Galehead & The Twins

tMail the Tornado is at it again, smacking down one after another. Holy crap. His tentative plan for Sunday is to take the Gale River Trail up and the North Twin Trail down. I plan on bagging the Hot Pepper (Leaf Peeper Half Marathon) in favor of this trek, which I'm pretty sure will do less damage. This 12.x mile banger will knock 3 more of his list.

tMtT: name the start time and we'll work backwards for a meeting time and place. We'll drop a car off at the end of Haystack Road (where the North Twin Trail trailhead is) and save about 2.5 miles instead of backtracking from North Twin back to the River Loop Road.... unless you want to do a down-and-back.

[Update 9/29] tMail the Tornado has called it: 8:30 at the Haystack Road parking area where we'll leave a car and shuttle to the starting point on the Gale River Loop Road. It may be pretty chilly in the morning, so Yours Truly will be sporting a big pack with lots of insulation - possibly even a few rolls of R19 pink fiberglass insulation and a can of urethane foam.... oh yeh, and mittens. tMail has also made it official: this is to be a hike, not a run. I'm wearing my leathers to protect my first metatarsal.

[Update 9/30] What a terrific day. Newbie Westie joined tMail and me on the trek and a good time was had by all. Westie's apparent addiction to baseball was overrated - he's not addicted, he just lives it with every breath. The remaining parties to this adventure (The PM, Treadmill, Steph and the Winnipeg Jet) came and went like the fluffy little clouds in the bright blue sky. We met up with them at Galehead and again at the hut, but on South Twin I asked tMail where they were and he said "Mutha, I don't think they're coming." Bummer. We didn't even get a chance to say "goodbye" and we had assumed that the summit of South Twin was where we'd meet The Jet.

On another note, Galehead Hut strikes again, winning another point in its bid for Weirdo Magnet extraordinaire. Recall that on the Hut234 we encounted a pair of lunatic hut panthers. Not to be outdone, another hut freak showed up. This time in the form of a bearded serial killer, but one that suffered the same affliction: An inexperienced hiker who has no clue, but yet has a deeply planted opinion on everything. This time it was on poles ("My dad and his buddies use them - I don't get the point"), fashion ("Do you have the poles because they match your pack?") and footwear ("You shouldn't hike in sneakers"). As Westie pointed out, the problem wasn't that he was new, it was that he wasn't nice about it - how fucking weird is that? (Amber Alert: In the pic above, it's the guy on the left w/ the sunglasses).

tMail has posted his pics [Link] and I've posted mine and a selection of his as well [Link].

[Update 10/1] I created a time profile of the route (Elevation vs. Time). Summits were bagged at 120, 170 & 210 minutes into hike. We made the summit of South Twin only 30 minutes after leaving the hut.