Minnesota Hiking Club
#2 - Whitewater State Park
Date Hiked: January 6th, 2025
Other Hikes That Day: Carley State Park
Wanderloon Ranking System Score: 4.33
You only get 2.2 miles credit for this hike? That can't be right.
Before starting this hike, I was in the unique position of seeing an office not only open, but staffed. The information and dioramas inside are awesome and really give you a feel for the area's landscape and wildlife. The wonderfully friendly ranger working there advised me that the trail shouldn't have much ice. Even the sign entering the trail warns you that the difficulty is considerable.
Then, something that would've been near impossible a day or two earlier, I had to carefully step over concrete blocks in the river to cross. On ice two days ago, that would've been sick. Then, the trail goes straight incline the whole way up, but the quality of the trail was greatly increased due to the lack of ice. The demons were still rampaging in my mind, despite my "woke up feeling dangerous" trilogy two days before. But, maybe peering out over the heights of the bluffs gave me a little more unexpected boldness, both in hiking and personal interaction. Instead of reading too much into a message I got where I normally would've, I instead chose to believe the words I was given. With a mind prone to running wild and filling in the blanks with the worst of possibilities, this was not only something I was choosing to do in order to avoid consequences or self-initiated spirals, but because therapy was beginning to work and I chose to believe someone I love when they said so. I know this is incredibly vague, but trust me when I say that it was a transformative act for a worrisome person prone to paranoia in the unspoken like myself.
It doesn't matter what came before, I've felt pain and I wanted more, I'm not settled until I've done it all and right...
Overcoming giant ass bluffs is just like silencing the mean voices in your head that conjure paranoid thought spirals that aren't there; it's extremely hard to do at first, but the more times you train, to take things one step at a time, to breathe, to believe what someone tells you, to trust your footing, to build up the endurance for when things get difficult, the payoff is worth the trials and tribulation of the fight. Trekking up that hill is a bitch, but seeing the rest of the park from atop the rocky bluffs would be impossible without putting in the work to do that without fear, same as it is to trust someone rather than allow the worst trauma of your mind to convince you that someone who loves you actually hates your guts and doesn't give a shit. You can't do it without practice, failure, hard times, wanting to give up, and times of strain on others and yourself, but to use a cliche that I nonetheless mean:
You got this.
Seeing a trail labeled "difficult" a year earlier might've made me reconsider.
I got this.
You've got this, both internally and externally.
ReplyDeleteSome day, I too might believe that.
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