So, my friends and I sometimes find ourselves being ambitious and adventurous, we have personal bucket lists and nothing makes a bucket list more fun than doing those things with friends, so first up was checking off “Climb Old Rag” off Meredith’s bucket list…Next time, I’m doing more research :).

Old Rag is about 90 minutes away from good ole urban Washington, D.C. so kelly, geter, myself, and meredith got up super early on Saturday morning, hopped into Betty Jr. and sped down route 66 to Old Rag to conquer the ” nice hike” for the day… As soon as we got to the parking lot, I kinda knew we were in trouble. Troops of boy scouts, people with ginormous backpacks, professional walking sticks, old dudes with cool floppy hats all filled the parking lot.. but we weren’t going to let that intimidate us so we trudged on. Start time 8am.

First sign of the day that it was going to be interesting…all those people in the parking lot, weren’t following us..they knew something we didn’t…we figured out what they knew later.

So, onward we go, the first part was charming and nice and easy, we spent most of that time looking for walking sticks of varying sizes for Meredith and Kelly, the sticks didn’t make it with us all the way to the top, the “Rock Scramble” made that nearly impossible, but they worked quite nicely for most of the trip:

So, we’d been making jokes all day about what these so called “Rock Scrambles” (of course talking about breakfast and scrambled eggs was an obvious one…)were going to be, we’d come across a few mini rock scrambles, but we had no idea the true definition of a “rock scramble” until we found ourselves scaling the sides of slippery rocks and pushing and pulling each other through tiny cracks and over big boulders! Team work and strategically placed back packs got us through! I lost my backpack privileged once the tip of Geters camel back flew off and the side of my leg was soaked with precious drinking water… I completed the rest of the incline backpackless…it’s fine :).

Another important fact: never say we are “almost there” until you see the summit sign… I lost this privileged after saying it 3 times with a false conclusion. Adding that to my list of “things not to do while hiking”, also on that list is ” dont lose the trail with the lil blue marks, you’ll end up in stick situations” and “composting toilets are sick, just say no”.

Through the steep inclines, rock scrambles, windy conditions, and blustery cold, we made it! Despite many of thoughts that we should just turn around and pack it in, we trudged through, and Geter was patient and didnt kill the three of us in the process.

At the end of the 10 mile hike, Meredith brought out the description from the website, ” most people choose to hike Old Rag due to the complicated Rock Scramble”…note to self, read directions and descriptions before…. Robert Frost would be proud of us though I think…we were pretty pleased with ourselves by the end, sheetz mac and cheese, chicken tenders, almond joys, and cheez its were our reward for the 3,000 calories burned in about 6 hours. Go team bucket list.