mount sugarloaf

we went for a hike today up mount sugarloaf (isn't that so cute?). it was just four of us: shawn, laura, summer and me. we had a fun time. i forgot how much i like to hike. and it was the perfect day for a hike - clear, sunny but not hot. aside from my personal troubles getting to the trail, (i kept driving past the road onto which i was supposed to turn right -- and, in my defense, i'm normally a great navigator :-P) it was a great time. it wasn't a big mountain (shawn and i thought it would be best to avoid a complicated trail for our first time hiking in MA), but we took the long way up the trail so it took an hour. there were a few sections (toward the top) when we all decided that if we kept this up, we'd have the finest asses in the cohort...


the best part was getting to the summit. holy cow. you could see the whole valley. the mountain was in deerfield (north of us) and we were still able to see amherst and hadley (if you look really closely at the first pic, you can see du bois library in the background). and, of course, you have the connecticut river which meanders through the valley. amazing.

we had lunch on top and after shawn and summer made fun of a motorcycle gang (quietly of course, lest they get their butts handed to them), we decided to head back down. here's the fun part - we finally figured out the map and decided to go down a different way than we came up. the trail back down zig-zagged steeply down the front slide of the mountain and had a cable fence around it (we figured out that this was to prevent cars from driving off not to keep hikers off). anyway, so we begin our descent and shawn remarks, "this seems like the beginning to a joke: 'two lesbians, a gay man and a straight woman go down a mountain...'" but we never decided on a punchline. we thought the beginning part was too funny.


in the end, we had such a great time that we're going to mount holyoke to hike monday. :-)