Sunday, August 28, 2005

Still breathing....

Well, April and I made it back from our little jaunt along the West Coast Trail. 75 kilometers of rough terrain designed, I'm confident, to utterly drain those hikers brave (or foolhardy) enough to attempt it.

Suffice it to say, we had a blast.

We hiked all 75 km in about six days (the last day was a real push; we had to go 12 km before 1:00 pm), hiking an average of 12 and a half kilometers a day. That becomes a little more impressive when you realize that there were some days in there that we only managed to hike about 6 km.

Once you get past the first 22 kilometers, though, the trail gets a lot easier... except for the fact that there are still 53 kilometers to hike. We averaged about 1 km/hour for the first 22 km. We averaged well over 3 for the last 53; just to give some perspective.

Suffice it to say that we had a wonderful week, and I firmly believe that the West Coast Trail is something everyone should do at least once before they die.

April and I are already starting to toy with the idea of doing it again in the not-too-terribly-distant future. Probably next year. We figured we'd pack lighter (there were a lot of things in our packs this time that we simply didn't need), and take more time (there were a few days that were more than a little rushed; we figured we'd take nine days instead of six next time).

Still, it was an adventure, and one I'd really like to repeat someday.

2 comments:

JonBen said...

The averages... do they include the sleeping time... and how much sleeping time did you actually get each day?

Drew said...

Including everything, hiking the trail took us about 140 hours total. We left at 2:00 pm on Friday, we arrived at 10:00 am (almost exacly) on Thursday. In terms of actual hiking time, we got about 4-6 hours every day.

Distances we covered in that time varied. The first day, we made about 6 km in four hours; on the fourth, we did 17 in five; and the last day we did 12 km in three hours; so it was quite terrain-dependent.