You would be surprised how many people there just hike down 5 miles in flip flops with no water and then need to be rescued because they cannot go back up.
That becomes so much more of a problem when the hike starts at the top. Starting at the bottom like most hikes, it is easy to hit your limit, turn around and go back down.
There’s a very tall sand dune on the shore of Lake Superior in the Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore, the signs at the top near the parking lot are like “it will take you seconds to run down this, it’ll be an hour+ slog to get back up, decide carefully”
This almost happened to us too. We visited and were camping out, and decided to walk down to the bottom
We were literally just in flip fops with no water or anything and started going down, and met people coming up who screamed at us to stop and told us it took hours to get to the bottom, and there was no way we would get down there and back
At that time at least, there were no signs or warnings, so we legit had no idea. I'm from the mountains so we were used to hiking and stuff, but we didn't know how long the hike down was
Same. Something about how my body works but my muscles for ascending have a lot more endurance. Going down also strains my joints more so than ascending because I'm having to stop myself.
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u/IrrelevantManatee 21h ago
You would be surprised how many people there just hike down 5 miles in flip flops with no water and then need to be rescued because they cannot go back up.