I want to invite you to make my blog on the hiking lives of Dan and Hannah (as well as bonus adventures in their lives) a part of your weekly “must” reading on the Internet. Each Saturday I will post a one-page account of our hiking adventures. What started out as a series of pieces about hiking in the Southwest has morphed into one pagers about our hiking life, especially with our newfound love of the Appalachian Trail (AT).
I’ll begin with hikes in Flagstaff, Prescott, and Sedona, Arizona as well the South and North Rim of the Grand Canyon, Bryce Canyon, and Zion National Parks. Hikes along the AT will next be featured.
Here’s a little about Hannah and Dan to set the stage.
In her fifties Hannah turned her life long desire of being a hairdresser for the elderly into reality when she earned her license at the Portsmouth (NH) Beauty School. Working three days a week at the Durgin Pines Nursing Home in Kittery, Maine, she is living the dream. Dan has been a teacher of one sort or another for forty plus years, be it with fifth graders in Tempe, Arizona, middle schoolers in Kittery, Maine or preservice teachers at the University of New England. He retires in May and remains inspired by the travel writing of Bill Bryson (A Walk in the Woods: Rediscovering America on the Appalachian Trail.)
Our idea of a good vacation/hiking day begins before breakfast with an hour walk to explore the town where we are staying. At its core, the day is centered on hiking for three hours. We ran five miles per day for thirty years until one morning the creaking noise in our knees as we got out of bed got to be too much. We stopped running and took up walking, bicycling, and hiking on a regular basis. Hannah’s fondest athletic memory is running her first ten miler through the mountains of the Prescott National Forest in Arizona. As a physical education major at Arizona State University, Dan loved nothing more than having the human performance lab technician raise the treadmill speed and elevation to heart pumping levels.
I hope you will consider responding to my blog as a follower. Post your comments if you like. If you would prefer I use a different email address for you, let me know.
Dan Rothermel
December 29, 2010
“Some days you get the bear, and some days the bear gets you.” - Davy Crockett
