Welcome back to Cougar Crest

    You know what pisses me off almost as much as rattle snakes?
    People who put fake plastic snakes in the middle of trails.
    Not funny.
    Not funny even if your a twelve year old boy.
    No one will be laughing when I almost have a heart attack jumping over a fake plastic snake on Cougar Crest Trail Head. There weren’t even any cougars (the type you’d find on www Nu Bay com to alleviate my stress).
    I wish I knew who left the fake snake on the trail; I would kick them in the neck.
    That be said, it was a glorious evening for a run, on a mountain trail spattered with hikers who could not keep up with me, and I was jogging!
   Damn, that made me feel pretty damn good about myself.
    What did not make me feel good?
   Almost shitting myself two miles from the nearest porta potty when some idiot left a plastic snake toy in the middle of the trail.
    I run to get my heart rate up, but it doesn’t really need to race like this. This can’t be healthy.
    This blog post is not suppose to read as a book report, but I’m reading Wild, by Cheryl Strayed right now.
    So far, not so impressed.
    This book is really depressing.  The girl in the book comes from a majorly poor family in Minnesota. Her mother is diagnosed with lung cancer and dies forty five days later. Cheryl is fucked up after this. So to heal herself she decides to hike the entire Pacific Crest Trail from Mojave to Canada. She has barely been a hiker before and is not in shape at all.
   It’s a good premise for a book, but the book is just so sad and she doesn’t even write about great adventures, how beautiful it is, the stunning scenery or the fun of hiking and camping. She writes like this is hell she is going through, how she wants to quit every moment and makes it seem like hiking is a night mare.
    This book has encouraged me to write my book to show how fun and amazing running and hiking is. I would really like to inspire people to change their lives and live healthier, and have as much fun as I am doing it.
   This depressing book also inspired me to part of the Pacific Crest Trail today.
   

The Pacific Crest Trail runs all through our mountains. I’d like to get to know most of it by heart in the coming years. So many people start out in the spring every year and hike the trail from the Mexico Border to Canada. I really have no desire to do that, because well, it requires living your life like a hippie hobo for three months, never showering or shaving ones legs. I might be the worlds biggest tom boy, but even when back packing, I need to make myself a little less stinky and lady like every few days.