Life's a Stitch

So I ended my last post, regarding watching trail previews, with the question, did it make us better prepared or scared.

The answer: not scared enough. Whoever rated the trail difficulty as 2/5 has a different rating system than we’re used to. Overall it averaged a 3, but some parts were a 4. I confirmed this with an experienced hiker,

The good: spectacular scenery, really spectacular.

And meeting hikers from Germany, Canada, Czech Republic, and Italy.

The challenging: 

• some narrow cliff trails with steep, high drop offs. I chose to look the other way.
• Hiking on trails with deep sand.
• Scrambling on rocks. 
• The flies on the sandy parts of the trail that were attracted to our sunscreen.

I bummed down the top portion of this segment:

Each step was calculated in these two, one downhill, one up:

I’m happy to report we made it unscathed.