As I said this was a wet hike and we made it about 3 quarters of the way to Leechtown this time so about a 12k hike. Being so wet I hardly pulled out the camera since my digital camera does not handle direct rain very well I just took a couple of pictures of the river which was running real high and fierce.

I did add an extra kilo or so to my pack for this trip bringing the total up to about 5 kilos now for my pack. I did notice we got much further along the trail before I began to have knee pain so the muscles are building. The last time out was similar to this one in that about 3 quarters of the way into the hike was when the knee started to hurt. Although from last time it was only a couple of days before it was feeling better not several.

If you’re looking for a place to get your training done for hiking the Galloping Goose is not only a great trail to do it on but it is also very picturesque. Enjoy the pictures from the weeks outing.

This 5 point buck was eyeing us

We had only managed one hike in the month of October but we are determined that we will get in a hike every two weeks from this point forward. It is now the first week of November in the Sooke hills and the weather is turning colder and getting damper as it does on the wet coast or beautiful British Columbia.

We headed out this time with a different goal in mind, now that we have done some wandering along the river’s edge and up the hills along the pipeline it is time to think about building up our legs and backs. This time I started with my pack carrying about 5 kilos mostly just water and snacks. We decided we would start heading up the Goose trail and actually work towards getting to Leechtown.

I had recently gotten an iPhone and downloaded a GPS program called runkeeper which my wife uses to track her runs (you can read here blog at http://www.littleillusions.com/ all about running) and decided to use it to track our hikes. Here is a link to the one we did on this date http://runkeeper.com/pub/act/2WOw0klazv2orbQMR5sn/map as you can see we did about 10k this time and actually have some proof on it, plus a great Google map to look at.

So what did we see on this hike well we saw a great big 5 point buck staring at us from across a ravine, the largest deer i had seen in years. He would not take his eyes off us as long as we were in his territory. It was also pretty wet on this day although we were pretty lucky in that most of the dampness was simply left over from the rain before we started.

The river was up a bit and pushing it pretty heavy, as you can see from the pictures the flow was heavy. Being November you would think the leaves would all be gone but we still saw some pretty stunning scenery. This is one of the benefits of living on the wet cost you get to get some beautiful areas no matter what time of year it is and the weather while damp is not usually too cold.

We did manage to get about halfway towards Leechtown as you can by the map. So our goals from this point forward is to work our packs up to 20 kilos and make it to Leechtown, beyond and back in a day.