Walking in Circles: The Training Hike!

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Last Saturday Kathy invited me to accompany her on a training hike in preparation for her 1/2 marathon, The Goat Mountain Gallop. She mapped out a route through our town that includes all kinds of terrain, and I took pictures along the way. Since we are a couple of happy grandmothers, I couldn't resist "framing" the photos in an old-timey kind of way.

First photo: Off we go! My husband took this one for us. :)

First part of the walk in through a little wooded park area which includes hairpin turns like this one.

Here is Kathy heading up a trail into an upper neighborhood of our town.

We had to watch our step through here. This portion of the trail used to be a vehicle road, which both of us actually drove on many, many years ago! It's now closed off (obviously!) and only used for foot traffic. Our hike day was raining to begin with, which made things a little slippery.

Our Town! Here's a great view of the oldest part of our hometown. Notice the dark clouds. By this time the rain had stopped and the rest of our hike was dry and cool.

How about some stairs on a training hike? Happily, we only came DOWN them this time!

Our route took us along the Willamette River.

Then we crossed town, over a bridge into another community and there we followed a different river: The Clackamas!

Back into our town again, and I detoured Kathy onto the most thrilling part of our hike: Crossing a train trestle! She was concerned a train could catch us there and scolded me for stopping to take a pictures when we should have been "hurrying"!

3 1/2 hours later we we done, and by Kathy's calculations we had covered 9 miles. We certainly enjoyed walking this big circle together. Even though we have been friends for nearly 30 years, we don't often get to have prolonged visits with each other. This was great fun, and I know Kathy is going to do very well in the Gallop next weekend!