Saturday was another of the Adventure Hikes at Clear Creek Metro Park. These are longer-than-the-average-organized-hikes led by the Director of Columbus Metroparks, John O’Meara.
The one on Saturday was 11.6 miles, and just happened to pick a 65° rainless January day.
The air was pretty foggy when things started out. We’d had so much snow melt the past week that there was a lot of moisture in the air, and a starting temperature of around 45° helped that out.
Here’s the picture I took last Tuesday of the Creekside Meadows trail.
Nothing but Packed-Down Snow
Because it is down in the valley and shaded to the south, the ice and snow hangs around longer there. However, a week of warm weather had quite an effect on it. Here is the same location, more or less, and pointing in the other direction.
Same Trail, Four Days Later
Big difference. And you can’t see them all, but there were around 25 hikers. As you can tell, these hikes are quite popular. We even had one of the park rangers along, simply enjoying a hike on her day off.
This was really the only spot that retained any snow at all. Here are some of the hikers descending a hill along the Hemlock trail.
Descending the Hemlock Trail
The halfway point was again at the Barnebey-Hambleton picnic area. You can see that we’d climbed above any remaining fog.
Lunch Overlooking the Clear Creek Valley
I made sure to shoot this picture pointing a different direction than I usually do. Usually I shoot up-valley. This is the other direction.
After lunch we headed down about 140 feet to Lake Ramona. You can see that the sun is now out, and working hard to melt the ice remaining on the lake.
Alongside Lake Ramona
This is about the time I picked up a thorn on the front part of the ball of my foot. I’ll occasionally step on thorns—usually they don’t go very deep (I feel them and stop stepping on them) and pop right back out. This time a thorny cane stuck, and I had to gingerly pull it off.
After a bit I realized that there was still some small bit of thorn in there. These are actually less of a bother than you might think. The thorn hadn’t penetrated far enough to draw blood or anything; it was just pressing on a nerve when I happened to step in just the right way to put more pressure on that one particular spot.
Since we were trucking pretty good (that’s another part of the “Adventure Hike”—it’s done at a pretty good pace), I just didn’t bother stopping. It just wasn’t bothering me enough, even though I got the occasional reminder.
After a bit, the group I was hiking with (we tend to get spread out, since not everybody hikes at the same speed) stopped to rest after a particularly long climb, but I went on ahead to where I knew there was a bench to sit on. At that point, I got out the tweezers on my Swiss Army Knife, was able to locate the thorn, and easily scraped it out. I had ended up hiking about 2½ miles with it.
It really wasn’t that big of a deal. (And it certainly wasn’t worth hiking shod just to avoid such a minor annoyance.)
The funny thing is, after I got home, walking on our linoleum floors, I felt a different twinge. Turned out I had another thorn in there I just hadn’t noticed before. I only felt it on the linoleum because its flatness always stimulated it.
This one had also gone in deeper, and was a bit harder to get out. However, the tapered point of thorns make them fairly easy to get out if you can manipulate the skin to kind of get under them. I didn’t quite shoot it out, but I did easily get it to withdraw enough to get a tweezers on it.
Here it is.
Dethorned
It looks fiercer than it was. That just wasn’t long enough to get too deep in the thick and callused skin on the bottom of my foot. When you hike barefoot a lot, the body adjusts and can handle with ease situations that the shod think near impossible (or at least annoying).
Once again, it was a great hike. The next one is scheduled for February 9.
Ahcuah 
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