Walking For Exercise And Fun

Here's a few that my wife took of me starting the hike and on returning.

 

Tomorrow, I will take a shorter hike, 3.7 miles. It will finish about where I began my last couple of hikes. Walking home will add another 2+ miles to it if I opt for the sidewalks. I'll decide when I get there whether I want to do that or go through the woods. That will probably depend on the sort of day it is. I don't want to get out of the habit of walking because I'd like to build it up to ten miles or more.



This is almost the same hike I took once before, only I walked along Route 157 then, while this will be in the woods, which roughly parallels the road.

 

By the way, this doesn't need to be my own walking diary. Anyone else who walks for exercise or fun may feel free to post their experiences here, as well.

 

Uh-huh. When I walk blocks, or along the road, it is more of an ordeal but when I am in the woods, it's an adventure and I don't think much about my legs hurting or how far I have to go yet. Plus, I use different muscles when I have to select stumps, roots, and rocks to walk on, to avoid getting my feet wet, as well as the combination of uphill, downhill, and so on. Although it tends to be wet, this is the best time of year, at least here in Maine, because the biting bugs aren't out yet.

 

I got rained out. Before that, I got twisted and went the wrong way a couple of times, wandering around the woods for a couple of hours before coming out not far from where I went in. Then it started raining so I called my wife to get me. I wouldn't have minded walking in the rain but I had my phone and my camera with me. I think I'll invest in a compass. I have a couple of them around but I don't know where.

 

At least in the area I was in this time, I knew I wouldn't be hopelessly lost since it was blocked in by the town of Millinocket, the paved road, the railroad tracks, or Dolby Pond. As long as I walked straight in any direction, I'd come out somewhere I'd recognize.

I've been lost, in the way of not knowing where I was going to come out, several times. I don't think it's because I'm stupid, just that I tend to follow trails to see where they go, or I walk around looking at things; then, when I get ready to leave, I learn that I'm not where I thought I was. I get lost on my own property up north. There too, as long as I walk straight in any direction, but one, I would come out to something I recognized. There is one area where my land borders on thousands of acres of paper company land, but there's only one small portion of where I might not realize that I'm leaving my own land. I am sometimes surprised at where I come out, but I don't get hopelessly lost there.

I did get lost on Bagley Mountain, near Lincoln, Maine, once. Always hating to go back the way I came, I decided to walk down the mountain a different way than I had come up, which was on a defined path. What could go wrong going down a mountain? The direction is... down. As it turned out, I had to go around so many obstructions, looking for easy ways to get down that my sense of direction got twisted, so once I had descended the mountain, I wasn't headed in the right direction. I wandered for hours and it was dark by the time I came to a road, and thankfully there were cars on it or I wouldn't have seen it. Then I learned that I had a few miles to walk in order to get back to my car.

I enjoyed Boy Scouts, but I suppose I was a crappy Boy Scout.

 

Okay, I returned a little while ago from a ten or ten or a half-mile hike. It was probably close to ten and a half, or more, because there were a few places where I had to work my way around some very wet spots in the trail and, for about twenty minutes, I was without a trail. The trail I had decided to hike would have been a shorter one, maybe six miles, so I decided to hike each of the side trails that I came along, some of which were logging roads that dead-end, so that I would have to backtrack or make my way through the woods, sans trail, in order to connect to another one.



Mostly, it was a pleasant walk but, since water tends to take the path of least resistance, it sometimes follows the trail. For example, this is not a stream; it is the trail. I did manage not to get very wet today though, although I sometimes had to parallel the trail through the woods. On a side note, I see something red on a limb of a tree toward the left side of the picture, and I'm wondering if there might have been a cardinal there. If so, I didn't see it at the time that I took the picture. I suppose we have other red birds in Maine, but the only ones I can remember seeing are the cardinals. I can't think of any other red thing that might be on a tree branch here.



The problem with hiking a snowmobile trail is that snowmobilers don't mind water, given that it's frozen during the snowmobile season, and that can result in some problems for hikers. In this case, I had to make my way across what appears to be the top of a beaver dam. I explored my options for going around but they didn't look pleasant. That wouldn't have been much of a problem twenty years ago, but I almost took a spill. I have to remember to bring one of my hiking sticks with me for balance because balance doesn't come as naturally to me now as it once did. By the way, what looks like a stream, to the left of the beaver dam, that's the trail. It might also be a stream because, again, that wouldn't be a problem for a snowmobile. Clearly there is a stream involved because that's what the beavers dammed up.

The trail that I was on leads to the back of the Millinocket Airport, which is a municipal airport with two runways, maybe three. I know they added one a few years ago, I remember, because it didn't seem fair that the taxpayers of Millinocket should pay for it since 99% of the town's taxpayers have never used the airport, and don't benefit from it in any way. Plus, the main reason they wanted to add a runway was to accommodate a new National Monument that Millinocket voters had voted overwhelmingly against. Nevertheless, we paid for it. However, this sounds political, and I wouldn't want to upset anyone, so I'll go on.

The snowmobile trail passes in the middle of two runways to connect to Old Medway Road, which seems odd to me. I considered following that, but it occurred to me that, while they might accommodate snowmobiles traveling there in the winter, a time when the airport is rarely used, it wouldn't necessarily follow that they'd want people walking across it. So, to avoid an encounter with the SWAT team that the Millinocket PD might hurriedly put together, I decided to walk around the airport, along the edge of the tarmac.

Finding a trail that led into the woods, I thought there was a good chance that I might be able to avoid the airport altogether. Well, that trail crossed a stream, which lacked a bridge, so I followed the stream, looking for a way across. It wasn't a particularly large stream and, as it turned out, it wasn't a stream at all, because it simply ended. There was no trail but, by then, I could see a building. While I expected to come out on Old Medway Road, I came out on Route 157, which was fine, except that it meant a longer walk back to the house than I was expecting. I considered calling my wife because I was a little sore by then, but I decided to finish it.

That's it. As far as I can determine, it was more than ten miles but less than eleven miles.



By the end of this winter, I wasn't feeling particularly healthy. As is usually the case during the winter, I was out of shape, and I was also feeling old. This winter was probably worse than usual because I didn't really get a lot of exercise last spring, summer, and fall either, so it wasn't just the winter. Now, I am feeling pretty good. I haven't lost a whole lot of weight but the bulk is better distributed than it had been, so the weight is in muscle rather than fat.

 

Having pretty much hiked every trail of any size that I can walk to from my home, I am going to have to expand beyond the Millinocket area. If I can get my wife to drive to the start of a trail and pick my up again at the end, I'll try some longer ones. I wish our idiot governor hadn't closed Baxter State Park because there are a lot of trails there that I'd like to try. Unfortunately, the park rangers are still working or I'd just sneak in. I'm thinking of doing that anyhow since it's not like the place is fenced in or anything. I wouldn't have to walk past the front gate.