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This is part II of a series on hiking Barr Trail. Read part I.

The temperature on the trail was around 50°F at 2:00 AM and didn’t get much warmer; by the time the sun had come up we were above 10,000 feet where the air temperature would have been colder anyway. Wind temperatures varied from a nipple-stiffening 0° Kelvin (subjective estimate) to occasional teaser gusts of warm air, maybe 65° F. I wore shorts and a polypropylene top, and felt underdressed. At some point I donned a fleece, which I exchanged for a windproof jacket toward the summit.

The final three miles are the hardest on the trail. The grade is steep, the air is thin, the sun is bright (with no tree cover for shade), and we’d been working hard for over six hours on little sleep. The third-last mile took 40 minutes… the second-last took 50… and the final mile took over an hour.

We lost a half-hour in there somewhere, too, when we missed a switchback and tried to traverse an ice field. We were acting on bad advice and tried to climb up a 25% grade of hip-deep snow. Then I nearly sprained my shoulder trying to pull my boot through the leg of my snowpants. All in all this was the sorriest episode on the mountain, genuine evidence of misfiring synapses at high altitude. In a nutshell, we’d overlooked the trail and were cutting the switchback because we didn’t see any other way.

Finally, my companion and I reached the summit at 11:22 AM, 9 hours 12 minutes after leaving the trailhead. This is dreadfully slow — it works out to 1.3 mph, a respectable speed for the “16 Golden Stairs” in the final mile, but an embarrassing average for the day. I’ll have to do it better next time.

The altitude was a bigger challenge than the climb, I think. During the last three miles, I would get winded after two minutes’ exertion. I pushed through, but on my own I probably would have taken many short breaks. I noticed that after each break, I’d feel fine for the first few minutes, and then came a sort of uphill full-body-heaviness, and a realization like I sometimes get when I drink too much and in a moment of lucidity think, “Ugh, I don’t want to drink any more.” That’s what it felt like: I didn’t want to climb any more. But then I’d rest for a moment and feel better. The air at 14,000 feet is half as dense as the air at my house. (My unofficial calculation: at 14,111 feet, the atmospheric pressure is 56% that of sea level.)

The lack of sleep combined with oxygen deprivation to cause a few curious mental blunders. First was the missing-trail syndrome described above. Next, about a half-mile from the summit, I realized with a shock that I’d run out of water. This seemed impossible, that I’d already drunk three liters since Barr Camp, but I checked all my bottles twice — they were all empty.

Then at the summit, in line at the french fry concession (give me a break — this was the only vegan food item to be had), I unconsciously pulled a bottle from my pack to discover that it was still full. A tourist nearby barked out a laugh and made a sarcastic comment about me hauling un-needed water all the way up the mountain. He found this hilarious, that I could be so dumb. He would have been even more amused to know that although he was incorrect that the water was so much surplus weight, I’d been so addled that I hadn’t drunk any because I’d believed the bottle to be empty.

There was even more fun at the summit house; read part III.

Our warmup hikes brought a happy surprise: no shin pain. None at all. It was as if I’d never had an injury. I’m mystified, but there it is. I’d bought a 2 lb. bag if Safeway peas and carrots and didn’t even need it.

One of our hiking group has a brand-new Ph. D. in psychology. He proposed that my tendonitis had been an anxiety injury, because he’d suffered similar problems in recent weeks. I argued against it… I’ve hiked a lot, and I was in great shape when I hurt myself. There was the specific exercise I was doing that is, for better or worse, very hard on the tendons of the lower leg. And there was visible swelling (not in my brain, but in my ankle). The symptoms were real. Besides, even now that the hike is behind me, my left shin is still tender.

But I can’t say I was completely free of anxiety. It hit me Friday night, as we tried to go to sleep. We ate dinner early and planned to sleep from 8pm to midnight. I am not talented at sleeping when I know I have to get up in a few hours (although, ironically, I’m spectacularly talented at getting up in a few hours when I could sleep in if I wanted). I dozed briefly without achieving any actual rest. Thoughts flared through my mind like tracer bullets aimed at my fear center. Was I hydrated enough? Damn, I left my water bottle in the kitchen. Had I taken ginko after dinner? I couldn’t remember! Would my leg really be OK? What if I oversleep? What time is it?

Tiny sounds woke me. Normally I sleep like a deaf man in a coma. This night, to say that sleep was elusive would be like saying post-9/11 air travel presents occasional inconveniences. That is, it’s an understatement, with unpleasant consequences.

At 12:30 AM, I got up, ate a bowl of granola, stretched, filled water bottles, and did a final gear check. We were on the trail at 2:10 AM.

The group of seven stayed together for the first few hours. We hiked a 70-minute cycle: an hour hiking followed by a ten-minute break. The pace felt slow to me, but I expected to need whatever energy I was conserving for the final ascent. Also we’d lost two of seven headlamps; in order to share light we stayed in a tight line.

So it was social, but made for somewhat slow going. We reached Barr Camp, 6.8 miles and +3600 feet into the climb, at around 6:30 AM, on a pace of about 1.5 mph. For reference: my sea-level climbing pace is nearly twice as fast, 2.5-3 mph. In retrospect we were wondering if hiking in the dark is inherently slow. Personally I think it’s more an issue of group size, because we moved at the pace of the slowest hiker.

I don’t mean to say I felt like I was being held back. I was wary of injury (besides the recent tendonitis, I used to frequently suffer knee pain during climbs), and I was afraid to gain altitude too quickly, and I wanted to save my energy for the steeper climb at the top of the trail. So for those first four hours I was happy to stick with the group.

Then, leaving Barr Camp after sunrise, several of us decided to find our own pace. I set out with the three fastest of the seven. Two then dropped back to address an over-packing issue (one had to lighten his load) and ended up hanging back to help the rest of the group. I regret that we didn’t see them again until the summit.

I continued on with a guy who is training for the Denver marathon. All his high-altitude running has put him in excellent cardiovascular shape, and his pace was faster than mine. I told him as much, and was surprised to hear him disagree. Maybe there’s something to the psychology of leading or following that affects the perception of effort.

We hiked quickly through the rolling hills in the middle of the trail, slowing as we began the steep incline. We took occasional breaks, but never for long — a radio check-in with the other hikers, an occasional photo, a change of clothes.

This isn’t a particularly dramatic spot to split the narrative, but I’m going to do it anyway. Read part II.

Over the past three months I’ve accelerated my normal exercise routine, increasing the intensity and duration and frequency of workouts. In addition I’ve augmented these with an 8-10 mile trail hike every weekend. In addition I’ve maintained a stretching and strengthening program I began in February, the goal of which is the correction of assorted skeletal mis-alignments that plague most everybody who works at a desk. All together this comes to about 11 hrs/week spent working out.

One of my exercises was designed to first loosen and then strengthen the ankle, to support proper foot position. Whenever I’d complete this exercise, I’d feel muscles burning in my lower leg. This is apparently normal. Then one day, the burn didn’t go away. I followed up the exercise set with my standard period on the incline treadmill, and I felt a dull ache in my left shin. I have almost no experience with injury, so I kept walking. The sensation didn’t get worse, but didn’t go away. And now, three weeks later, it’s still here.

I have two problems with leg injuries. One is that the treadmill has become my primary form of cardiovascular exercise, and it’s the means I employ to stay in shape. Without it, I fear I may regain the corpulent and complacent existence I shed two years ago.

The second is that I have a serious hike planned for this weekend.

But this injury is not something I can control. The diagnosis is extensor tendonitis, which I believe is one of the injuries more commonly known as shin splints. It’s an overuse disorder, the two symptoms of which are inflammation and pain, and the only real treatment of which is rest (although compression and ice can help).

My pain was never that bad, but I’m frustrated by its tenacity. I’ve rested for three weeks — no hiking, no treadmill, minimal walking even around the house. This is the longest break I’ve had from exercise in over two years. I got to a point where there was no pain or even minor discomfort in my leg… And then I ran up a flight of stairs, and the pain came back in full. That was late last week.

So now I know all about Ace bandages and ice (my preference: Safeway frozen peas, in a 2 lb. bag). A sports medicine doctor tells me that prescription anti-inflammatories are simply 3x doses of ibuprofin, and suggests that a regimen of 2400 mg/day would be appropriate to see me through Saturday’s climb. She says that I can hike with tendonitis because there is little to no risk of permanent damage.

But it’s not great news. I think I was in good shape for this hike three weeks ago. Today I’m not so sure.

Tomorrow and Friday I’ll take 1-hr warmup hikes on the Barr Trail. Saturday morning at 2:00 AM, we’ll set out to do the whole thing, a 25-mile roundtrip. In my pack will be a bottle of Advil and a chemical cold pack (and about 10 lbs of petroleum-based fabrics and extruded food bars, of course). On my left leg will be a 6'' Ace bandage, wrapped tight to the knee, making my lower leg appear mummified.

My personal prognosis is that in spite of the injury, I’ll reach the summit, take a picture, and then hike back down. But I might instead get my ass kicked. If I’m spent at the summit, I can ride the train down. If I don’t make it to the summit, the options are poor — in a nutshell, I can hike up, or hike down. Not to be melodramatic, but there’s no other way off the mountain.

The 10th Annual Italian Street Painting Festival in San Rafael, CA provided an opportunity to see awe-inspiring art in an unexpected medium: chalk on asphalt.

The big draw (no pun intended) was a half-size recreation of the Sistine Chapel ceiling, but I was more affected by some of the other pieces — which are very difficult to photograph given the perspective of the average spectator. Crowds cast long shadows, for one thing (you’ll see my own in the corner of one image); getting high enough above any of these images to capture the whole piece without huge perspective distortion was basically impossible. (Staff volunteers carried ladders for the official photographers, but even these were inadequate for some of the larger panels.)

It was hot. Imagine spending two days on hands and knees on freshly sealed asphalt. Kudos to the artists for enduring, especially given the temporary nature of this work.

The other lasting impression I had is how filthy some of the artists were. Loose-hanging clothes and exposed skin were quickly smeared with chalk, dirt, sweat, and grime. It seemed like it would be an absolutely miserable way to spend a weekend… but the art! Some of the images were stunning. Seeing these photo-realistic lighting effects and super-saturated colors on the street was jarring, even for a “street painting festival.” Basically it was amazing. See examples below.

Here are galleries of past festivals:

• 2000 Italian Street Painting Festival
• 2002 Italian Street Painting Festival

FindLaw columnist John Dean presents an interesting analysis of the political implications of the missing WMDs in Iraq:

Before asking Congress for a Joint Resolution authorizing the use of American military forces in Iraq, [President Bush] made a number of unequivocal statements about the reason the United States needed to pursue [an act] of war against another nation… Now it is clear that many of his statements appear to be false.

If no Weapons of Mass Destruction will be found, Dean predicts, the scandal will be bigger than Watergate, which as you know resulted in the resignation of then-president Nixon. Read the full article here: Missing Weapons Of Mass Destruction: Is Lying About The Reason For War An Impeachable Offense? Here, as a teaser, is Dean’s conclusion:

To put it bluntly, if Bush has taken Congress and the nation into war based on bogus information, he is cooked.

Dean has a great perspective on presidential scandal — he was a part of the Watergate coverup, and served four months in prison as a result. (This historical factoid is not part of Dean’s FindLaw.com biography.)