East vs West

When we first went to Yosemite, we heard an experienced hiker comment on the chief difference between Eastern trails and Western trails. In the west, he said, trails wind up steep mountainsides in a series of switchbacks. This happened because of the amount of mule traffic, necessary because when you climb Western mountains, you're likely to be climbing a long, long way. In the East, especially the Northeast, the trails are good Protestant ethic trails that frequently go more or less straight up the mountain, regardless of terrain. Sort of like this:





Likewise, Eastern trails are likely to go straight down the mountain, disregarding whatever's in the way, like this:




Mules frown on this sort of terrain. It is only humans of a certain temperament who walk over this stuff voluntarily. This, said the hiker at Yosemite, is what makes a big mountain out of a small one in the East, and helps to make Eastern mountains good training for Western ones.

Now, this guy was hitting on an attractive woman when we overheard this, so he did skip a few items. One is that a climb from 1500 feet above sea level to 3000 feet above sea level, which we were doing on this Mount Monadnock hike, allows one to catch one's breath and recover one's base heart rate fairly quickly. Not so when climbing, say, from 7000 feet to 8500 feet. I know there are devices that allow athletes to duplicate high-altitude conditions when training at low altitudes, but they don't seem to have shown up at my gym. Nevertheless, that travelling hiker's observations allow us to take an optimistic view of our preparations for the next Yosemite adventure.