On Friday, October 18th we hiked the Valencia Peak Trail.  The days leading up were very foggy and we were concerned that the same would be true on Friday, but the views turned out to completely clear to the horizon.  One of our hikers called it our “prettiest hike ever.”  It was perfect shirt-sleeve weather, and we only encountered a little wind near the summit on the way down. We started out with 13 hikers, and we had some split off early as planned.  The first group, with Carl Berney carrying a recording GPS, turned around at the central “squiggle” in the trail.  They did a total of 2.8 miles with a respectable elevation change of 659 feet.   That took them a total time of 2:10 with a total of 694 UP waypoints.  

 

A second group including Gary Taff broke off next because Gary needed to get back home.  The remaining group of seven hikers continued onto the summit for a total distance traveled of 4.5 miles and an elevation change of 1393 feet.  The trail near the summit was fairly treacherous because of a large amount of loose and broken shale.  Even with poles, we had to move slowly which made the total hike time 3:45.  Despite the difficulty near the top, we were passed by a couple of young men on the run.  One was even wearing about 40 pounds of weight around his waist.  There is something pleasurable about seeing people in the prime of life making the most of that time of their lives.  We visited with them at the summit and found out they were firemen.  We talked about some of the benefits of the job such as having a weight room to use when they weren’t polishing the fire engine.  They admitted that some of the benefits accrued mainly to the single men.  Lorraine summed it up best on the way down when she said the conversation had been “cute”. For our part, we strive to gracefully surrender the things of youth.

 

We were joined by a guest of Gary’s named Victor.  He will henceforth be known as Victor from Venezuela.  We enjoyed having him along and expect he will continue to hike with us as an addition to our Engineering Cadre.  Victor's expertise is Materials Engineering, but we can also see him in other roles since Venezuela is right next to Columbia, and he seemed to fit.  Chris (our professional clarinet player) expressed skepticism about the whole Coriolis affect affecting water rotation down a drain.  Russ is going to provide him with the equations for frequency harmonics in nature as they apply to wind instruments.  We also noticed that one of the trails pictured below precisely matched what is known as a sine wave modulated sawtooth waveform.  In addition to the pictures provided by Barbara we have a 360° video taken at the summit by Russ available HERE.  Don’t forget that when viewing our pictures on a mobile device you can zoom in on them by touching and spreading your fingers.