Am I glad I did this hike? Yes. Will I ever do it again? I don't think so. I don't know why, but this trail kicked my ass! I've mentioned in other reviews that I'm 43 years old, 50lbs overweight, I have mild asthma and a nonlife-threatening heart condition that basically makes my heart rate faster than normal. Keeping that in mind, I've been on many hikes, most of them rated as “hard” and I've never had my ass handed to me like it was on this trail. Oh, it started out nice and easy, like many reviews I read and I knew it would become difficult about a mile from the top, but I feel like “difficult” is an understatement. I didn't struggle with the scrambling, just how steep it was. I went slow, took breaks to bring my heartrate down and completed it. I just don't know that I ever want to do it again.

The reason I gave my “Bug Status” as they were an “annoyance” is because they were. There were thousands of bee's. Mostly they left us alone but one keep landing on my friends back as we sat near the peak to eat lunch. There were also a ton of little gnats that kept buzzing around and landing on our arms. Towards the end I was ready to losing my cool with them. But I was hot, tired and grumpy.

Speaking of being hot. We started up at 6:30 am. The weather was nice most of the way up. It started getting warm as we neared the top. On the way back down it was HOT! There were area's along the last 2 miles (near the granite) where the heat was downright oppressive. I took 3L of water and ran out with about a mile to go. I probably would have been happier if I had taken 4 to 5L of water. I drink a lot of water and found I was not drinking as much as I would have liked on the way up because I was trying conserve it.

We saw a few people with their dogs. I would not recommend bringing your dog on this hike if the weather is going to be hot. These dogs did not look very happy. As we neared the bottom we saw a guy with is dog that we had seen at the peak and he had stopped and was waiting for his friend to come back up with more water for the dog. I've seen and heard of too many dogs dying from the heat and it breaks my heart.

One last thing. The roadway in seems to be more like a racetrack to other drivers. My friend and I commented on the way up we may not get to hike because we were going to see someone fly off the road and we'd have to stop and help. Well, it didn't happen on the way up, but it happened on the way back. We missed it by maybe 5 minutes maybe. We were stuck in traffic 5 cars back from the closure for about 35 minutes. I'm thinking it was a fatality because EMS left pretty quickly. Maybe have some extra food and water in your car in case you get stuck and be ready for cars to ride your @$$ (even if you're not going slow).