I did another couple of Adirondak high peaks this weekend. Giant Mountain and Rocky Peak Ridge. It's just up. Up up up up up. That's to be expected, but honestly it felt more like spending five hours on a stair climber than hiking.
That's ok, it's actually why I use the stair climber. Torture myself at the gym so my outdoor escapades are fun. So that wasn't really the problem. No, the problem was going down.
When I first moved out to Buffalo to attend UB, I was the type to skip the elevator and just use the stairs. I still do, but back then I did it a lot, and I discovered an odd problem after a while. My knees hurt when going down the stairs. Conventional wisdom suggests that going up would be the difficult part, but this was not the case. The direction, force, etc, were all conspiring against me for a while. I used the elevator when going down even a single flight of stairs, and after the first semester the problem abated. Never came back, and I continued to use the stairs every time (up and down) until I graduated.
Back in June when I hiked Whiteface, we did it backwards. We drove to the peak, then hiked down, then up to Esther, then back up to Whiteface. From the peak, there's a part where you can either take an elevator back down to the parking area (booo) or take the very rough trail down, which is basically bouldering. It was tiring getting back to the peak, but those rocks going down... they hurt. Wow did my knees hurt. I took it nice and slow, carrying myself on the guardrail until I could walk like a normal person again.
By contrast, when I did Cascade and Porter, my knees ached a little during the last hour. Very different strain.
This past trip, it was a mixture of stair climber and bouldering to get to the peaks. It was beautiful, but going down wasn't a challenge - it was a problem. It was a longer hike, but our plans had us getting back to the car three hours before sunset - so nobody had a flashlight. As soon as the decent started, my knees started. The sharp grade combined with the bouldering parts made it almost excruciating. Our speed was cut to less than a half. We timed ourselves and realized that at that pace we were going to make it back to the car well over an hour after sunset. When bouldering with no lights, that's dangerous. I had exactly one dose of Tylenol which took the edge off, and we managed to get down past the boulders and onto just steep trail before we had to pull out our phones to use as flashlights just to make sure we stayed on the trail. I almost used the trekking poles as crutches, but taking the pressure off helped a lot.
My entire body was overdoing it to keep the pressure off my legs, and I ache all over because of it. Good thing I can sit down at work.
