The weather we’ve had has been unprecedented for June in Las Vegas. Sunshine, a few high scattered clouds. As perfect as it gets. Unbelievable! Reasonable! Not hot! It’s rare for there to be days this good in April.
So Sunday morning we went hiking at Red Rock in the 71° not-heat. We did the Icebox Canyon trail.
It was a great hike. The cholla cactus were blooming, the redbuds have their leaves, there were butterflies flying, songbirds singing, and some kind of thrush or swift, uh, thrushing and swifting. There were a few native penstemons with a few blooms—scarlet bugler (Penstemon centranthifolius), I’m guessing—but most of them had ripe, dry seeds, which we collected for our garden.
So then the “almost perfect” limitation, the asterisk on the day, comes in. The photo in the center is me on a rock Janette wanted me to climb. I climbed it, and then jumped back down on the backside, a drop of four feet of so. I didn’t look like that much… At any rate, I found out that either (a) it was too far, or (b) I’m now too old. I came down a little funny, a little painfully. It seemed ok, and I hiked the two miles back out with only minor trouble. It only hurt if I stepped on it a certain way.
Long story short, after the hike was over and I had a couple sedentary hours it began to throb, and I could no longer put any weight on it at all. The x-rays didn’t show anything broken. Just a bad sprain. I’m guessing I didn’t break any of those little pebbles that made up our footbones, I just scrambled them up pretty good. So now my armpits hurt from the crutches, and I'm sitting in the recliner with my foot on a stack of pillows.
I wish I could remember if this was the same foot I broke while skateboarding as a kid and then, two or three weeks later at camp, cut the cast off well before my “sentence” was up and the day after ran on it through the woods at a full sprint, being chased by a bear (or, ok… running in fear after having seen a bear that never really gave chase) … ? Nah…
It was a beautiful day for a hike.
2 comments:
It's so fun getting old. You're not even out of the thirtysomethings yet. I never heard the bear sighting/running away story.
I think it was your right foot==but that may have been Mom's right foot which was casted around the same year.
Michael D remembers you cutting off your cast.
Dad
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