hike to the falls

our saturday excursion took us to the hilton falls, not to be confused with the hilton fallsview because that is something else entirely. saturday's outing took us to a close section of the bruce trail in escarpment country. using a crappy map downloaded from the internets (because we are too cheap to buy the $30 trail guide, which is really not much more than a few pages of text and colour copied legal sized fold out maps in a small binder), we drove in the direction of milton and got off on the exit as directed. and then we drove north for at least 15 minutes before jon believed me when i said i was pretty sure we missed the turn. we eventually made it to the park gates, paid our $11 and parked. there was a large map of all the trails, which was a little confusing (and didn't quite match what we had printed out). the trails were mostly either silly short (4-5km) or insanely long (22.2-775km). it's a good thing at least one of us is good at map reading otherewise we'd have been screwed. we ended up hiking on a side trail of the bruce, occassionally hooking up with the main trail, and completing the "hilton falls" loop. we had originally discussed 4 hours, but i was set on keeping it to a max of 3. the last time i hiked was september and the run at the dish taught me how out of shape my hill climbing muscled were. well. there was a lot of hiking UP right off the bat at hilton. we walked all the way to the top of the falls and then back down again. the dearth of snow was nice. all i had on top of my fleece was a wind breaker. the moss covered rocks looked strangely out of place in the wintery brown landscape.

the escarpment was formed by glaciers and there are a lot of jagged, craggy rock faces and crazy holes. i imagine if that's what you're into, it would be fun to climb down that. i was happy to stay at the top and just peer down with my camera.

we stopped for lunch after an hour of hiking and then we carried on. we saw the falls and a few other rapids. at about 2:30 of hiking, i was asked if i was ready to start heading back to the car (which i estimated to be at least half an hour away). i happily said yes because my feet were starting to get sore and my shoulder hurt, even though my pack was fairly light. unfortunately "yes let's start going back" was understood to mean "oh let's keep going a little longer". there was a mishap with a heart rate monitor that stopped tracking at 1:57 (the stop button must have been hit), so jon assumed that we hadn't really been going for that long even though i said we were almost at 3 hours. in fact, the next time i asked how long we had been hiking for, according to his watch, the answer was "1:57". ack! i finally convinced him that we really needed to start getting back. turns out we were really really far away from the car. by the time we figured out which trails we needed to retrace and made it back, it was 5pm. 5 hours + of being out and just over 4.5 hours of solid hiking. i was never happier to open up a fun sized package of peanut m&ms in the car (with a whopping 5 candies. fun!) and drink my icy cold blue gatorade (recovery fluid). i could already feel the pain that i knew wouldn't really set in until the next day (and oh. it has! walking around the apartment this morning hurt). supposedly we're going to go on another 4 hour hike next weekend (bike coach says that hiking is good for building base level cardio. we suspect she is wrong), but i really don't know if i can commit to that much time away, since driving there and back takes about 2 hours. still, the fresh air was good and a small, masochistic part of me kind of enjoys muscle soreness.