Author: chogan@directresearch.com

Post #2141: Ashby Gap to Sky Meadows Overlooks. A rewarding hike.

 

This is a short, relatively easy mountain day hike with a some excellent views, a good workout, and nice trail.

It took me four hours car-door-to-car-door.  That was about three hours of walking, to complete the 6-mile round-trip, plus an hour for eating and looking at the views.

In hindsight, for me, this was a more-fun-less-challenging hike than the “direct route” to the Sky Meadows State Park overlooks, the Sky Meadows Piedmont trail.   If nothing else, there’s just more hiking “stuff” than you get from walking straight uphill, in a grazed meadow:  stream crossings, trees, and so on.

In addition to a less-steep slope and more variety in the landscape, this AT-based route gives you better views as you walk.  With the Sky Meadows Piedmont trail, the view is all behind you, as you walk straight uphill.  But with this longer approach, you get a lot of nice views as you walk along the top of the mountain.   E.g., your classic pipeline cut, from this hike:

 

The hike

Start from the parking lot/trail head just north of U.S. 50, at Ashby Gap.  That is, on the other side of U.S. 50 from your destination, Sky Meadows State Park.

Take the short blue-blazed trail from the parking lot down to the Appalachian Trail, and turn left.

This takes you down to Route 50.  Cross.

After you cross 50, and walk alongside it for a bit, then do the long uphill slog to the top of the mountain.  The grade isn’t bad.  I recollect that I did this without stopping.

I also recollect that the thrill of trudging uphill ran out long before the uphill did.

But the grade was moderate enough that I could, in effect, pick a slow pace and keep going.  Just breathe hard.  By contrast, the other access to the overlooks — via the Sky Meadows State Park Piedmont trail — is short steep climb, during which I run out of breath and stop a few times.  As do most, I think.  Or at least, would like to think.

 

Most of the trail is pleasant walking, with only the occasional rocky bits.

Around mile 1.5 or so, you start to see signposts for trails in and around the state park.  At that point, just follow the signs to the Whitehouse overlook.

You pick up the Ambassador Whitehouse trail in the middle of a large open area.  That takes you down to the Whitehouse overlook.  (On some older maps, confusingly, Piedmont memorial overlook.)  This land is not part of the state park, but is owned by the Piedmont Environmental Council, a trust of some sort.  The odd tableau, behind the wire fencing, that (as of this writing) you cannot access, appears to be mainly a paean to the founders of that trust.  I believe the overlook is currently named for Charles S. Whitehouse.

From there, continue on the Ambassador Whitehouse trail, then follow the signs to the Piedmont overlook:

If you want more exercise, walk down this hill to the visitors center.  It’s a stiff walk down, and a stiffer hike back up.  Or just turn around and hike back to your car.  (Or, any of several color-blazed trails in Sky Meadows park will take you back up to the Appalachian Trail.  I vaguely recall that anything that says “Ridge” will do that.  As long as you turn right (north) when you get to the Appalachian Trail (blazed white), you’ll get back to Ashby Gap.)

The hiker

The weather forecast called for rain showers moving in around 11 AM.  Then rain for the rest of the week.  If I wanted to take a hike this week, I needed a short hike, plus an early start, in order to be back at the car by 11 AM.  To avoid the rain.

My wife mentioned Sky Meadows State Park, for a nice short hike.  Lovely hikes there, but the 8 AM park opening time makes for an awkward trip.  Instead, I parked at the Appalachian Trail (AT) access, just the other side of Route 50 from Sky Meadows, and walked to the “top” of Sky Meadows, from there, via the AT.

This allowed me to start as early as I pleased.  Which plays to my strengths as an old guy, as I wake up early.  In any case, I left Vienna VA well before dawn (about 5:15 AM).  There was an orange-colored full moon, just setting, with enough cloud cover to make it look smokey.  Nice.  But consistent with rain in the forecast.

I-66 West was fast-but-orderly traffic.  I did my best to fit in with the pack.  By  Gainesville, traffic density had moderated.

Once you veer off I-66 — at 17 North, to Paris (via Delaplane) — things get downright picturesque.  On this trip, dawn was breaking, the clouds were rosy above a shadowed landscape of rolling hills and foggy pastures and creeks.

The whole thing looked like something out of a children’s picture book.  But I was driving.  So I have no photos.  This is not a good road for driving.  But it is a scenic drive.

In any case, I parked at the trail head around 6:15 AM.  Got back four hours later, around 10:15 AM.  The return hike goes about half an hour faster than the outbound hike, owing to its being mostly gentle downhill.

Can my joints take the abuse?

The big question for me is whether my leg joints can take the stress of mountain hiking.  To that end, I’m (quite rationally) eating an ounce of hydrolyzed collagen a day (the equivalent of about a half-gallon of Jell-O every day, protein wise.  I’ve gone through the details in just-prior posts.)

On the morning of the day after this last hike, I think I can say that providing an abundant supply of the amino acids needed for building collagen seems to speed the healing of my hips and knees post-hike.  I spend less time, in less joint pain, than I did with earlier hikes.  This morning, I pass my “ADL test”  — I can perform the normal activities of daily living without making old-man noises about my joint pains.  That’s new, and I attribute it to my new-found goal of eating an ounce of hydrolyzed collagen powder a day.  The reasoning and rationale for this are in just-prior posts here.

But it’s not clear that it’s smart to continue with these mountain hikes.  The jolting, weight-bearing exercise of mountain hiking is just the ticket for building strong leg bones.  Bones respond to that shock-loading by getting stronger.  Joints, on the other hand, simply wear out.  Maybe all I’m doing with this better recovery time is putting a smile on my face, as I hasten my progress toward debility and the need for joint replacement.

It’s a tough call.  But I do like to hike.  In Virginia.  In the spring.  For a whole lot of different reasons.

All said and done, I think I’d best hike while I can.  Let the long run take care of itself.

Meanwhile, I’ll do what I can for my suffering hips and knees.  First, good boots.  Then, trekking poles.  And now, a diet abundant in the amino acids needed to repair collagen.

Post #2140: Rod Hollow Shelter Hike

 

This roughly 8-mile mountain day hike is good exercise, but not much more than that.  It starts from the same trail-head parking as the last hike (where the Appalachian Trail crosses the steep, gravel, one-lane Morgan’s Mill Road, a few miles from Virginia Route 50).

This hike heads south on the Appalachian trail, to the Rod Hollow shelter.  There are no views to speak of.  But there’s a lot of uphill and downhill (2200 feet of elevation change), and a few nice creek crossings.

You have the option of turning this into a ten-mile hike, if you manage to get lost and end up backtracking on the trail.  Which I did, with the help of the not-so-friendly rattlesnake pictured above.

In a better universe, rattlesnakes would be Day-Glo orange.

Luckily, a rattling rattlesnake makes a lasting impression.  If, at some point in your past, you’ve managed to piss off a rattlesnake, and been rattled at, close up, you’re not apt to forget the sound.

If nothing else, rattlesnakes show that God has a sense of humor.  Why else would you create this poisonous snake with a high-decibel warning system, then fit it out with excellent camouflage so that you can’t see the damned thing?

The microphone in my phone does not do it justice.  Above, I had to amp up the sound to be able to hear it.  But even with the distortions, you can tell that this isn’t something you hear in the woods every day.  It sounds more machine-made than animal.

In any event, I heard this rattlesnake long before I spotted it.  That’s typical, in my limited experience.  It took about three steps for me to go from “what’s that odd noise” to “oh crap”.

In the course of those three steps, that rattling got a lot louder.  That’s how you operate the volume control on a rattlesnake.  If you’re having trouble hearing it, just step a bit closer.

Once I realized what I was hearing, I froze, and moved nothing but my eyes until I spotted the snake.  It was maybe 20 feet away, just minding its own business, sunning itself next to the trail.

We looked at each other, the snake and I.  Between the now-quite-loud rattling, and those beady little eyes, it was clear there was no way I was walking past it.

So I did what any red-blooded modern American hiker would do.  I took a quick video — because, you know, photos or it didn’t happen.  You will note that the video is brief.  In hindsight, I’m surprised I had the presence of mind to take it at all.

I slowly stepped back a few paces, until the snake stopped rattling.  Then bushwhacked a wide detour around it, and went on my way.

And managed to get turned around — I still don’t know how.

If not for the fact of this little wooden bridge, on the trail, I might still be walking south.  I knew I’d already passed it, heading home.  So when I came to it again, it only took me a few disoriented minutes to figure out that I’d been backtracking for some time.  And that, contrary to my first impression, space aliens had not somehow built a new footbridge, on the path back home.

Between that, and getting off the trail earlier, I think I managed to stretch this 8-mile hike into a ten-miler.  All told, it was 8 hours car-door-to-car-door, of which about 7 hours were spent walking.  (And the remaining time was spent eating, as I finished 3 big PB&J sandwiches, 3 apples, and some candy, in the course of the hike.  So, my average hiking speed was something like one-and-a-third miles per hour.

I was pretty beaten down by the time I made it back to the car.  Which was part of the plan.  In particular, my knees and hips were thoroughly sore from the hike, and had been for many miles.

Does heavy consumption of hydrolyzed collagen protein powder help my joints recover from hiking?

To my surprise, the answer seems to be yes. 

My joints ached for days after doing the prior hike, to Hollow Brook Falls.  More generally, this spring, it seemed like the more hikes I took, the worse my joints felt afterward.   At any rate, after that prior hike (Hollow Brook Falls), there were a couple of days where I didn’t want to be on my feet, let alone walk anywhere, for the severe joint pain, particularly my hip joints.

But one day after this hike, and my joints are … fine.  Just a bit achy.  Not remarkably different from how they are normally.

The only change between last hike, and this hike, is that I’ve begun eating an ounce of this collagen-derived protein powder per day.

So, does hydrolyzed collagen help with repairing my leg joints, after mountain hiking?  So far, my joints say yes.

My wife has given me a better, if less rapid test:  Will an ounce a day of hydrolyzed collagen fix my fingernails?  I have thin, brittle, splitting fingernails.  Adding whey protein to my diet did nothing to fix that.  I now realize that whey provides the wrong mix of amino acids for building collagen and other connective tissue.  But hydrolyzed collagen protein powder provides the exact right mix, and in addition contains a good mix of amino acids for making keratin, the protein that makes up fingernails.  If I have obviously stronger fingernails in a few months, after years (decades) of brittle nails, I will attribute that to the hydrolyzed collagen protein supplements.

Edit, the next morning:  Answer, heck yes.  I expected to be in pain for days yet, after that last hike.  But here it is, the second morning after the day of the hike, and I’m fine.  Pain-free, or as close as my 66-year-old joints ever get. 

Instead of looking at to two or three more days of limping around, waiting for my joints to recover, I’m ready to go back out on the trail. 

Maybe that’s a one-off fluke, but I don’t think so. 

I now think my previous slow recovery was due, in part, to a diet that (accidentally) skimped on some of the key amino acids needed for rebuilding connective tissue.  Now that I’m providing those necessary amino acids in super-abundance, my joints recover from a day of hiking much faster. 

So it’s not unreasonable.  Think of it as a supply-chain issue.  I realize that, except for the nine essential amino acids, your body can re-arrange incoming protein to make all the varieties of amino acids that you require.  But that process has to be a lot faster, and so able to complete far more effectively for the available protein in the diet, if you feed it the proper raw materials from the start.

And yet, as with whey protein for building muscles (Post #2023), I expected this to take weeks or even months to have any noticeable effect on my musculoskeletal system.  For the simple reason that muscles (etc.) don’t grow very fast. 

I did not expect it to help materially with recovery from the wear-and-tear of hiking, overnight.  But it does.  Or certainly seems to. 

If anything changes to lead me to a different opinion, I will come back and re-edit this.  But as of now, this stuff gets an enthusiastic thumbs-up from me.  It’s now a permanent part of my diet, though I may dial back to more of a maintenance “dose” daily.

Conclusion

1: You are what you eat.

2:  Chicken soup is good for you.

3:  Eating an ounce of this cheap hydrolyzed collagen protein powder, per day, is like eating a half-gallon of rich chicken broth, per day, protein-wise.

4:  Better, actually, because the protein fragments are shorter — and so, more readily broken down into their individual (and absorbable) amino acids — than is the relatively intact protein in gelatin, in chicken broth.

If my body’s joint repairs had been held back from a lack of the right amino acids in my diet, that should now be decisively fixed.  This is vastly more protein than you would get in (e.g.) your typical dose of patent-medicine joint supplements.

It’s just a question of whether the resulting changes in my joints (and nails) are big enough, and consistent enough, that I can reasonably attribute them to this most recent change in my diet.

So far, the signs are looking positive.

Post #2138: Whey versus collagen protein powders, round 1. Collagen coffee taste test.

 

Except for the faint aftertaste of leather.

With effort, I think I could get used to collagen coffee.  Except for …

Seriously, I tried adding hydrolyzed collagen protein powder to my morning coffee.

I didn’t much like the results.

End of weight loss is not as fantasized.

You picture the end of a diet as being like … I don’t know — like filling a punchbowl with ice cream, and plunging your face in.

But that’s not reality.  Every diet has a “maintenance phase”.

For me, the end of weight loss has become a matter of fine-tuning my now-existing diet.  Tweaking the knobs a bit.

This is one such fine-tuning.  Tweaking my protein input, to try to help my joints recover faster from exercise.

Easter Bunny, meet Tasteless Hydrolyzed Collagen.

Tasteless?  Nope.  Not quite.

The back story is that I’m going to try eating about an ounce a day of hydrolyzed collagen protein powder, hoping it will benefit my joints.  This, in response to a very slow recovery of those joints after a recent mountain day-hike.

In any case, as tested above, in coffee, I get a distinct “leather” aftertaste that is, unhappily, turning out to be difficult to disguise.

This, admittedly, from a sample, of a product.  And it was an acid test — big dose, straight up, in freshly brewed coffee.

I’m not sure how generic this issue is.  Rather than curse all such, I’m going to buy a jar of the top-shelf stuff from my local Vitamin Shoppe (not a sponsor).  So I will give this a retry with better stuff. After I eat my way through the five-pound bag of the stuff I just bought.  There’s a reason I am not allowed to enter Costco.

I side-by-side taste-tested my own coffee.  The Nescafe mug contains 10 grams hydrolyzed collagen, nicely dissolved in fresh coffee.  I compared the taste of this to the same coffee, unadulterated.

Blinding this — so I didn’t know which was which — would have done no good, because you can tell the coffee-plus-hydrolyzed-collagen from the mouth feel.  (The “silky” mouth feel is noted on the internet.  FWIW, it gives the same “throat-soothing” mouth feel as dense homemade chicken broth.

But back to taste.

The cup with the 10 gram (third-ounce) dose of hydrolyzed collagen protein powder had at the minimum, a faint aftertaste of … a badly-rinsed canteen, say.  Like you’d accidentally chewed on a piece of untanned leather.

It’s like you’d accidentally taken a bite on a piece of rawhide.  Maybe bit down on a rawhide lace to hold it taught temporarily.  And spat, say.  Maybe rinsed and spat.  But you inhaled through your nose soon after, and could still taste it.  Kind of like that.

Slightly mildewed rawhide.  Old canteen.  Along those lines.  Just a whiff.  Nothing that I particularly want in my coffee.

I tried disguising it with sweet chocolate, by adding a heaping teaspoon of chocolate whey protein from Costco.

It was a good try.  Definitely tasted better.

But that’s when I discovered that a chocolate taste, no matter how nice, does not cover up a lingering leather aftertaste. 

 

I got that cup down, but it was partly a chore.

It’s unclear what to do next.  Try to minimize it, try to get used to it, try it in some other format, try it at lower concentration.  Try it in some other liquids.  Try a different product.  Something.

Do not underestimate the power of Mucilage

For added fun, hydrolyzed collagen protein powder is a mess to use.

Spilling this powder (hydrolyzed collagen) on your kitchen countertops is like dripping glue on them.  You’d like to get it up before it sets, and it smears when you try.

(I have already explained the fundamental stupidity of stone countertops, owing to stone being a high-surface-energy material, and thus sort of the anti-teflon of cooking surfaces.  See Post #1790 on Formica.  So I’m a bit sensitive to the issue of having bits o’ crap stuck to my kitchen countertops.)

Spills can result in hard patches of what is, essentially, mucilage.  Hide glue.  On your countertops.

Lovely.

So, where cleanup of spilled whey powder is a snap, you just don’t want to spill any of this hydrolyzed collagen powder on your countertop.  At all.  Not unless you enjoy scouring them to get what’s glued itself to the countertop, off.

It is for human consumption and all.  It has the aminos I’m looking for, for my joints.  (See prior post).

But from the standpoint of clean-up, it’s water-activated hide glue powder, with an open time of maybe five minutes. Get it moist, and first it turns to slime, then it sets like glue.

I don’t need that at 6AM.

Conclusion

I’ve done my first head-to-head comparison between two animal-derived protein powders:  Whey and “hydrolyzed collagen”.

As I crudely understand this, the first (whey) is a waste product of the dairy industry, and the second, you just don’t wanna know where it comes from.  It’s a waste product of the meat industry.

Admittedly, this was an acid test:  dissolved in my morning coffee.  And taste is subjective.  And it’s a first-time effort.

I’m going to call collagen coffee a fail, as noted above.  The product I used, at 10 grams in a cup of coffee, dissolved nicely in hot coffee, but was unpleasant due to its persistent aftertaste.

Separately, and not reported here, when I put some of that in literal chicken broth last night, I didn’t catch the leather after-taste.  So I’m sure I can find a way to eat it that won’t bother me.  Yet coffee would be ideal, because coffee is part of my daily routine. I suspect that if I can work this into my diet, it’ll be in savory soups (like chicken broth), or maybe with V8 juice.

Edit:  Second 10-gram dose of the day, in chicken broth, and the taste of the hydrolized collagen is not even remotely noticeable.  Whatever taste it has, it seems to blend in and get lost in the overwhelming umami of chicken broth. 

Second edit:  This stuff also seems to work OK with cold V-8 juice, at the rate of 10 grams of hydrolized collagen (a rounded cutlery teaspoon, plus a bit) to a 12 ounce glass of V8.  A bit of clumpage when merely mixed with a spoon, so this might require use of a frother or some such.  But it tastes fine, in the sense that I can’t taste it.

So, this new stuff — this broken down gelatin — if it doesn’t poison me, or disagree with me, or remind me of its origins in any way — this should work just fine, as a steady source of the amino acids I need to build joint-adjacent connective tissues.

It’s not a treat, the way the whey protein turned out to be.  But as long as I don’t put it in my coffee, I should be fine.

It’s also far from clear that I’ll be able to tell whether or not this helped, to any material degree.  I’ll have to take three equivalent mountain day-hikes this fall and see how badly my joints hurt afterward.

Finally, if this protein source doesn’t work out, I’m pretty sure I would get the same amino mix if I just ate Jell-O.  A whole lot of Jell-O.  An ounce of protein works out to more than three standard store packages of Jell-O, per day.  (A typical box of sugar-free gelatin weighs 0.3 ounces.)

Source:  https://swolverine.com/blogs/blog/whey-vs-beef-protein?srsltid=AfmBOoqBdkyF6MHbkEmPtHoLpWL_K6ROO9C_I_-VV3PJUda-SnUQiHn1

In any case, this stuff provides the aminos I’m looking for,  for my joints.  Or, if not this exact stuff, something very much like it.  And I now own a five-pound bag it.  It’s just going to take me a while to figure out how to eat it.

I had hoped that this new protein powder would be plug-and-play swapable with the whey protein powder that I already incorporate in my diet.  It’s not.  But it’s workable nevertheless.

By way of comparison, it was easy to incorporate whey protein powder in my diet.  The whey powder (which will always include emulsifiers) was a joy to use.  The chocolate-flavored whey powder from Costo is a plus in my morning coffee, despite needing to take care not to curdle it with the hot coffee.  It tastes just like coffee flavored with chocolate Ovaltine.  Separately, unflavored whey imparts no detectable taste to Jell-O sugarless instant chocolate pudding, which is then poured over frozen fruit, providing a full serving of protein in the form of a sweet treat. 

I should probably have some safety concerns, with this stuff.  As I said, you really don’t want to know what it’s made from.  But (e.g.) literal leather (cow skin) is certainly one of the likely initial sources.  Perhaps one of the less-unpleasant sources.  And yet, my guess is that that have to decompose (what is essentially) the impure gelatin that is the input, so hard, that any potentially harmful proteins (e.g., mad-cow prions) should be destroyed in the process.  Kind of ultra-ultra-pasturized.   I should probably look into that more before I get all gung-ho about this.

Post #2137: Oh, the price of gold … V

 

Gold is at $3100 $3200 $3300 $3400 / ounce this morning.  Again.

Source:  Kitco, Inc.

The last time gold hit that level was April 21.  Then, it made news.  Now, everybody yawns.  The media won’t mention it until it sets a new record price in today’s dollars.

We’re still just a bit over $100 below the all-time high price of gold, in real (CPI-adjusted) dollars.  That’s by my calculation, based on the price of gold at the end of 1979/start of 1980.  And the BLS CPI calculator.

As a noted in the last post, the previous high (in real terms) occurred during absolutely dreadful economic times — stagflation following two Arab oil embargoes against the U.S.

Now, by contrast, we’re seeing a near-all-time-real-record price for gold, in a world with a basically good economic climate, except for U.S. repeatedly shooting itself in the foot.

If I had to guess what has pushed gold to this price level, I’m betting that the Trump administration will soon have no choice but to start testing the waters on various forms of default on Treasury debt.  Nothing too radical at first.  Maybe floating the idea of forcing T-bill holders to hold that debt for another few months, beyond the term of the bills they hold.

But between gutting the IRS (and essentially declaring open season on tax cheating), extending the existing costly tax cuts, and piling on more tax cuts, failing to find any material “efficiency” savings, and so on — while repudiating any and all international agreements — and threatening the Chair of the Fed — if we now slide into a deep recession (with the resulting automatic ballooning of the Federal deficit — I’m guessing we’re going to end up being unable to finance the Federal debt in conventional ways.

So the economic geniuses of the Trump Administration need a dress-rehearsal now, in anticipation of the coming cash crunch in Treasuries.  After they’ve driven the economy into recession.

Sounds insane, I know.  But insane is what we do now. 

Maybe I’ll earn myself a prison term in the newly rehabbed Alcatraz, just for saying it.  Maybe I’ll be forced to march as part of the spectacle on the next Leader’s Birthday military parade.  Or maybe the 200 trade deals that Trump claims he has already made will somehow save the day.

Or maybe all that bullshit is coming home to roost a lot sooner than anyone would have guessed.

That’s what I think this most recent rise in the price of gold means.  Q3 2025 is when all the economic nonsense that’s gone on so far really starts to hit the fan.  Smart money is finding safe havens other than Treasuries, in anticipation.  And gold, despite its many drawbacks, is one of the few safe havens left.

Post #2136: Listening to my bones as I walk.

 

My hips and knees are still not ready to be back in action, after my last day-hike.

Three days after hiking, I walked around the block anyway, during a brief period of clear weather.  In part, I was trying to figure out what makes my joints hurt, and what doesn’t.

Pain can be your body’s way of telling you to pay attention.

By that metric, it was an instructive morning.

Lesson 1:  Don’t walk stiff-legged.

It’s an efficient way to walk, but probably not a good way to minimize impact on your leg joints.

Now that I’ve gotten used to using trekking poles, I realize I often use my (aligned) leg bones in the exact same fashion — as a temporary, rigid, weight-bearing pole, transmitting force from the ground to my torso.

As I stride, I tend to start each stride with a straight leg — with the knee tensed.  This lets the leg bones and joints hold my weight, for just an instant, with little or no use of muscle, to support my weight.

That, as opposed to walking with a bent knee throughout, resulting in a “bouncier” stride as the knee flexes, just a bit, acting as a shock absorber of sorts.

Mechanically, I think this temporarily-straight-kneed stride is an efficient way to walk.  A least-effort stride.  No wasting energy in a soft suspension (the flex of the knee), if nothing else.  But also, possibly an artifact of my days of being obese.

But I’m pretty sure this is a bad thing, from my leg joints’ point of view.  You will see all kinds of warnings about merely holding a static locked-knee position.  I can’t imagine that this issue somehow goes away when you walk.

This was particularly noticeable today when walking downhill.  I take my weight on my rigidly-aligned leg bones, just for an instant, to slow my descent down the hill.  Kind of jolt my way down the hill, ever so slightly.  Just as I would have used trekking poles, to slow my descent, but with bigger muscles and more force involved.

I shamble.  Like a zombie, but faster.   I shamble noticeably, walking downhill.  And that morning, my hips let me know that.

Worse, even if my stride were super-smooth, so that there was no jarring when my foot hits the sidewalk, there’s now enough looseness in my joints (maybe from age, maybe it’s always been that way) that, among other things, I can feel movement within the hip ball-and-socket.  Just a little bit.  When I do that.

Basically, those weight-bearing, lock-kneed moments are ever-so-slightly pounding the crap out of my hip joints with every stride.

But guess what?  If I try to do the opposite — make sure my knee is never fully straightened, letting the flex of the knee absorb the shock of foot hitting ground, putting a “spring” in my step — then my knees hurt.  Starting with, but hardly limited to, the patellar tendon/ligament — the big sinew just below your kneecap, that touches the ground when you kneel.

The pain never goes away.  It just moves around.

Lesson 2:  Joints have a lot of different parts.

Source:  https://drpeterwalker.com.au/hip-anatomy/

And all of them can hurt.

Seriously, the big one that that old people worry about is the articular cartilage, as shown above.  That’s what bears your weight, and once that wears out, the joint is toast.

But I’m sure that a lot of my joint pain is from bursa, tendons, ligaments, and other miscellanous musculo-skeletal parts.

For example, after this last hike, I recognized mild symptoms of baker’s cysts, that is, knee bursa that are so swollen they puff out the backs of the knee joints.  That makes the knees feel “stiff” or “full” when bent.  (The treatment and prevention is to wear an elastic knee brace.  Nothing exotic.  Just a fabric knee brace of the type for sale at your local drug store.)

Separately, a lot of the pain at my ball-and-socket hip joints seems to have nothing to do with the weight-bearing parts of the ball or the socket themselves.  It’s now all the other stuff around hip joint that hurts.  During flexion and after straightening up.  Whatever it is that gets flexed, in the hip, as you bring your knee up to your chest — that’s sore.  Bending over to time my shoes is a chore.

If nothing else, this an an excellent excuse not to weed the garden.  Bent-over weeding stretches those same ligaments.

As I noted in the last post, I’m going to start eating a lot of gelatin, or, more properly, hydrolyzed collagen.  The idea is as crude as this:  I’m eating the concentrated, purified extract of animal-sinew proteins, in the hopes of healing my own sinews.

Edit:  And that’s showing some promise, as whey protein — what I’ve been eating to keep up my muscle mass as I lost weight — is almost completely deficient in some of the amino acids that are key to building collagen and connective tissue.  Plausibly, by relying on whey for about half my protein, I’ve been skimping, for an extended period, on some amino acids that are required for building joint tissues.  If lack of that key amino acid has been slowing my body’s joint repairs, then substituting hydrolyzed collagen for half the whey should resolve the problem.

Source:  https://swolverine.com/blogs/blog/whey-vs-beef-protein?srsltid=AfmBOoqBdkyF6MHbkEmPtHoLpWL_K6ROO9C_I_-VV3PJUda-SnUQiHn1

Be that as it may, not every pain in the joints is from wear-and-tear on the cartilage.  There’s wear-and-tear on a whole host of items.

And every damned one of them can hurt.

Lesson 3:  Hops, skips, and jumps.

Hurt like hell this morning.  Takeoff is fine.  The landing is what hurts.  It sent a clear message, written in pain:  Please don’t do that.

But mountain hiking, on rocky trails, necessarily involves a lot of that.  In the heat of the (hiking) moment, that hardly registers. But with already-sore joints, there is no pain-free way to do anything of the nature of rock-hopping across a creek.  Anything with “hop” in the name is going to hurt.

I need to find a better way to stick my landings, without the pain.  No idea how.

But, at the least, walking on sore joints tells me I should avoid those sorts of jumps and hops when I am hiking, whenever I can.

Conclusion

At my age, it’s not clear that anything is going to make my joints happy.

But I’m going to try.  Try to walk with soft knees.  Amp up my consumption of (plausibly) joint-friendly protein.  Try to stick my landings without jolting anything.

Turns out, I like mountain hiking a lot.

Now I need to find a way to make it sustainable.  If that’s possible.

Post #2135: Anything worth doing is worth overdoing.

 

I have recently completed three stiff mountain day-hikes.  Hikes where I was worn out, and then some, after just a few hours of hiking.

On my last hike I met a 74-year-old guy who was doing real backpacking.  That is, days-at-a-stretch, carrying-kit-and-caboodle mountain hiking.

I handed him an apple, so I know he wasn’t imaginary.  And it got me to thinking: If he can can do it, can’t I?

Answer:  Nope.  There’s no way I can go backpacking.  Not due to the weight of the pack, but because my joints can’t recover fast enough from the pounding.  I need days (plural) of recovery time after a mountain day-hike.

There’s no way I could do this two days in a row. Which, practically speaking, rules out backpacking.

Continue reading Post #2135: Anything worth doing is worth overdoing.

Post #2134: Hollow Brook Falls/Sam Moore Shelter hike.

 

The first part of this hike is what everyone thinks a walk in the eastern woods should look like.  After a brief climb on some stone stairs, you gradually arrive at a long section of mostly-level dirt trail.  As shown  left.

The trail head is on a rarely-used gravel road.  On the trail, the only man-made noises were from the occasional jet flying overhead, and one far-off dog.

By contrast, the woods were full of birds.  This ends up as a hike, on a good trail, out of earshot of roads, listening to songbirds and woodpeckers.

The side-trail to the waterfall on Hollow Brook is a hoot.  But perhaps not appropriate for small children.  It ends at the waterfall pictured above.

The trail gets rockier and steeper as you travel further north.  Pick your turnaround point as you see fit.

 

Continue reading Post #2134: Hollow Brook Falls/Sam Moore Shelter hike.

Post #2133: Clickety-clack. Trekking poles are loud. A partial fix is … ineffective.

 

On the East Coast, you do not need to wear a bear bell.  Aluminum trekking poles — if applied with due diligence — will make all the noise you need to alert the wildlife.

And everyone else.

Seriously, trekking pole noise is an issue that deserves to be … heard.

This post is my brief inquiry into trekking pole noise.  And what I can do about it.

Edit, the next day:  I took my modified trekking poles (below) on a hike, and the fix shown below does essentially nothing to suppress the noise these poles make.  

The act of jamming the pole tip down onto the rock — basically, using these poles — causes the aluminum to sound.  Worse, accidentally slapping the hard plastic tip of the pole, sideways, into the rock, produces a loud rackety-bang noise out of the aluminum pole.

As of now, I’m guessing that the only effective way to quiet down these noisy aluminum trekking poles is to cover the carbide tips with rubber tips. 

I may have to rethink my aversion to rubber crutch tips on trekking poles.

To cut to the …

I count at least three distinct, common trekking pole noises.

First, there’s the ringing slap of the aluminum pole against rock.  What I would call the bangety-bang noise.  This isn’t something you do intentionally, it’s just the side of the pole accidentally banging against the rock as you put the pole down, over and over again, in time to your walking.

Second, there’s the potential for the inner workings of the pole to rattle, make boinging-boing noises, and similar, as most trekking poles are “spring loaded” to minimize shock to your hands as you use them.

My poles don’t have this problem.  But some of them jangle as they are used.

Finally, there is the noise of the carbide pole tip biting into the rock surface.  I’ll go into it at length below, but suffice it to say, they put carbide tips on these for a good reason.  They are integral to these functioning well on rock, in all weather.

I don’t think I can get rid of that noise.

So, of what I count as the three main sources of noise, the only one relevant to me, that I think I can do something about, is the ringing bang of the bare aluminum pole against rocks.

I’m trying the above, to minimize that.  If for no other reason than “Of course I have a dead bicycle inner tube hanging up in my garage.  Doesn’t everyone?”

Anyway, this is surely an idiot-proof fix.  We’ll see if it stops the banging, on my next hike.

Trekking pole noise, a more sensitive issue for hunters than hikers.

On line, you see sporadic mentions of trekking pole noise, as an annoyance on the trail.

On my most recent hike, I heard a bit of grumbling from one hiker.  Not direct at me, but at a guy who had jangled up the trail some tens of minutes earlier.

And my fellow hiker had a point.  When a trekking pole user is approaching along the trail, you can typically hear the clackety-clack, and sometimes the jingle-jangle, from quite a ways off.

But what to do about that?  As a trekking poles user, I mean.

Logically enough, the best discussions of trekking pole noise that I stumbled across were in the sportsman (hunting/fishing) community.  Trekking pole noise is a drawback when stalking prey, so it receives full and serious attention in that market sector.

From discussion among hunters, I learned that

  • sloppy users make more noise than those who are more careful,
  • and some brands of poles are noisier than others,
  • carbon fiber poles are quieter than aluminum.

And, finally, I ran across this bicycle-inner-tube fix, in those sportsmen’s discussions.

It was a goldilocks moment.  Soft plastic — pool noodle, pipe insulation — couldn’t handle the abrasion of the rocks.  Hard plastic — like vinyl tubing, rubber garden hose, or similar — would take some ingenuity to attach, and have it stay attached.

But inner tube material seemed just about right.  Very tough, for sure.  Prevents metal-to-rock contact.  And big enough to allow the pole to be fully collapsed, even with this inner-tube sleeve attached.

Why I’m (probably) not going to use rubber crutch tips.

Source:  https://science.howstuffworks.com/environmental/earth/geology/mohs-hardness-scale.htm

A separate part of trekking pole noise is the impact of the carbide tips on rock.

Not only does the impact of carbide tip on rock make noise, it marks the rock.    This draws some criticism of trekking poles, in some heavily-hiked areas, because over time the rocks become visibly scarred.

But carbide trekking sticks tips scar the rock by design.  Tungsten carbide is harder than any common rock, by a wide margin.  On Moh’s scale, it’s a 9+, where quartz (about the hardest rock around here) is 7 on the Moh’s scale.  That carbide tip “bites into” the rock underneath it when you apply weight.  That keeps the tip from slipping under adverse conditions (e.g., wet and muddy).

I have rubber crutch tips to fit over the carbide tips on my old, cheap trekking sticks.  I can see that a) I used them, b) I took them off, and c) they have some mud on them.

My take on that is that the rubber tips aren’t much good, under the circumstances where I rely on trekking sticks.  That is, going downhill, putting a lot of weight on the sticks to take stress off my knee joints.  In that situation, if the tip skids on the rocks, the results could be very bad indeed.

And so, from the look of it, and as best I can recall, when I last used these — about seven years ago — I tried the rubber crutch tips and found them to be unreliable for rocky trail descents in adverse (muddy/wet) conditions.

They’ll slip, in situations where the carbide tip — with its minuscule surface area in contact with the rock, grinding into the rock — will not.

I may try some upgraded rubber tips, to see if that makes any difference.  Or, maybe, see if I can find ones that are adequate in dry conditions, for me, leaning on them as I descend rocky trails.

Plus, as a day hiker and retiree, if it looks like rain, I ain’t going hiking.  So maybe I don’t need much in the way of muddy/wet performance.  (Or, when I don’t, maybe I can get by with rubber tips.)

Conclusion.

I’ve done the simple fix, for one component of trekking stick noise.

Nothing to do but try it out on the next hike and see whether it makes a difference or not.

Post #2132: Bears Den Overlook/Sam Moore Shelter hike.

 

This is a good day hike if you’re looking for a workout.  That’s the consensus of opinion on hiking upward.

Otherwise, there’s nothing special to recommend it.  You hike over some ridges and through some hollows, to an Appalachian Trail shelter in the middle of the woods, next to a creek.  And you hike back.

It’s slow hiking, with abundant rocks.

Continue reading Post #2132: Bears Den Overlook/Sam Moore Shelter hike.

Post #2131: New hiking boots from Lowes.

 

Lowes.  Lowa’s.  What’s the difference.

I bought Lowa Renegade boots, from my local REI.

Addendum 5/4/2025:  After two day-hikes of 6-7 miles each, on the nearest sections of the Appalachian Trail, these boots get an A+ from my feet (zero problems) and at least a B from my joints (in reducing shock).

But the fabric has already started fraying on the boot collars.  That’s from me scuffing the ankle of one boot with the heel of the opposite boot, as I walk.  I got proactive and Barge-cemented a small leather patch on each boot collar, to take the scuffing.

I am not happy about that.  Put a happy face on it by saying that I like the boots so much, I was willing to invest a couple of leather scraps to serve as wear pads needed for my heel-scuffing gait.

In addition, the Vibram soles are much better than they looked in the store.  The semi-slick surface of the injection-molded soles has now worn to a nice matte finish.  The soles have good traction.

They’re good hiking boots. I don’t regret purchasing them.  I remain unhappy that I had to add wear patches.  Such is life.

Edit 5/9/2025:  Ten miles of rocky trails, and these patches are already showing wear.  I’m sure that the original cloth would not stand up to this much abuse.

The story so far

Thanks to yesterday’s big adventure (Raven Rocks overlook hike), I now know that I need better boots (or maybe shoes) to hike in.  And that I need to eat before I hike.

What the mountain hike lacks in average intensity, versus cardio machines at the gym, it more than makes up in duration.  By the book, this little 5.4 mile hike involves four hours of walking, plus lunchtime.  I’m sure this well-under-six-mile hike burned at least twice the calories of an hour’s CV exercise at the gym. 

But that means I needed to have twice the readily-available stored energy, on tap.  Turns out, I didn’t.  I don’t pack that much glycogen.  And, worse, I can’t burn fat fast enough to keep up with the demands of hiking.  That’s how I interpret that last hike.  I ran out of sugar and glycogen, and I’m too low-power as a fat burner, for hiking. 

A degree of “brain fog” of fatigue ensued.  Not terrible, but not good.  Double plus ungood if you’re a geezer hiking a steep rocky trail.  Do I need to wear a helmet when I hike?

The obvious fix for running out of energy on the hike is to eat breakfast first. Duh.  Eat a high-starch breakfast, then drive an hour to the trail head.  Somewhere in the first couple of hours of hiking, presumably, those carbs will be available as sugars to burn. A few packs of ramen would provide an easy test.

Then there’s the boots.

About a boot.  I bought boots.

Lowa Renegade boots.  And I know they’re cool because they’ve got speed laces.  And because they’re pronounced re-ne-GAh-da.  Or should be.

For the Raven Rocks hike, I made do with some work boots and two pairs of socks.  That worked.  The stiff soles and leather uppers of my old Walmart/Brahma work boots kept the soles of my feet from being beaten up by the rocks.  For which I am grateful.

Those work boots failed on the downhills.  No shame in that, and not unexpected.  The “work boot” design isn’t made to prevent that downhill slide, within the boot, that results in your toes getting crammed into the end of the boot, on the downhills.  Making the boot rigid/close-fitting enough to stop your foot’s downhill slide within the boot would make the boot uncomfortable as a work boot.

I need something made for hiking.  If nothing else, I’m old, and need all the help I can get.  Stiff soles are required, else the edges of the rocks beat up the soles of your feet.  Ankle support (high tops) are a good idea if you’re stepping around fist-sized rocks a lot.  Finally, I need something that passes the “toes remain comfy on downhills” test.

The more I looked, the higher up the market I went.  For one thing, a lot of low-end hiking boots are more … hiking-style boots.  They aren’t typically bought to be used for mountain hiking.  Which suggests to me that they aren’t typically made to do mountain hiking well.

Weirdly, that crossover at the low end — people using hiking-look boots, as general-purpose boots — occurs in part because, for reasons I cannot fathom, this category of footwear is known as “waterproof hiking boots”.  Waterproof is, as far as I can tell, not optional, and absolutely integral to the category of footwear I wanted.  You want hiking boots, of the type I’m after, you’re getting waterproof hiking boots.

Apparently a lot of people buy them not as hiking boots, but as a style of waterproof boots.  A lot of commenters actively disliked the features — e.g., stiffness — that made them hiking boots.  And so, at the low end of the market, you have a lot of what I’d call hiking-style boots, whose construction and fit is more like … eh, work boots.  And if the boots fail to fit and act like work boots, the commenters call them out for it.  (And for failure of the waterproofing.)

Long story short, after a lengthy shopping expedition, first on-line, then at my local DSW, I finally ended up at REI on a Saturday afternoon.  And I bought the best of what they had on the shelf.   Which is a story in and of itself.

I paid about what you’d think, buying top-shelf boots from REI.  But, arguably, less than the cost of a broken ankle.

What I ended up with was a pricey thin-but-stiff leather boot with thick Vibram sole, from Lowa.  Which to my surprise, is a German-made boot, explaining both the high cost and the excellent everything else.

So it’s a German-designed and assembled boot, incorporating American fabric (Gore-Tex), and Italian soles (Vitale Bramini?).  (Although, these injection-molded Vibram soles are nothing like traditional real (rubber) Vibram soles.)

Das boot is a real-life lesson for the Age of Tariffs and supply chains.

At any rate, these are right for the task.  Stiff sole.  Stiff ankle support.  Good toe room.  Vibram sole. And speed laces.

On the downside, aside from cost:  They have leather uppers, which I did not want.  I’d prefer more “sneaker-like” construction.  But thin leather is not a terrible choice given that these are, after all, boots.

And they are disposables, which I also did not want in a high-end boot.  Just like a pair of sneakers, they cannot be resoled.  I’m guessing that at my age, this is unlikely to be a problem.

Conclusions

Cheap boots are false economy.  But sometimes cheap boots will do.  And the availability of better boots does not give you carte blanche.

That said, at the end of the day, I bought the best hiking boots I could find locally.  Locally, so I could try them on first.  And the best I could find, not because I set out to do that.  But because, somewhere along the line, after looking at what was for offer, that started to make sense.

My other take-away is that REI, here in NoVA, is a fundamentally weird place.  Doubly so on a spring Saturday.  A whole lotta shopping goin’ on.  An eclectic mix of staff.

They say these German-made hiking boots should last 1000 miles.  Or maybe it’s kilometers.

Either way, I’d like to put that to the test.  Otherwise I’m just another doofus in expensive boots.

Starting just as soon as I heal up from the last hike.

Addendum:  Tuning the lacing on a stroll downtown.

I strolled to Walgreens, to get sunscreen.  Maybe two miles round-trip, on the sidewalks.

The boots did fine.  I did fine.  It was fine.

The leather on these is stiff enough that I assume they require some sort of break-in period.  People may sometimes tell you otherwise, but my experience says that it takes a while for leather boots and feet to get to know one another.    I’m doing that by wearing them around, a bit at a time, and eschewing (e.g.) oils (or even water) to speed the break-in.  I’m in no particular hurry.

To my surprise, these boots don’t have to fit tightly around the foot, in order to pass the downhill no-toe-cram test.  Instead, you can set up the lacing to be (comfortably) relaxed around the foot, as long as the ankle portion of the lacing is pulled tight. 

It’s designed this way.  The ankle portion of the lacing is the speed laces.  Tighten them up, leaving the lacing relatively loose on the foot, and the boot effectively grabs you by the ankle.  Firmly, but gently.  And that keeps your foot from sliding forward in your shoe, on (modest, so far) downhills.

The upshot is that a) the boots pass the downhill test so far, and b) my feet feel better loosely-laced.  But that all works out, because the boot is designed to hold two different tensions, on those two different parts of the lacing.

Comfortable hiking boot?  That’s kind of a foreign concept to me, but, these are foreign boots.

I guess it all works out.