I’m starting to write this one without a title. It’s the first time it has happened. We’ll see with which title it comes out.
More than 10 years ago, a friend of mine took me for a hike on a mountain not far from where I live. I was yet to turn 26. I’ve always been quite an athletic person, always played sports—football at first and then basketball up until a year or so ago—but I pretty much never trained cardio. Which means my legs were never the issue when I was hiking, but my breath was. I was always, always short of breath.
We hiked this mountain back in June 2015. I remember it being a hot day, and the other thing I remember is that this particular trail was an absolute nightmare. You park the car next to a river, at around 200 meters of elevation. The first third of the hike is an infinite stone staircase nested in the woods, covered in moss and quite slippery. It’s an old road built god knows when, and it’s well maintained, but going up is a slog. And there’s basically nothing to see because you’re inside the forest, and it’s not even a pretty one. So you keep your head down and you power through it.
That’s how the first solid hour of the hike looks, and then you finally reach the point where the trail takes you on the side of the mountain, and the view opens up, and you start to see the valley down below. By this point, you have gained some 500 meters of elevation, give or take.
You then leave the pretty view behind you and start walking up through the woods, on what has now become a normal trail, no longer a stone stair but a regular dirt trail. You go up and up and up, and after another hour or so (and another 300 meters of elevation gained, you’re now at 800), you get to a mountain hut (that wasn’t in great shape 10 years ago) and you think you’re almost there.
And you’d be wrong in thinking that, because even though it feels like you’re almost at the top, the summit is not close. It takes you another solid hour of scrambling up and down and up and down the forest—which has now become a very pretty one though, way better than the one down below when you were climbing that infinite stair—to finally, FINALLY, reach the summit. A thoroughly unimpressive one. Because this is not a very tall mountain (1237 meters), and its summit is still surrounded by trees.
So you just hiked up for three hours and gained more than a km in elevation to see an uninspiring summit, and now it’s time to walk back down. And down you go, through the forest, through the dirt trail, through the infinite stone staircase, and by the time you’re at the car again, you also want to go through the cold water of the river because this has been absolutely exhausting.
At least it was for me, back in June 2015. It took me almost 6 hours to complete this hike, and I remember hating most of it.
But minds are strange. At least mine is. Time passes, things change, and a month or so ago, I started to feel the desire to go back up on this stupid mountain again. I was about to go for it a few weeks ago, but it was 37°C and hiking for 6 hours didn’t sound like a smart idea, so I postponed.
It’s been raining for the past few days, but last night I said to myself, «If I wake up tomorrow and there’s nice weather, I’m going for it». And sure enough, I woke up today, the weather was nice, and so I went for it.
And let me tell you: it was exactly as awful as it was 10 years ago. But I kinda loved it. I loved how awful it was. I loved how uninspiring it is as a hike. And I loved the fact that my brain wanted to do it again, 10 years later.
I went solo this time around. No friends, no dogs. It was just me, my knees (that will likely hate me tomorrow morning), and my thoughts. And like 10 years ago, there was no payoff waiting at the top. Only the same pretty forest, and a nice view of the valley, on a day with clear sky, where I could very clearly see the sea, far in the distance.
I hiked this mountain for the first time when I was almost 26. I’m 36 now. Maybe this can be my way to check if I still have it: after all this time around, I went further (13.5km vs 16km), because I took a different way down, which made the whole hike longer and yet I still completed it 30 minutes faster. Take that 26-year-old me!
— M