hiking to the top with NO WATER. It always amazes me to see people hiking with nothing.
After a short steep hike we reached the summit. It was such a beautiful day for hiking. This is the kind of day that I envision people taking brochure pictures for Anthem. After a short lunch break we headed down. The downhill leg was filled with a bit of excitement as one of our party decided it may be quicker to roll down the mountain. After thinking better, she grabbed a rock to stop her fall. Luckily all we had to deal with were scrapes and bruises - nothing broken!
The fall slowed our decent somewhat as we were being extremely careful on the steep areas. About halfway down we stopped at our last geocache. this was where I heard from Jim and his 9 year old daughter. We had though they turned around at the saddle but they pressed on and made it to the summit. Quite an achievement for a 9 year old! Knowing they had to come down the backside (and because I was their ride home), I said goodbye to the main group and went back to hike with Jim.
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We met at another cache up the hill and made our way back down, through the "Parkside Penalty" and back to the car.
This was a great hike and a fabulous way to end 2011!
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