pantsnotneeded, ardaiel, and I hit the trails out at Harbison forest last weekend and did six miles or so. ardaiel was down for the count this weekend with a sore throat (LOL) but Chris and I made it out there anyway, and ended up doing about eight miles. Pretty nice. It feels pretty damn good to still be ABLE to do an impromptu eight-mile hike over fairly rough terrain, and feel little if any the worse for wear. It feels even better to actually be DOING it instead of sitting in a chair and rotting!Protip to any other Columbia-ers that want to do the Harbison trails, though: print out your own fucking maps beforehand and make sure you've put a (correct) compass rose on it. The little map stands along the trails are frequently downright wrong and invariably oriented in a completely random fashion: North will NOT always be up; neither will it be oriented such that "up" is the direction you are looking in when facing the map. I am pretty sure that the Forestry Commission got a tax break by employing, uh, developmentally disabled folks to do the maps. Which would also explain the occasional tic-tac embedded in the map behind the plastic. "I LIKE TIC-TACS!"
Chris keeps trying to get me to run (and we actually did run a bit of the trails last weekend), but I keep telling him there's very little in this world I want badly enough to run after it, or am scared of enough to run from it. "Fight-or-flight" response in me is pretty much just simplified to "fight". Maybe after we've been banging the trails regularly for a few months I won't mind the idea so much, but for right now, the hell with that noise. Honestly, if I want more of a challenge I'm more the type to strap on a heavy pack than to break into a run, anyway.
We'll probably hit up the Congaree next weekend, weather permitting, I think. He's never been, and I haven't been but once - but it was gorgeous. Definitely a lot more to look at than the Harbison trails - and if you're going to hike a swamp, far better to do it in March than in May!
