My husband and I love to hike. We only really got into it a few years ago, when our two children got old enough to accompany us on some of our shorter rambles. (They are now twelve and thirteen.) We’ve put in some pretty serious mileage in the last three years, including hiking 96 kilometers (59 miles) in four days. (The kiddies stayed with Grandma for that one!)
We had hiked enough (all short day hikes) that we felt pretty confident that we could be able to do the hardest hike in the Maritime Provinces, Cape Chignecto Provincial Park. The hike is a grueling 52-kilometer (32 mile) coastal trail that promised, in return for all our hard work, some pretty spectacular scenery. We had only ever “backpacked” for one night prior, but that didn’t worry us. We had hiked plenty of trails before that were rated as difficult, and we found them to be a breeze. Although this trail was rated as “Very Challenging”, we thought perhaps like so many other trail descriptions that this would be a bit of an exaggeration, or perhaps not apply to “fit” folks like us.
We didn’t have much money at the time, so we geared ourselves up with $20 Wal-Mart backpacks, borrowed the kids’ sleeping bags, bought a $25 pup tent, and hit the trail.
Within twenty minutes of starting the trail, I nearly lost my breakfast. That was a pretty common theme over the four days it took us to hike the entire trail. Steep, steep climbs that went on and on were followed by shin-punishing steep downhill grades. Mealtimes found me too nauseous to eat much. Most days saw me throwing up in the bushes (or at least dry-heaving) at least once. The combination of the heavy pack (mine was over thirty pounds) combined with the seemingly endless climbing really took their toll on me. I guess we weren’t quite as fit as we thought we were!
In addition to the sheer physicality of it all, there were other issues as well. Our backpacks had started to fall apart a few days in and needed to be patched (uncomfortably) with duct tape. I took a tumble on day two, cutting my leg and causing a huge hand-shaped bruise on my arm where my husband had grabbed at me frantically.
It rained all day on the third day, soaking us right to the skin and trapping us in our tent for hours once we reached our campsite. We also had an up-close and personal encounter with a sick moose that gave us quite a fright.
By the time we staggered out of the woods at dinnertime on the fourth day, we were sore, bedraggled, and wearier than I can ever remember being before. My family and co-workers thought we were nuts to have wasted our precious “vacation time” that way. I had decided I would think long and hard before ever attempting a stunt like that again.
But long about September, when the air started to cool and you could smell fall in the air, I started to spend a lot of time reminiscing about that hike. I even gazed wistfully at the picture of that moose that I keep on my desk. By the time Christmas had rolled around, my husband and I had already talked about going back. (In fact, my big gift last year was a state-of-the-art backpack with all the bells and whistles.)And now, with the official start of summer a mere few weeks away, we already know for certain that we’re going back to do it again. Our friends and family all think we’ve both lost our bloody minds. But I need to go back and do it again, and I’ll tell you why:
It made me feel strong. When I dropped my backpack at the end of that trail, I felt like there was nothing in the world that I couldn’t accomplish, nothing in the world too difficult for me too tackle. I think that if I had found it easy, I would have been disappointed. I try to carry the feeling I had that day around with me in everyday life, when things get hard and I feel like giving up. I tell myself, I’m the gal who tackled Cape Chignecto, and I’m the gal that beat it. And I’ll go back again this year, and likely the year after that, to prove once again to myself that I really can do anything I set my mind to.
