{"id":317,"date":"2011-08-23T21:31:10","date_gmt":"2011-08-24T01:31:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/marksisco.com\/blog\/?p=317"},"modified":"2011-08-23T21:31:10","modified_gmt":"2011-08-24T01:31:10","slug":"chicago-basin","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/marksisco.com\/?p=317","title":{"rendered":"Chicago Basin"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Hiking distance from the Train to the Chicago Basin:\u00a0 4.5 miles.\u00a0 Not bad, huh?\u00a0 No big deal.\u00a0 Most anyone can walk 4+ miles in an afternoon at a slow pace, right?<\/p>\n<p>Oops, I forgot a few pertinent details:\u00a0 Elevation increase of 2,500ft (to 10,800ft above sea level); 50lb. pack; rain; pouring rain; hail; pouring rain again; more hail; pouring rain; 3rd round of hail;\u00a0 downpour and hail again!\u00a0 6 hours of hiking with fully loaded, wet packs, and we were still 1.3 miles short of our destination.\u00a0 That&#8217;s right &#8230; 6 hours, and we had only covered 3.2 miles!<\/p>\n<p>The rain and hail were overwhelming.\u00a0 And along with them came cold body temperatures as our sweat and rain soaked bodies felt the mountain temperature descend to the 50&#8217;s.\u00a0\u00a0 We were wet and whipped.\u00a0 The final straw that broke the camel&#8217;s back was that a trickle of a stream across the trail had become a roaring lion.\u00a0 We could not get across, so we setup camp short of our destination.\u00a0 It was a relief, to be honest.\u00a0 Jerry, Betsy, and I were safely tucked into our tents by 7pm, and we didn&#8217;t come out until 6am the following morning.\u00a0 Forget food.\u00a0 We only cared about 3 things:\u00a0 Getting warm, dry, and rested!<\/p>\n<p>Upon talking to several experienced hikers the following morning, this was the worst mountain storm any of them had been caught in.\u00a0 And, while the hail did not accumulate much at our stopping point, the Chicago Basin area we were destined for only 1.3 miles ahead had 5 inches of accumulated hail.<\/p>\n<p>The weather and trail cleared on Tuesday morning, so we repacked and forged on after breakfast.\u00a0 We arrived at the Chicago Basin well before noon, emerging from the prior 4.5 miles of wooded trails into a wonderfully large meadow protected by mountain peaks in all directions.<\/p>\n<div id=\"attachment_318\" style=\"width: 710px\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\"><img aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-318\" loading=\"lazy\" class=\"size-medium wp-image-318\" title=\"SanJuans_196_HDR\" src=\"http:\/\/marksisco.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/08\/SanJuans_196_HDR-700x466.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"700\" height=\"466\" srcset=\"https:\/\/marksisco.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/08\/SanJuans_196_HDR-700x466.jpg 700w, https:\/\/marksisco.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/08\/SanJuans_196_HDR-1024x682.jpg 1024w, https:\/\/marksisco.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/08\/SanJuans_196_HDR.jpg 1200w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 700px) 100vw, 700px\" \/><p id=\"caption-attachment-318\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">Single Track Trail Leading into the Chicago Basin<\/p><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Hiking distance from the Train to the Chicago Basin:\u00a0 4.5 miles.\u00a0 Not bad, huh?\u00a0 No big deal.\u00a0 Most anyone can walk 4+ miles in an afternoon at a slow pace, right? Oops, I forgot a few pertinent details:\u00a0 Elevation increase of 2,500ft (to 10,800ft above sea level); 50lb. pack; rain; pouring rain; hail; pouring rain [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[15,14,5],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/marksisco.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/317"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/marksisco.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/marksisco.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marksisco.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marksisco.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=317"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/marksisco.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/317\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":319,"href":"https:\/\/marksisco.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/317\/revisions\/319"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/marksisco.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=317"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marksisco.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=317"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marksisco.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=317"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}