Lazy Mountain Climb

Today I climbed Lazy Mountain with my friend Pam and our two little dogs.  Usually by taking the old Lazy Mountain Trail I figure about 4 hours round trip on a leisurely hike, and 3 hours if I'm practically running in both directions.  But today's trip took us exactly 7 hours! We did switch to the Lazy Moose Trail for the descent, which is 2 miles longer than the nearly straight up old trail. Pam doesn't like the steep trail for the downhill because it can be quite treacherous, especially on days like today when half was slick mud and the other half slick ice and snow. I switched to my micro-spikes once we hit the snow, but even with them, it was still pretty slippery. I was really glad I chose to bring my trekking poles.  They were almost essential today.  Once we reached the picnic bench at the halfway point, we found the route was totally snow-covered.  In many places we could just follow old footprints, but often we found we would punch through and post-hole up to our knees. Our dogs, however bounced along happily.  Pam's dog tried very hard to get into an altercation with a moose but she finally obeyed and left the moose alone.  I keep Baby on a leash because she will chase anything regardless of how large and ferocious it might be. The weather was fairly nice but not quite as sunny as we had hoped.  But the views were still spectacular. After much trudging and struggling, we finally reached the summit ridge.  It seemed a bit treacherous because the hard packed path created by earlier hikers was very narrow and one would not want to slide down the north side.  My dog decided to slide down the south side and found herself sitting on the rocks in a pile of soft snow.  Another reason I prefer to keep her on a leash.  But we reached the rocks on the summit without any disasters and had a pleasant little rest up there. 

the trip down was much easier except for the fact that now the snow had softened considerably and we occasionally found ourselves sinking thigh deep into the snow that had held us on the way up. We made our way to the rocks and even still wearing our spikes, it was much easier. I'm quite sure mine are not as sharp as they were when I left home.  Once we reached the halfway point, we turned onto the Lazy Moose Trail. There was still a lot of snow but after awhile, we were able to remove the spikes and walk mostly on dirt. It wasn't all nice dry dirt, and sometimes the mud was so deep that my one boot nearly submerged in it. I never brought my boots back into the house once I got home. Fortunately they are waterproof but I left them outside for the caked mud to remain out there. We reached the parking lot at 5pm, exactly 7 hours after we left it at 10am.  Nice speed, one mile per hour!