Hiking!  Coltrane and I went hiking!  We went to Muir Woods, a beautiful area just north of San Francisco, CA.  I was really excited to have found someone willing to make the short drive and go hiking with me. I hadn’t been there in over ten years and it was just as beautiful as I remembered.

When we were assessing trails to take, we chose one that was 4.5 miles even though the 9 mile one sounded like a beautiful trail. “Start small, you can always go back”.   That’s what I told myself, and good thing, because the trail distances were one-way, not round trip like I had assumed. 18 miles would have been a LONG day!  We ended up modifying our trail slightly so it came out to about 7 miles of pure beauty.

The first 4.5-5 miles was mostly slight grade uphill through a redwood tree forest complete with mossy tree stumps and mushrooms.  The top of the hill left us with a beautiful view of San Francisco in the distance and clouds rolling in looking like the ocean. Breathtaking.  The remained of the hike was different kinds of trees.  On the ostomy front – I didn’t have to empty “in nature” because there was a bathroom at the top of the mountain so that was handy.  On the steep downhill portions I ran, ostomy out of mind. Woohoo!

I wore an ostomy wrap for support from ostomysecrets.com that has pockets in it and used the pockets to hold my cellphone and ID, I love multipurpose clothing.  My legs and body were definitely tired for the last 2 miles of the trip and I think by the end I was a little dehydrated despite having been drinking water the whole way.  What a fun adventure though, I am excited to go back and try another trail.

This post was originally written in February 2014.