Sunrise in the Sooke Hills

Well now that all the past blog updates are done for our journey to being able to carry everything we need for lightweight camping it’s time to sum up our hikes. We finished up the year with one final hike today, it was a great hike although the coldest yet it seemed.

We made some excellent time up to Leechtown making the 8k hike in only 90min (must have been the cold spurred us to warm up), although it did take 2.5 hrs to get back. Not too many pictures today just a couple a great sunrise pictures on the hillside and some interesting frost on the ground.

We did over 16k today although the map shows that we teleported for about 5k. Seems I had paused the GPS program when we stopped in Leechtown for a midmorning snack and forgot to restart it. You can see the map of this hike here http://runkeeper.com/pub/act/zGEYR3CfperIRz4nUI0v/map as you can see we made it to Leechtown and then we suddenly appear 5k back down the trail.

We did actually go about 500m past Leechtown this time just so we can start to get the lay of the land and start to explore the Kapoor park and check things out.

This was a pretty brutal hike not real sure why it may have been the fast pace up there of the fact that I had upped the weight in my pack to 10 kilos plus an additional kilo since I had to carry all the water today. For the last 2k back I was using my walking staff as a cane to help me along. Although as I am entering this my knee is feeling pretty good and bouncing back quickly, it could possibly be related to this great supplement that I am taking not real sure yet but am monitoring to see.

Now that we are on a regular schedule for our hikes I think we might make our goal of doing a 2 day overnighter sometime in March of 2010. In which we will hike out into the hills and spend the night do some sightseeing maybe even a little gold panning in the open areas that are available and head back. I do look forward to not having pain at the end of a hike and just feeling good about the hike.

I do think for the next couple of hikes I will keep my pack at its current weight and simply work on my endurance since my shoulders where feeling it today. Here is some information about the Kapoor Regional Park that might interest you http://www.crd.bc.ca/parks/reserves/kapoor.htm it does give a bit more information about the park.

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.