Hiking Delights

Two days ago I did my first hike of the year. (Skip past all my excellent excuses for why I hadn’t done any hiking for the past three months, except for an attempt on January 1st that lasted only one mile, and no other hiking since last October.) Inspired by blogger Tammy Strobel, who keeps a "delight list," I'm going to share five delights of the hike.

Delight No. 1: My Adventure Challenge

The ad came up in my Facebook feed on Friday afternoon — directed precisely to me, of course. I went straight down that rabbit hole and stayed there for at least an hour. Challenge and Accountability are the two things I need to push myself to accomplish just about anything. My Adventure Challenge has a hiking challenge for every season; the current one is the Spring Fling Challenge, to hike 75 miles on trails, March through May. I'm getting a late start, but averaging 9.5 miles per week will get me there. Week 1 consisted of the coming weekend.

Delight No. 2: Actually getting out on the trail

I had sort of planned to hike on Saturday anyway, but without my friends Challenge and Accountability my excuses probably would have prevailed and I would have taken an extra barre class and a short walk and called it a day. Instead, I drove 15 minutes to the Northwest Branch Trail, a hundred yards or so off a major city street. You'd expect a city trail, but a few minutes hiking on it takes you into the woods along the stream and you forget the city.

Delight No. 3: Birds and flowers

Shortly after the street traffic noise faded out, I heard the bird calls. There was one that sounded close, just overhead, a complex pattern of four of five notes repeated. How does one describe birdsong? Probably there's an app for identifying the birds, but how would that work? I should read music reviews and learn something about describing melody and tone.

Next I came to a single flower growing out of the green ground cover. Its bell-shaped, lavender petals were beginning to wilt, but it was my first flower sighting of my first hike of this spring. Later I passed a fairy-size field of those flowers.

Delight No. 4: Noticing

The AllTrails app tells me I started my hike at Fall Line, Rachel Carson Greenway and Northwest Branch Trail. It's an easy trail, 3.9 miles long, on a wide, dirt path, with an elevation gain of just 314 feet. I've hiked this trail before, but this time went a lot farther out (2 miles) before returning. This was my intention, unexpectedly helped along by some signage that I noticed for the first time.

At a fork there were signs pointing to an end 600 feet away in one direction, and the real end 2.5 miles the other way. On previous hikes I had gone the wrong way, then wondered why I was back in the city after such a short walk.

I'm glad I used my GPS to drive to the trail even though I knew where I was going, because the GPS directed me to turn right, where I would have turned left into an obvious parking lot. To the right is a larger parking lot, set back from the street. I parked and then, reading the informative posters, learned what a "fall line" is. Basically, it's a place where an upland region drops sharply in elevation to a coastal plain. Where a river crosses it, you see waterfalls and rapids. Crossing this fall line is the Northwest Branch, a tributary of the Anacostia River, which flows into the Potomac River and then the Chesapeake Bay. I decided to save the rocky, downhill trail for another day and, crossing the street, headed north on the wide, flat Northwest Branch Trail.

Delight No. 5: Peace

Worry and anxiety fade out with the noise of the city, and my body and mind relax into the easy rhythm of walking. The silence covers me like a soft veil.