Pretty happy with my ascent, although I should have taken one more break a couple miles before the summit and that would have helped my energy and altitude adjustment. On the way down, though….
I've been getting sharp pains in my right shoulder on some of my descents lately, it's really odd. It slowed my downhill pace quite a bit as it hit me only a mile down from the summit, with 7 miles left to hike! Stopping every couple miles to stretch a bit helped a little, but mostly I just had to deal with it and slowly make my way back to my car. Didn't help that I ran into two different belligerent hikers who felt compelled to chastise me for disobeying hiker etiquette. For what it's worth, etiquette IS important to me and I DO appreciate receiving corrective feedback, as I was mistakenly assuming I was properly following etiquette. However, there's no need to be unkind when trying to inform someone! It put a damper on the experience, worse than even my sore shoulder.
But hey, I summited and I only have two peaks to go, then I'm going for Whitney next month! Huzzah!
Responses
What did they say to you to chastise you?! ????
For context, I was failing to give the right of way to uphill hikers. This is a rule I learned several years ago but somewhere in the last year or two I accidentally flipped the rule in my head, so I was hiking under the incorrect assumption that downhill hikers had the right of way.
So the first guy was barreling up the trail, which was wide enough for two people but he had a large gait that took up the entire thing. I assumed we would just make room for each other as we passed but as we got nearer and I gave a friendly, “Good morning! How are you doing?” he basically charged right at me and exclaimed, “I’d be much better if you got out of my way!”
A couple hours later I again was in a situation where the trail seemed wide enough for two directions of traffic but the hiker I was passing exclaimed, “What, am I stopping for YOU?!” He was a little upset with me BUT he at least stopped when I asked him to explain what I was doing wrong. His tone wasn’t great but he did a better job of helping me understand my error, which I’ve now corrected!