When I said “killer hike” in my last post, I didn’t mean it literally. We ended up hiking up the San Rafael Reef and hitting this cache, but we were too tired to press onto this one which was only a quarter-mile away. Not only that, but we were running dangerously low on water, and all three of us actually ran completely out before we got back to the car. Luckily, I brought an extra two gallons of ice cold water and left it in the car.
The hike itself was fun. We had to stop quite a few times in the shade, which was hard to come by sometimes. We had to squeeze up against rocks most of the time in order to attain some measure of coolness, and other times we were able to stretch out on our backs underneath an overhang and almost fall asleep in the shade.
I’m not sure what was worse, the hike uphill with the burning leg muscles and shortness of breath, or the downhill portion with the other different burning leg muscles and hurting feet. I thought I’d really be paying for this hike today, but I’m surprisingly not really sore. When I run up the stairs or chase Michael around, my muscles start to burn again, but otherwise everything’s normal. I really need to start getting out and hiking much more often, then this exhaustion will be a thing of the past, at least until winter sets in.