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COLUMN: A bit more than I bargained for

Reporter Kathleen Saylors reflects on the differences between a walk and a hike.
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One of the less-steep trails in Gladstone Provincial Park. (Kathleen Saylors/Grand Forks Gazette)

While I understand that in theory the summer months are the best time to be outdoors and active, that never seems to work out in reality. I have an extremely poor tolerance for the heat – I get cranky and dehydrated faster than you can say “It’s 35 degrees today” – so mostly I prefer to stay in the shade with an iced tea.

But with the coming of fall comes the more amenable weather. This time of year is, to me, perfect outdoors weather: it is cool and crisp, reliably neither too hot nor too cold. It is the Goldilocks of seasons.

So when a friend suggested taking a walk on Sunday afternoon, I was all for it.

If I had only known what was to come.

“Make sure you wear good shoes,” they said. Fine, fair enough. That should have been a clue.

The next clue should have been that we were driving…and kept driving…and kept driving. Eventually we pulled off onto a Trans Canada Trail access point near the Paulson. The trail looked innocuous enough, well maintained and flat.

Silly me. That trail was not the final destination.

A 10-minute walk along that trail took us to a small footbridge, and a narrower, clearly less travelled trail. And that’s where the “walk” began.

Now, I had a lot of time to think about the exact differences between a “walk” and a “hike” as I dragged my sorry butt up the side of a mountain.

I came to the following conclusions: if I were to get lost on a walk, presumably I could find civilization again in a reasonably short amount of time. This is the reason I’ll never hike alone.

Walking can be done in jeans and a sweatshirt. It does not require sweat-wicking fabrics and looking like a model from the Mountain Equipment Co-op website.

Hiking, meanwhile, requires putting in contact lenses instead of wearing glasses so the latter don’t slide down your nose when your face gets sweaty. Totally not speaking from experience on that one.

When you hike, you pack the essentials – a power bar, a full but lightweight water bottle. Not your super cute but very heavy steel water bottle and a pack of Lifesavers.

Again, not speaking from experience or anything.

Major thanks to my friend, who politely pretended not to hear how out of breath I was every one of the (many) times I made us stop for water, and who also pretended that I was not slowing us down.

The payoff was a gorgeous “walk” through Gladstone Provincial Park. It was so serene and incredibly quiet, and I felt a million miles removed from my everyday life. It was exactly what I had needed.

Of course, the way back down is by far the easier way to go (lucky for me).

“I think this was the hardest part of the hike,” I said, slowly creeping my way down a steep stretch of trail I had climbed up the hour before, near the beginning of the trailhead.

My friend said something from a couple yards ahead of me; I heard simply “…peaked early.”

“Me, or the trail?” I asked, half-kidding. My friend replied that they had meant the trail. I, however, still think both are true.

Next time, we’re going on a hike.