So, I’m turning 30 in two weeks, and originally we had planned to hike up to Black Tusk as sort of my turning-30 celebration. The idea was thrown around for a bit as we examined the logistics–who’s going to take care of the kids and dogs while doing it? How are we going to have the time to do all of that and get back home at a reasonable hour?
My decision to do only the Garibaldi Lake route–an 18km trip–was made after seeing how well my daughter had been hiking lately. She had done 18 km before, sort of…half of that in one day, the other the next, and the distance was partly because we had gotten a bit lost and wandered around the top of the mountain until we found the trail again. That was last year. We thought she was ready to tackle this one, and we were right: she was remarkable.
The adults did so much worse.
The night before, our friends had a sleepover at our home so that we could get out and be at the trailhead early. We decided to call a couple of other friends over, make a dinner party out of it.
A bunch of hilarious stories and some terribly-sung songs later, we realized it was 1 am and that we had to be up by 6 am the next day and holy shit I have to do an 18km hike in less than 24 hours. We hurriedly broke off the party, staggered into our individual rooms, and slept like our lives depended on it.
I woke up at about 6 am (without an alarm, I might add) to get ready and felt great. I did have a bit of an acid reflux, normal after a night of crappy food. I tried to ignore it–this was supposed to be an easy trail, moderately difficult only because of its length. How hard could it be?
Pretty hard, it turns out, if you have a body who is not very happy that it only got 5 hours of sleep. On the trail, I was visibly struggling. It got a bit better as I got used to it, but I am less than proud of the attempt. I normally carry our son up, but this time, my husband had to take over. My brother, who drank a lot of tequila, kept complaining of an acrid taste in his mouth which even a 99-cent Wendy’s Frosty couldn’t erase.
Lesson learned: always be well-rested before a hike.
On the other hand, party+18 kilometers definitely beats binge-drinking in Vegas.
Read The Agartes Epilogues, where some people have better judgement, but not by much.
