Don’t Apologize…

There are some activities in which I engage that are purely for my own enjoyment.  ”Wandering” (hiking, for example) is one of those activities.  Sometimes it feels like I’m wasting time, that I could be more productive doing something else…like volunteering at a food bank or something…something more, well, philanthropic, if you will.  Recently a friend of mine told me to look up Ralph Waldo Emerson’s poem, “The Apology”.  I’m taking this poem as my response to myself if ever I should find myself thinking that spending time out in creation is something to feel badly about…

The Apology

Think me not unkind and rude,
That I walk alone in grove and glen;
I go to the god of the wood
To fetch his word to men.

Tax not my sloth that I
Fold my arms beside the brook;
Each cloud that floated in the sky
Writes a letter in my book.

Chide me not, laborious band,
For the idle flowers I brought;
Every aster in my hand
Goes home loaded with a thought.

There was never mystery,
But ’tis figured in the flowers,
Was never secret history,
But birds tell it in the bowers.

One harvest from thy field
Homeward brought the oxen strong;
A second crop thine acres yield,
Which I gather in a song.

  ~  Ralph Waldo Emerson

Thanks for that, Ralph.

And thanks, Dennis, too, for letting me in on Ralph’s poem.

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Trail Canyon Trail

A redunant name for a beautiful hiking trail in the foothills of Los Angeles.  “A place so beautiful, they named it twice”.  I went back “home” to the L.A. area for the Easter weekend.  Phil and the kids and I headed out on Monday morning to find the trailhead.  The trail we were seeking leads to a waterfall, as all of the hikes I go on with them do.  This waterfall was along the Gold Creek.

The book we were using as our guide was published in the 80′s, so sometimes the directions are hit or miss.  This one was a HIT!  The only “glitch” was that the sign we were looking for which would lead to the trailhead was missing on the way.  When we turned around to look from the other direction, there it was, and once we found it the directions were spot on.

We hiked in about 2 1/2 miles up (and 2 1/2 miles back, which is good, it’s always good to hike out as far as you’ve hiked in!) on a well maintained trail which completely lacked any evidence of human presence…no trash, no graffiti, no dog poop….barely even shoeprints in the softer areas.

We forded the stream a number of the times on the way there, but didn’t even get our feet wet.  I was a bit worried to be hiking since I jacked my right knee up back in December, but it held up nicely.  I was very careful about foot placement and avoiding any pivoting on it.  I tell you this just to show that the hike, though not totally easy, was doable even for the gimp in the group.  (So you could do it, too!)  The hike took us through lush green woods along paths liberally decorated with itty bitty wildflowers.  This purple beauty measured less than an inch across.  Didn’t even see the teensy weensy red bugs crawling around until I uploaded my pictures!

And it took us through more poison oak than any of us had ever seen in our lives!  Phil and at least a couple of his kids are really prone to getting horrific rashes from it and warnings rang out frequently about avoiding touching it!  (And upon arriving home, all clothes were stripped and washed, and showers were taken, it was that bad!)  I haven’t heard if any of them broke out or not, but Richard was already sporting some nasty rashes from his LAST excursion into the wilderness.

Back to the hike.  We came around one bend and found ourselves in a manzanita forest.  Manzanita is a bush that is found in the chaparrel biome.  Manzanita is spanish for “little apple”, I guess because the seeds look alot like little apples.  The trunk and branches are a deep rosey red, and they are smooooooooth and satiny.  Any way, these were huge TREES!  Never seen anything like it.  Phil shows how tall the bushes usually are.  The trunks were so thick you couldn’t get your arms around them.

The trail led us to something I can only describe as a CLIFF.  Rocks jutting out high over a small canyon.  Richard loves to rock climb.  I am afraid of heights.  He decided to pick his way down to the canyon.  I wanted to take a picture of him doing it, but couldn’t get close enough to the edge to do that, so I took a picture of him disappearing through a crack in the CLIFF.  Bye Richard.  I hope I see you again!

He took the short way down, we took the long way down, and we met back up at the bottom.

The last bit of the hike was a little steep and the dirt a bit loose, but when when we rounded the last corner before the waterfall, we entered a little bitty paradise!  The cataract measured about 50 feet tall and tumbled into a small, clear pool.

There was a large sycamore tree at the edge of the pool which had a high green and lacy canopy.  The canopy provided shade and showed off a brilliant blue sky above it.  Off came shoes and socks!  The bottom of the pool was firm and sandy/pebbly.  But boy oh, the water was cold!  Of course I orchestrated one of my famous foot pictures, but I couldn’t stand being in the water for more than a minute or so.

My feet are wimpy because they have spent all winter in shoes (and I just got a pedicure further removing any protective toughened skin!).  But Jonathan’s feet suffered no such wimpiness.  This kid was swimming in that cold water!

Head to toe wet.  Brrrrr.

We played and laughed for a time and decided this would be a great place for a picnic.  Plenty of large flat rocks to serve as a picnic table. I don’t know if we got lucky that day having the place to ourselves, or if it is a little visited place.  I wonder if we went back in the summer for that picnic if there would be a horde of people vying for the best seats on the rocks!

Time to put our shoes back on and go.

A hidden place which seemed to have been created, at least for that day, just for us!

For the LORD your God is bringing you into a good land—a land with streams and pools of water, with springs flowing in the valleys and hills…Deuteronomy 8:7 (NIV)

Some of the best times of my life are spent exploring God’s creation with my big brother and his kids.

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Photo Friday – “Emotion”

I am very late posting my entry for this week’s Photo Friday, but I have a good reason.  I had company from California here for the past few days and I wanted to spend my time with her.  Thanks for visiting Shawn!  It was a gooooood time!    Safe travels, my friend!

And so, without any further ado…

Today’s Photo Friday is entitled: Emotion

chosen by: Julie

Follow the links below for other entries (I will add links as entries come in!):

Tall chick tales 

 Idea jump! 

 Just for fun

 A Picture’s Worth a Thousand Words

A Curious State of Affairs

It’s always “fun” to conquer, even if just a little bit, one’s fears, don’t you think?  I am quite the acrophobe.  I fear heights.  Not ALL heights mind you.  My fear of heights is rather specific.  I’m fine with being at the top of very tall buildings, I LOVE roller coasters and other rides that include heights, and I have no problem with flying (planes of ANY size and helicopters are all just fine with me).  I don’t even mind hiking upwards.  What bothers me are things like being on bridges, hiking DOWN, driving next to drop offs, snow skiing, that sort of thing.  I don’t like being in high places where there is, at least to me, a perceived or actual lack of control in the situation.  I can’t stand having people anywhere near me if I am standing in a place where they could startle me, or end up close behind me without my having seen them come up on me.  My fear is more of a fear of falling from any sort of height, even if from a small height.

I used to be able to climb trees, climb up onto roofs, and climb ladders without any problem whatsoever.  I was rather fearless, in fact.  But I was startled twice, once when I was 16 and once when I was in my twenties, which resulted in my developing fear.  The first startling occured when I was laying concrete blocks on a less than sturdy scaffolding on the second story of a building.  When I was deep in  concentration and hard at work, a guy reached up from the ground and grabbed my ankles and shook me.  And that was the start of it.  I got so fearful of heights that I had a problem using the second step of a stepladder!  I worked on desensitizing myself and was almost over my fear.  But then, at the top of the Hancock center in Chicago I got my second startling.  While I was deeply in thought and looking down, my brother came up behind me and shook my shoulders and gave me one of those “Bahahahahha” shouts in my ear.  I again spiraled into my old fear pattern.  And I’ve been working on overcoming it, or at least occasionally temporarily conquering it, since. 

Yesterday my visiting friend, Shawn, and I took a hike up to some abandoned train tracks and tunnels.  The hike up to the location was really more like a loose gravel scramble!  Staying well ahead of Shawn (for my mental sanity) we climbed quite a distance at a very steep incline on a very slippery slope and it wasn’t until we reached the top that I thought “Gee, I just HOPE I’m going to be able to get down!”.  Putting that thought aside until I HAD to deal with it, I threw myself into enjoying the view from “up there”.  And I carefully picked my way around the washed out areas along the trail.  With the sound of the highway and river far below us, we worked our way through each of five tunnels and enjoyed the rock formations, the plant life, the insects, the sky and the feeling of relative solitude that being far away from civilization invokes. 

My emotion is “exhilaration”. 

 

Lou and Shawn, a self-portrait in front of the entrance to one of the tunnels

I didn’t do a Rocky sort of dance when I arrived at the top, nor did I shout with glee.  But inside I had this exhilarated “Whew!!!  I am DOING this!” sort of response.

Shawn also has her own heights issues, so we were quite the pair.  When our hike had to be over as we had a reservation for some horsebacking riding and HAD to get going, we found our way back to where we climbed up, and boy, did it look even more steep and slippery from up there.  We pretty much just slid down on our backsides holding onto anything at all that would give us a sense of security!  We were dusty, filthy, hot and sweaty, and our hearts were pounding when we got to the bottom, but get to the bottom we did!  Yay us!!!

(I will have to conquer my fear to get back up to this location again, as there is a geocache hidden in one of those tunnels that I failed to locate this time around!)

If you fear heights/falling, you might want to (or maybe not!  I could hardly watch it!) check out this link e-mailed to me by a friend, and also seen on “A Curious State of Affairs”.  This gave me the biggest case of the willies I’ve had in a loooooong time! 

http://www.brightcove.tv/title.jsp?title=1438490562

Please visit the links to the other participants work using the links at the beginning of this post and leave them a comment!

Friday 30th May : Title by CordieB: Phantasmagoria

Next Friday’s challenge will be my last for awhile.  I leave June First and won’t be home for two months!  Yikes!

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Little Successes!

Did the short four miles of the Waldo Canyon hike with Vickie this morning…it was too icy to do the top 3 1/2 mile loop though.  When we started this hiking thing I could barely make it up the three “flights” of steps at the trailhead and had to stop multiple times during the hike.  Today there was no stopping.  We do that part of the hike in just about an hour.  We could have run and done it faster today, but the air was bitingly cold and it hurt too much for that.  Anyhow, it’s amazing how much better my stamina is after just a couple of months of hiking once a week.

When I got home I tried to go on the internet but couldn’t make a connection.  I rebooted.  Reset the modem.  Reset the wireless router, etc.  I did note that the icon for my router which generally resides in the bottom bar of my screen was absent.  Odd.  So I fiddled with this and that, tried to fix it while I was on hold with Comcast to find out if there was a provider issue involved.  While I waited I found a link on my computer which, when I opened it, showed that my wireless system was turned off on my computer.  I clicked it to turn it on right when I got a live person and my internet was restored.  I’m pretty sure the Comcast person who got my call thought I was a nutbar.

How do you suppose it got turned off in the first place?  I have NO idea other than maybe my cat Mew Ling walked on my computer during the night and turned it off somehow.  She’s a sneaky snake that one!  She always does the most creative things when she takes a stroll on my keyboard!  I learn such interesting things when I am fixing her computer work.

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“It’s All Downhill From Here…”

…”except for the uphill parts.”

This was something my brother said to all of us when we (Phil, his kids, and I) were hiking this past December.  I was reminded of that today while hiking with Vickie.

We had planned to hike yesterday, but the wind was absolutely ferocious so we decided to hike today instead.  Gooooood call.  Today was a gorgeous day for hiking.  Since this was our third outing, we decided to add in the “loop” portion of the Waldo Canyon trail.  As I previously wrote, this added an additional 3 1/2 miles to our currently 4 mile hike.

What I was unaware of was that it adds who knew just how much altitude to the hike as well!  About 1/2 mile into the loop I wasn’t so sure about it anymore!  I was huffing and puffing and really feeling the altitude.  I live at about 6,000 feet.  I was guessing we must have been hiking at 8,000 feet.  I got home and looked it up, and at the top it was 8,200 feet and my lungs felt every foot of that altitude gain, believe me!  Vickie kept telling me that just around the corner and we’d be going downhill.  She lied!  She told me that a number of times.  I finally had to ask if she knew what downhill meant.  We would have had a good laugh, but I couldn’t breathe. 

I would LOVE to show you pictures of what is to be seen from up there, but I haven’t felt that taking my camera is a priority yet.  I would have taken pictures of the red rock cobblestones, the ginormous boulder with the overhang you couldn’t pay me to sit under, the sandstone layers visible across a ravine which are reminiscent of Arizona and Utah, and the phenomenal views of Pikes Peak around every corner.  You’ll just have to imagine it for now.   Last week’s snow had turned to ice in many areas of the trail and some of the stretches of trail were pretty treacherous.  I am looking forward to doing the hike without the impedence of snow and ice.  I hear that there are wildflowers and blooming bushes that are to die for up there when things warm up. 

We crossed a stream a couple of times which I imagine ups the beauty ante in the spring as well.

I have posted before on the sensitive nature of my feet and how they blister very easily.  Well, today I got a couple of doozies.  Mind you, I was wearing hiking boots that I’ve been wearing, and wearing A LOT since I moved here 2 1/2 years ago!  Ouch.  I didn’t want to tell Vickie that my feet were dying since I was already having a hard time just breathing!  But I can whine to you folks, now, can’t I?  Just gotta remember to put band-aids in those spots next week.  Don’t want Vickie knowing just how much of a malingerer I am, afterall!

All in all, a very successful hike.  Each week shows marked improvement in stamina.  My goal for next week is to shave some time off the hike.  Oh, and to not die.  That’d be good, too.

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“Where’s Waldo?”

I have two regrets in regards to my summer involvment with Teen Missions…

1. I only ran the obstacle course at Boot Camp with my Zambia team once.
2. I never ran the obstacle course with my Sicily team.

The obstacle course (O.C.) is a rather grueling course which requires significant stamina and strength.  There are tire mountains to be climbed, tunnels to be crawled through, rope bridges to be gone over, rope ladders to be climbed, water to swing over on ropes, and among other things, a 12 foot wall to be scaled.  You run it every day before the sun is even up, even if it’s raining.  When I was a younger person going on and assistant leading teams, I ran the course every morning.  I loved it.  It was invigorating and exciting.

But then was when I was younger, and in shape.  I was able to finish the course the one time I ran it (though we ran out of time before I could get over the wall) with my Zambia team, but this past year I had injured my back and sprained my ankle before my kids even got to boot camp and I just couldn’t manage it, not even once.

This year my goal is to run it every day.  In order to be able to do that, I really need to get into shape so that I don’t kill myself!  I will have the advantage of coming from high altitude to sea level, which will help with stamina, but I have the disadvantage of having gained 40 pounds since I was in my teens and twenties.  The weight slows me down and aggravates my back, my knees, and my ankles (I’m kind of an orthopedic bad dream).  Sooooo, in order to reach that goal, the weight needs to come off.  Mind you, I really hate exercise.  I mean, REALLY.

Enter Vickie.  Vickie is a co-worker of mine.  Last year she had a goal to run The Ascent.  (In brief, The Ascent is a race up Pikes Peak).  So she got together with a friend and got in shape and did it!  In the process of getting in shape, she lost 25 pounds.  Over the holidays she put on some weight and was telling me that she was wanting to get back into shape again.  I shared with her my goal, and she decided that we could help motivate each other.

So, this morning we took our first hike in our collective goal reaching plan.  We hiked the Waldo Trail, well, part of it anyway.  We hiked up two miles and then headed back down.  I was dreading it.  But it wasn’t bad!  I was breathing hard and my heart was pounding, but we kept a good pace and it was BEAUTIFUL.  I was worried that I’d slow Vickie down, but I really didn’t.  Vickie has decided we’ll do the same hike for a couple more weeks, and then add the next three and a half miles to the hike.  After getting comfortable with the seven and a half mile hike we’ll move on to a more difficult trail and work up from there.  We’ll do this on Sunday mornings (I’m changing to the Saturday evening church service which I attended last night and loved).  I have very little self-motivation when it comes to this sort of thing, so having a hiking buddy to keep me doing it will be most helpful!

I’d like to lose at least 20 pounds before June and greatly increase my endurance.  And in the process it will be fun to explore more of this beautiful state in which I live.

I normally wouldn’t put something like this out into the public arena, but perhaps doing so will help to keep me on track.  So, please feel free to give me encouragement and to check in on my progress.  I hope to be able to report positively over the coming weeks and months!

Wish me luck! 

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Emerald Pool

I made an unexpected trip to So Cal this past week as I wanted to attend the funeral of a friend.  It was a sad reason for a visit.  But the service was a lovely tribute to a wonderful man.  Lots of tears.  Lots of laughter.  I’m so glad I was able to be there.

As usual, I stayed at my big brother’s house.  We did some fun things while I was there.  One of those things was this!

Phil, his kids and I, went on a hike.  We went to the Santa Paula Creek area of Ojai in search of a waterfall.  My brother has this book of California waterfalls.  It’s most cool.  It lists the waterfalls and gives directions on how to get to them.  This was one his family had not yet gone to.  The book promised a 3 miles in/3 miles out hike with the holy grail being a series of “punch bowl” pools connected by small waterfalls leading to a 30 foot waterfall at the end.  The hiking instructions would have lead us to a campsite overlooking the pool which fed the larger cataract.

Somewhere along the way we got off the trail and ended up hiking the river’s path.  I came across this lovely little creature in a dry part of the river bed.  It measured about a half an inch across!

 

While this diversion provided what promised to be a “direct hit” on our target, it also entailed multiple rock crossings of the river, some ankle twistings and one occasion where we had to work our way along a rock wall using toe and foot holds which nearly had me at my tolerance for the heights and falling “thing” I have!  But with the patient help of my brother, and the occasional hand holding by my nephew, Richard, I persevered.

I like this picture soooo much.  I call it “Album Cover – No Band”.

We hiked and hiked and hiked.  It was getting late.  We found what we believed to be the punch bowls, but no big fall.  We thought we’d probably passed it when we ended up off the trail.  We took a moment to rest and drink water before starting back out of the canyon.  But Richard (who LOVES to rock climb) ventured farther up and in and came back with the news that he’d found the fall.  “Is it too scary, or can Aunt Lou make it?”  The answer was “Yes, she can.”.  So, me included, we decided to continue to climb our way in.  Very worth it!  The directions would have had us over looking the fall, but since we came up by way of the river, we were instead at the bottom where it filled a large deep pool.  We were so glad that we’d ended up off the path.  The algae on the rocks at the bottom of this crystal clear twenty foot deep pool lent the most gorgeous emerald color to the water.

The pool was surrounded by rock walls and a small rocky “beach”.  Evidence abounded that many had gone before us.  There was the sad bit of trash, a towel that looked like it hadn’t been there long, a few charcoally spots where fires had been built, and of course, graffiti.  And you know what?  I wasn’t much bothered by the graffiti.

Today’s graffiti are tomorrow’s “prehistoric” cave drawings…

A good time and place for one of my “foot pictures”!

It took us about a third of the time to hike back out.  Why is that?  Just wondering.

All in all, a wonderful smallish adventure.  We were all tired and sore at the end (and for the whole next day!).  Especially Avie.  We’d barely started the hike and she was complaining that “it’s a terrible time to be a kid”.  She’s growing, and her legs are sore.  But she stuck it out.  Barely.  Had that hike been a tenth of a mile longer, one of us would have been carrying her!

Two days later we got to see Tiger Woods and Vijay Singh.  But that’s another post!

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