Wide Saddle Loop Hike
On my day off, I set out to hike the Wide Saddle Loop at Mount Douglas, turning the outing into a small experiment. I had my phone’s voice recorder running, paired with a steady metronome, just to see what kind of transcript and data I could gather from the trail. The loop itself circled the base of the mountain, taking me through the Saddle, past the perimeter fence, and eventually onto Upper Whittaker where the path grows quieter and less traveled. Soon I was climbing over the familiar shapes I call the elephant’s back, shoulder, and ear, before dropping into the saddle chute and heading toward Harvest Lane and Glendenning. The pace stayed steady—about eleven minutes per kilometre—with my cadence between the forties and fifties and my heart rate climbing steadily into the 130s as the trail rose and fell. At first the metronome’s clicks kept me honest, but as the hike wore on, I realized they were more of a distraction than a guide, so I focused instead on the rhythm of my footsteps and breathing. Along the way, I passed through quiet stretches of fern and shaded forest, meeting only a couple of other hikers before carrying on toward the open sections. By the time I reached the 5K mark, I had logged nearly an hour on the move and burned close to 478 calories. The hike gave me what I was after: steady aerobic work, a few pushes into higher effort on the climbs, and the satisfaction of covering more ground than I would have with a short run. More than just the numbers, though, it was the flow of the loop itself—the mixture of climbs, descents, and forest turns—that made the experiment feel worthwhile.
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