Hiking Franklin Mountain, El Paso, TX (12-18-10)

Since we've been in El Paso, I have been trying to stay active by walking down and back up the hill that Paul's mom lives on.  Its a 2 mile hike straight down, then 2 miles straight up. I try to find something I need to buy at the store, to make it feel like I have a purpose.


View from the ridge

   Yesterday though, Paul and I took off to go hiking in Franklin Mtn State Park.  The trails here are not that well marked or maintained, but we did make it to the ridge, which was almost straight up.  I felt like we were mountain goats, and there were a lot of times I didn't want to turn around and look down.  I just kept climbing.  Once we got to the ridge, we were supposed to walk along it to get to a higher peak.  However, within 3 minutes the wind had almost knocked me over twice, and the windchill factor was not at all pleasant.  We elected to turn back and head down the mountain.  In the end, we only hiked about 2 hours, but since it was straight up, I felt like we got a bit of a workout.   Once we left there, we did more more shopping, although we had already bought, wrapped and shipped the kids' gifts.  Paul already has his gift from me, which is one of those "does everything"  multi-purpose tools- apparently it saws, grinds etc.
My gift will be a handheld GPS, which we ordered but we have to pick it up in Tucson AZ.  I have been wanting to try geocaching and there are a lot of times, like yesterday, when I would love to know how far we hiked and how much elevation we gained.  Yes, its a toy, I guess, but it isn't big, and it doesn't weigh much, so we can have it in the trailer!   I really wanted the Garmin, but you have to buy the Topo maps separately, which for us, since we would need maps for most of the country, would be about a $1000 investment.
Delorme's GPS isn't as user friendly, but its only $30 a  year for access to ALL their maps.  So, we'll buy it and try it out and have 30 days to return it.