Hiking, A Blast From The Past 03.11.09

Today at work, my brother and I were asked to go and GPS some new bike trails that are open to the public.  My supervisor is a mountain biker, and wants us to create some maps showing the different trails that are in Raisin Woods, which currently contains 4 different trails that total about 5 miles.

This really brought back the feeling of a project that we did back in the summer of 2003.  We had the task of hiking and GPSing all of the hiking trails in our area, most of which were in the National Forest.

Back in 2003, I was taking some classes at the local college, so I only worked a few hours a day except for friday, which was a full day.  A coworker of ours, Ben, who is now retired, would do all of the legwork of locating the trails, calling and finding out about them, pretty much doing all of the planning on topographic maps to get us out there and going.  He would drive us to the trailhead, help us get everything hooked up and working, and see that we were off to a good start.  Usually he would even hike with us for a while because he enjoyed it as well and his added company was nice, but would have to turn back at some point to get the car so that he could pick us up at the end of the planned hike.  So hiking was the friday thing for a few months, and we totalled ~93 miles worth of trails.  We had a blast doing that project and really saw alot of neat things out there.

I’d like to some day hike some of them again, and take the camera along to capture some of the beauty deep inside of the mountains.  Only this time, it’d be completely for the fun of it and I wouldn’t be on the clock.