Hiking Mt. Olomana in Kailua

Tuesday was a federal holiday and Adam and I were both off work so we decided to go hike up Mt. Olomana in our town of Kailua. It was kind of an overcast day, but that kept the temperature pretty cool. It's a grueling hike straight up the ridge you see below, including some boulder scrambling and some areas where you have to use ropes to pull yourself up!


At one point in the hike we came across a grove of those strange Hawaiian pine trees with really long droopy needles that make a carpet on the forest floor that is thick and squishy. The wind was surprisingly loud whispering through the pines!

The virtual stair master of a trail we climbed.... we took lots of breaks on the way up!

View of the peak from the trail below... still quite a way to go at this point.

Some teaser views of the ocean as we ascended kept us motivated!

Looking back towards the mountains. You can see how steep the climb was as I was only a few feet ahead of Adam taking this picture.

And then we came to THIS:

Oh yes. Your eyes do not deceive you, that is a ROPE. Intended to be used to scramble up that steep face of rock. Needless to say, I was FREAKING OUT.

FREAKING.

OUT.
I almost didn't make it, but Adam talked me through it and stayed right below me, which I felt was silly since if I had fallen it would have knocked him right off the mountain with me on top. He insisted he wouldn't fall if I fell on him. Partly what got me up this was that I wanted to go back down LESS than I wanted to keep going up to the flat part!

I was really proud of myself. I conquered some fears that day! Adam had already climbed this before and he's fearless anyway....

View of our town - Kailua from above. At the end of that peninsula is the Marine Corps Base where Adam works and right to the left of it is where our new house is going to be.

Looking out farther into Kaneohe Bay.

What a fun day!

Hiking at Sky Meadow State Park

After arguing with myself for a bit about whether it was worth an hour drive each way and $3.60 for a gallon of gas, I decided the trails needed to be hiked. And I needed to get far enough away from the city that I couldn't hear the highway or the helicopters or the airport traffic. I packed up my Camelbak and headed west to Sky Meadow State Park in Paris, VA, about 50 miles outside the beltway. It was a perfect day for it - temps in the low 70's, no humidity to speak of and a light breeze blowing. We had a lot of rain and warmer weather last week and all of a sudden everything exploded into luscious green. No more the tiny timid buds on the trees. And not the brown-gray green of mid-summer when all the plants are gasping in the stifling heat. This was a fierce bright green, almost glowing in the sunlight. I did an 8 mile loop that included part of the Appalachian Trail. I've lived in Virginia for 3 and a half years now and this is the first time I've been on the AT.

The hike was all uphill for the first two miles, with this view on the left:


Then it headed into the trees. This was less a forest and more woodlands dotted along the hills. Even as green as it was today, it's still a far cry from the rainforested hikes of Oahu. The rolling trails are totally different from the island trails we hiked - those were muddy narrow footpaths carving along steep ravines and over wrinkled ridges to overlook sheer cliffs above the ocean. Virginia's trails are gentle by comparison:

The sky was so blue, though, and not a cloud to be seen.

After coming out of the wooded AT, the hike went along several miles of rolling hills where the long blue-green grass actually looked like water as the wind blew through it. The pastures overlooked a pretty farmland vista.

The best view was seen almost at the end of the hike from Piedmont Overlook. Virginia's mountains are like bumps on the landscape.

The trail cut straight across the meadows to the parking lot and visitor's center hidden in the crop of trees on the bottom right.

There were a fair number of people on the trails. At one point a woman and a man came up behind me and I thought they would pass me so I kept to the side. But the trail was going uphill and I guess it was too strenuous for them to gain enough ground to get around without me stopping or slowing considerably. I could hear the woman huffing and puffing right behind me and I could tell my conditioning was much better than hers by my comparatively long, measured breathing, so I strode out instead of letting them by. I could tell she was trying to keep up with me because as I sped up, she stayed close enough that I could hear her breathing. I kept my strides strong; we were still going uphill and had been for quite some time. Eventually they slowed and stopped altogether to take a rest. Success! Later on they caught up to me again and the woman was chattering on, so I stopped to let them pass, preferring to be with myself and the trees.

Even with my Gecko GPS, I also got a bit off track and ended up following the wrong trail at one point, adding a little more than a mile to my total. I was discouraged, but was not to be deterred! Although it's a good thing I figured it out or I'd have hiked right into the next state on the AT.

Now I'm recharged and ready to face the week!

Hiking at Great Falls & River Bend Park

On Saturday the weather was gorgeous and I drove up to River Bend Park and hiked from there down to Great Falls, then south a few more miles along the river to Difficult Run, then looped around back to Great Falls and back up the river to my car. About 10 miles total, but not a hard hike, barely any elevation gain.

The views are great, though, hiking all along the river, especially south of Great Falls where you do some bouldering and can look down on Mather Gorge. Plenty of people were out, which was kind of annoying, but was the point of going there since I was solo and wanted to make sure someone would be on the trails besides me. Just in case. I've been lost out in the woods on solo hikes before and that is NOT FUN!!!

Once I got lost out at Bull Run mountain and ended up crashing around in the forest for a couple of hours before I finally found a dirt road that seemed to lead nowhere. At last a woman drove by and asked me if I was lost. Yes. She said hikers get lost all the time out there and she pesters the national park all the time to blaze the trails better. I thought I was following some trail markings but it turns out I was following someone's property line! Eek. Then she told me if I'm alone out there I should carry a big stick because there are wild dogs!! When she dropped me off and told me to head straight through the forest and drove away, I heard a sound in the leaves running near me and about shit myself. It was a deer. I'll never leave a clear trail again if I'm alone!

Yesterday I had my new GPS toy my dad gave me, it's a little Garmin Gecko. It was pretty fun, it tracks your route for you. I had that and my Camelbak and hiking boots that Adam gave me for Christmas and was feeling like a real pro hehe.

It's definitely springtime. There were these little purple flowers blooming everywhere along some parts of the trail. This is north of Great Falls.

It was so pretty and continued on like this for about a mile!! Just a blanket of purple flowers on either side of the trail. The sun had disappeared behind some clouds by this point, this was at the end of my hike. These pics are backwards from how they were taken!!

As I was stopping to peer at this curious sight and take a pic, a hiker came up behind me to explain that these are silkworms. They build these little nests and grow into beefy caterpillars and then when all the leaves are fully grown they come out and eat them all - they are a real scourge and the park service tries to prevent them from eating the leaves by putting sticky bands around the tree branches. Ew.

It's hard to see in this pic, but there were purple trees popping out in some places in the forest too. A real easter palette - eager baby-green leaves budding all over the trees and some purples thrown in for color contrast! Plus the purple on the ground...

Great Falls looks bigger in person.

I wasn't on the trail five minutes before I saw three deer! Can you spot them? Two babies and a momma! When they first saw me they put their white puffs of tails in the air and sprang off down the stream. Then their curiosity got the better of them and they stood still while I snapped some pics. They were pretty close to me, maybe twenty feet and stared at me wide-eyed with perky ears to get their pictures taken!

They are harder to see in this picture, they're right in the middle.

I just talked to Adam. He is doing well, he seems to be much better this time than last time he was out there in the desert. He said his office is in a plywood box. !!

The World As it Should Be

My aunt was diagnosed with breast cancer on Friday. It sounds good - small tumor and they caught it early. Still. I don't think I need to say how much this grips me. After watching Crazy Sexy Cancer on Wednesday and reliving all the emotions and memories, now this brings it back even stronger because it's personal. My heart goes out to her so much. Even though there is not a doubt in my mind that she will be "cured" (...no one really uses the C word in reference to cancer because, well, you're never *really* cured, it's always lurking there the possibility of recurrence or metastasis), I know what she is going through. I know how completely overwhelming and impossible it seems that this is happening, that this is your life, that you will make it through this, that you will feel joyful or relaxed or carefree again. Ever. (You do, eventually. Eventually you get lost in work again, cuss at drivers who cut you off, feel frustration about the size of your ass, and stop seeing unfolded laundry as a sign that living itself is just too impossible. This too shall pass. It really shall. As unlikely as it seems.) I remember feeling the intense need to DO SOMETHING. ANYTHING. NOW. Oh my god, just fix it. And at the same time, the feeling of total helplessness, because there's nothing to do but wait. Wait and see. For me, the waiting and wondering was almost harder than going through the treatment... almost. Because you don't know what will happen. Yeah, they say it's a small tumor and they caught it early, but what if they cut you open and the cancer is EVERYWHERE? What if you have complications? What if you don't wake up? What if you DO? Then what? Then there's a gaping wound in your neck and you feel like if you lean your head back it might fall right off, or if you sneeze all your insides will come exploding out, and eventually there will be a huge scar on your neck and that will never go away, and now you don't have a thyroid and maybe the cancer will come back anyway maybe it will come in the night and steal you away and in spite of all your best efforts and all the vegetables you have eaten and all the healing you have done and all the moments you have lived as though you are not a sick person you are a sick person... ? Yes, eventually WHATIF? stops becoming your All Consuming Entire Existence and you stop living with the clarity of a Mortal Person because, quite simply, it is too exhausting. Sometimes you have to just sit on the couch and eat candy bars from the vending machine and watch bad re-runs on TV, even if it might be your last day on earth, because you just can't live on the precipice of life all the time. But even once you do move on, there will always be the Reliving of it. Talking with my aunt, I experience all the fear and emotion and pain again, just as powerfully as the first time, it seems.

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Just to show that life does move on and you do eventually get to do things you love again and not be a Sick Person, I will tell you that Adam and I went to Harper's Ferry on the border of WVA and MD yesterday to walk around and go hiking. I wanted to hike farther, but the foot was pissed, so we hiked to the overlook and back and called it good. The hike goes over an old bridge across the river and up the hill on the other side to a rock outcropping where you can look down on the town of Harper's Ferry and get a good view of MD/VA in the distance.

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Adam is leaving next weekend to spend 10 days in Kansas with his family. That's TEN of the mere THIRTY he has left here in DC before he moves to Hawaii. Ten days to test out being alone. Because come October? He will be gone. I didn't think I cared. Truthfully, I thought, ok, he's going. Probably we are not meant to be together (if we were, wouldn't we [I] *know* it by now?) and maybe his leaving will be good for me, maybe it will be a catalyst for new and exciting things to come into my life. Maybe it will be like the End of an Era and I will be able to move on to a healthier, happier, more fulfilled chapter in my life.

But.

The closer it gets to that time, the more I realize that I do care. I care a lot. In fact...

I'm dying inside.

I feel a little catch in my throat when I ask him how many kids he wants to have and he makes his arms into a big circle and says, I think I can get my arms around maybe 4 or 5 of them... or he washes my dishes while I'm in the shower, not because he should, and not even to do something nice for me, but just because that's the way he is... or when he tells me that walking beside me through cancer, especially holding my hand in the hospital after surgery, he felt like his soul was fused to mine... and when I ask him if he still likes me even though I'm not as skinny as I used to be and he says, you don't even know what you're talking about... but do you still love me? and I already know the answer is he would love me still no matter what.

My Person is leaving me. What does this mean?

I don't know. I don't know.

And I'm eating my heart out.

I roll the window down
And then begin to breathe in
The darkest country road
And the strong scent of evergreen
From the passenger seat as you are driving me home

Then looking upwards
I strain my eyes
And try to tell the difference
Between shooting stars and satellites
From the passenger seat as you are driving me home

"Do they collide?"
I ask and you smile
With my feet on the dash
The world doesn't matter

(Death Cab for Cutie)

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That's all I have for now. I want to tie this post up in a neat little insightful ribbon, but I can't. This post is messy and complicated, just like life, and sometimes you can't figure it out and you can't make it better and it's not ok. You just have to breathe and put one foot in front of the other and hit the publish button and trust that everything is as it should be.

"Do they collide?"
I ask and you smile
With my feet on the dash
The world doesn't matter