First Hike of the Season!

Of which there are no pictures, because I forgot to check the camera last night and discovered partway up the mountain that the battery was dead. Ooops.

But I finally made it up Monadnock, which is effectively in my backyard and I had not hiked before.  Monadnock is supposedly the 3rd most-hiked mountain in the world, an internet factoid that I'm not sure I believe, but then again, it's a easy mountain not too far from Boston. It's certainly popular - even though it was Mother's Day and kind of overcast for the majority of the trip, there were plenty of other people.

I'm always amused by the wide variety of people you see on the trails on "easy" hikes. There were the 4 of us (I went with L and LaLa and L's brother) and we were all using it as a training hike - figure out what we forgot to put in the pack, remember where everything goes, determine what gear needs to be replaced, and in my case, remember which spots I need to tape on my feet before heading out. There was one serious hiker dude who was doing LAPS on the mountain - parking lot to top. He passed us heading up, passed us heading back down when we were almost to the summit, and then we met him going back up when we were about 1/4 mile from the parking lot. There was the guy on top in jean shorts who had put his bottle of grape soda down directly on top of the USGS marker, and couldn't understand why we asked him to move it. And then there were the 4 people just down from the summit who had hiked up with a radio, a videographer, and were doing interpretive dance. Yes, really. Good times!

Now my legs are pleasantly tired, I have a list of little things I need to find around the house to replace in the pack, and I'm itching to get out again and do something longer (and maybe something less popular). And remember folks, the USGS marker is not a coaster!