Sept 20, 12th Hike - Edgewood Park

This was our last hike before setting off for the Smokies on the following Thursday!
It's the beginning of the "cool-down" period to give our bodies a little rest before the event hike, so it was only 2.5 to 3 hours.

Diana met me for this hike - I was very happy to see her. She arrived before I did, but I was able to quickly get my boots on and hustle across the road to meet for the mentor-led hike. I wish I had taken a picture with Diana because we were also celebrating the fact that we've known each other now for 16 years.
We met at Cardenal in FloMo at Stanford, sometime in the beginning of our freshman year (we got there on Sept 24, 1992!)

Edgewood Park was my first hike with the group, and it was fun to see how much easier it was now!
We kind of improvised with the trail map because we took a couple turns different from the route, but we just kept hiking until the end of the time period and it was fine.

Sept 13, 11th Hike - Forest of Nisene Marks

This hike, along with Big Basin, was probably one of my favorites. This site has a ton of QuickTime VR panoramas of the park!
Cool, green, dark, hiking in the forest. We did have to ford the stream several times and I was probably a bit too slow there, but I got through it with much appreciated help from Jen.
First picture here is Kelly lunching on a stump. Kelly was very well prepared, she also had a garbage bag to sit on too. I really love how comfortable it looks. (She said it was actually comfortable!)

During the hike, I asked Bowman why the park is called "Forest of the Nisene Marks." I thought it was some sort of religious group of Nisene monks or something, but I learned from him that it is actually "Forest of Nisene Marks" - Nisene Marks was a woman whose family lived in the area and owned this land and when she died they donated it as a park.
See full story on wikipedia:
"The park was named for Nisene Marks, a passionate nature lover and the mother of a Salinas farming family that purchased the land from lumber companies (and others), in the hopes of finding oil. Nisene's children donated the 9,700 acres (39 km²) of land in her memory, to the State of California (with the help of the Nature Conservancy) in 1963 after drilling efforts had failed to find any oil."

I was really moved by this - this was already one of my favorite hikes and then it turns out the whole park was set up in memory of a mother, and I am hiking in memory of my mother.

Here's Jen - not sure what she is doing or why I took this picture:


Here's Reggie showing how to ford a stream with no poles! (We were using our poles for balance but one of mine decided to suddenly telescope in the middle of the hike):

Donor Heidi Roizen Wins FWE&E Achievement Award

Heidi Roizen , last month (on Sept 11 when I first wrote this post) - won the Forum of Women Entrepreneurs and Executives Achievement Award for 2008.

Heidi, who was my alumni mentor at Stanford for a short time, donated to my HFD effort and also gave me several Skinny Songs CDs. I gave most of them to my teammates, and we raffled off a couple of them at our charity mixer night.

Here is the organization's site. There's a video of the interview from that night, on this page.
Angel and I were watching this while we were still at work. It was so inspirational, we could not leave until it was over.

Here's Heidi's site. Congratulations, Heidi!

Sept 6, 10th Hike - Saratoga Gap - Long Ridge

This hike is dedicated to all the donors who have contributed since last week:
Marius (who donated while in Romania!), Antoine, Micah, Rob and Jennifer (again!), Thelma, Carolyn, Shonda, Derek, Greg, Sheridan, Teresa, and Bernie!

And it was a big hike....the group pictured here, plus Reggie (in picture below) - hiked a 14 mile loop together, taking 8 hours.

And almost all of us ran out of water near the end, making it feel a bit like we imagine boot camp would feel, at least for the last mile or so.

Lesson learned for me -- 4 liters plus a liter of electrolyte is not enough for these long hikes!

Picture above is Mentor Deb, Kelly, co-hike leader Nathalie, and me. Sitting on a log having a lunch break.

A ranger came by on his motorbike while we were sitting here eating and we had a nice chat with him. He was checking signs in the park.




Here we are with Reggie in the picture.....














This is the "After" picture. Everyone was pretty tired, drained, thirsty at this point.

Lauren, who is waving, had lemonade in her car and it was the best lemonade ever! Nathalie who is in blue hat in this picture is holding a cup.

Stacey had some leftover water in her car and gave me some, also the best water ever.

Notice to the right of my legs is my backpack where I threw it down to rest!

About an hour before the end of the hike, I ran out of the water I had brought. Luckily, a little later, Kelly gave some of her water to Deb and I, which helped a lot. Before then there were several points where I literally just wanted someone to come and get me!

Deb was very nice and waited with me until I just sucked it up and started off again. I could get moving, if only very slowly.

It might sound cheesy but at one point it wasn't helping anymore to be inspired by my other hikers, and I started thinking about why I am personally doing this.
About my mom and imagining her walking with me. This version of her, since it was hard to picture the 60-year old that she would be today. That did really help, and I kept going, and I finished.


Below is another picture I took at lunch, of our group's boots. Yay for our boots, they have been our constant friends through over 2 months of hiking.


















After lunch we had only walked for a little while more when we unexpectedly found this pond:
















This sign pointed out that it was part of the Jikoji Center which is a Zen retreat. I had seen the sign on Skyline driving down.