Mesa Trail Recap

I have a lot of rambling to get to my point.

I've been hiking up Mesa Trail since about the mid 1980s. I think it is the second best trail in the Magdalena mountains. When I joined Search And Rescue the litter carry practice was to carry a real human up Mesa Trail. Thankfully, I was sick and couldn't go that day. I've been thankful ever since, actually.

Also, Mesa Trail might not be the name of this trail. Matt's GPS showed that the other trail was called Mesa Trail. And someone had nailed boards across the "gate" to Mesa Trail. It used to be a little boxlike non-turning turnstyle to keep things like cows and motorcycles out, but that was gone. Now it is just a hole in the fence, and someone nailed boards across it. There was no sign saying it was closed, and the side-gate wasn't locked, so we just went through the gate.

All my years of hiking up have taught me things. Going out and hiking it without recently prior hiking experience is quite painful. It is a short trail (to where I normally stop) of less than two miles. A bit steep. And normally my first time or two onto it is a pain fest. I'm too out of breath to hike up, my legs are quickly too sore to hike up it. I can't walk the next day because I'm too sore from having walked up it.

And now I ramble! I've been weight lifting for a couple of months now. Medhi, whose 5x5 plan I'm following, says squats are the main exercise. Squats can hurt. Interestingly, the places that squats hurt are also some of the prime hurting-places for having hiked up Mesa Trail. It's like stepping up a trail is somehow similar to lifting up your whole body with your knees.

So yesterday, with months of weight lifting behind me, but fifteen months since my last hike, I hiked up Mesa Trail. I plodded on steadily. I didn't become out of breath. My legs didn't scream at me. We took no sit-down rests, the only substantial stop we made was so that Brad could fish his Gatorade bottle out of his pack. If not for that, it is likely that I could have hiked non-stop to the top, which isn't what I'd expect after a broken ankle and fifteen months of not hiking up things. The only time that has happened is when I've made hiking up Mesa Trail a routine occurrence. But this time I just jumped right in and it was easy. I have every reason to believe that weight lifting is what made this easy.

There were some problems hiking up. The rains have brutalized the trail. What used to be a smooth dirt path is now a rocky and painful rut. I was wearing five-fingers, and this was the most painful terrain I've every tried to walk on. At the top I had some terrible foot cramps. Walking around on flat ground after getting back to Socorro was hard, and I limped a lot because of how knotted my left foot was. This morning isn't bad. I can feel that I was mean to my feet yesterday, but I'm able to walk around, which is good. My left ankle also has some pain in it, but it got a work out too.

We hammocked at the top, as always. I took a few pictures. Despite saying I needed to take a lot of pictures, I didn't. The hike down was painful because of my foot cramps. If my feet were in better shape then it would have been pretty easy to get down.