Moderate Hike to Soda Creek Falls in Cascadia, Oregon

Soda Creek Falls

We've been on this hike before, but we were running out of hikes that we could do on our way to Albany. We decided that to redo this hike since it had a waterfall and it was right on the way. I love waterfalls. Before we went, I reread my blog post about our Hike to Soda Creek Falls in January of 2014. I was 315 pounds when I went up he first time and 275 when I went up the second time. I know I stopped a lot the last time I went up it. The hike is only 3/4 of a mile, but it's mainly uphill. The first section of it isn't that steep, but the last section gets a bit steep. I don't remember if we used our hiking poles the first time, but I know we didn't use them the second time. We wished we had though! We've decided that we're going to get poles that shrink down more easily and we'll just keep them in the backpack so if we need them, we have them. No more need to decide at the parking lot if we're going to need poles or not.

This hike is a fairly popular spot and the path is really only wide enough for one person. We had to pull off the path a few times to let people through. That part gets annoying when you are trying to check your progress and see how far you can get up this hill without stopping. On the way up, we stopped several times to catch our breath. On the way down, we just powered it out and only stopped if we needed to let people pass. It felt pretty amazing doing this hike and thinking back to how challenging it was the first time. I've come pretty far in a year and a half. I might not be where I want to be as far as my weight and I still have a long way to go with my strength and endurance, but I'm so much stronger than I was back in January of 2014.  

Polar M400

This was our first hike using our new gadget the Polar M400. It has a chest strap heart rate monitor and GPS watch. I had some issues with the connection on the heart rate monitor strap. The thing kept popping off me. The strap didn't fall off or anything like that, but I would look at my watch and see dashes instead of my heart rate. That really messed up my speed and heart rate chart. It was pretty gnarly looking so I just used the elevation line for this hike. No one else really cares about my heart rate and speed anyway. So here's the chart of the elevation. You can see that we got to the highest point of the hike at about the 45 minute mark. It took us 45 minutes to go 3/4 of a mile up and about 17 minutes to go 3/4 of a mile down. We did spend a few minutes up at the top though so the down was actually a little bit shorter.