Did y'all miss me? (Is anybody reading this, anyway?) Well, with five hikes done in the SoCal Six Pack, my life took a turn for the…complicated. My boss quit, and I took on a ton of new responsibility at work. This resulted in me ending up doing a ton of work outside of business hours, I wasn't working out much, and instead of hiking on weekends I was catching up on sleep. My fitness levels started to slip, and with the only options left for completing the Six Pack before the end of the summer (and before I left LA for a few months) either at high elevation or involving 15 miles of hiking, I wasn't sure I could do it at this moment.

I'll get back to SoCal for either Wilson or Baldy before the end of the year. But in the meantime… I'm in New England, so let's knock out this Six Pack before the end of October, shall we?

Since I haven't been hiking for two months (yikes) I decided to start with what was very obviously the easiest option, Bear Mountain. And I decided to make it a little bit easier by doing the hike as an out-and-back rather than a loop, because I had heard that the scramble on one side of the summit can be pretty difficult and slippery if it's rained recently (which it had been doing just this morning). I drove up from New Jersey the day before and spent the night at a hotel in Torrington, which was just about the only town within an hour that had affordable hotels…I blame New England country inn weddings. Woke up early, hit the local Dunkin for fuel, and got to the Undermountain trailhead parking lot just in time to take the last spot in it.

This was a hike that I'd have considered extremely easy if I were in my preferred hiking shape, and even still, it wasn't that bad. Mostly, I was just sort of bored because after months of sweeping desert vistas and forests of piñon pines while working to complete the SoCal Six Pack, the Northeastern forests of my youth were just a little bit dull in comparison. Thankfully, the weather was under 70 degrees, a refreshing contrast to the 90-degree heat and sweltering humidity we've had in this part of the country recently. The sky was overcast, which meant not a whole lot of views once you got to the summit (there are no views until about half a mile from it anyway), but meant for very pleasant hiking conditions.

The whole thing took me about three hours on the nose. Bugs weren't a problem until the last quarter mile, in spite of the fact that the hike has some very swampy sections. I didn't see a whole lot of people on the way up, but on the way down, every few minutes I was running into hikers who were on their way up, so I'm glad I got that early start. Back at the parking lot, cars were now parked along the side of the road for what seemed like a quarter mile. This is clearly a very popular hike, but I couldn't tell whether people were more eager to hike to take advantage of cooler conditions or if the crowds would be even bigger on a warmer and sunnier day.

Overall, not the most interesting hike I've done lately, but damned if I'm happy to be getting back out there! Greylock or Old Speck up next depending on where the winds decide to take me after today.