No I haven't recently been drinking the water in a third world country if that is what your thinking. What I have been doing is some really long distance trail runs in quite inclement weather. Today after my last final (Wooohooo!) I was orginally going to run half the race course; basically run from Bogus Basin road back to my apartment. Instead I decided to do something a bit shorter, because of the time. Plus it was raining and snowing really hard. If you haven't been to Boise lately, we have been getting tons of rain and the mountains are getting dumped on; Bogus got 11 inches yesterday!
So I went to do a 16 kilometer run on the trails around 8th street around 3 or so. I took off out of the parking lot in the midst of a downpour and started up the mountain. After about 20 minutes I was running up alongside the Hulls Gulch creek when I saw something move in the willows about 100 meters ahead of me. At first I thought it was nothing, but then I got a better glimpse of it, or I should say them. What I think where two wolves ran across the trail and up the hill, away from me. I'm pretty sure they were not coyotes, because coyotes are not as big as these, plus coyotes aren't black and grey. I stood there stunned for a second, looked at Kulgogi and put her leash back on. After debating for a minute or so we continued on up the trail. As we ran I saw a bunch of large tracks and compared them against Kulgogi's paw prints. When I got home I looked up some pictures of wolf prints and am now pretty sure these where wolves. After running for a couple more minutes we came upon two other runners who had pretty much the same story as me.
We continued on for and eventually got to the first steep climb. This climb is probably about a mile long and snakes it's way up to the top of a exposed ridge. In the interest of soil erosion I probably shouldn't have ran up this hill, as it was pretty slick, but well I did it any way, so there... In reality it wasn't too bad because the ground was freezing up, still I did do a little sliding at times. We crested the ridge and where immediately hit with the full force of the storm. Wind and sleet knocked me all over the place and the hood of my rain coat plastered to the side of my face. From here it was 5 miles of gently rolling downhill til the finish. We pounded down the trail, hurdling puddles and the occasionaly tumble weed. Getting close to the trailhead we came upon a guy walking in the rain, no rain coat, no hat, just a sweatshirt. Now I don't believe in werewolves or any business like that, but if there is such a thing, this guy certainly fit the sterotype. Crazy beard, crazy hair; he looked like a wolf in human form. It was kinda crazy considering the events of half an hour earlier; maybe it was just because of my earlier sighting that I made the connection, but whatever. Ten more minutes and Kulgogi and I where back at the trailhead, soaked and a bit tired, but that was one hell of a run.
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Hi, I googled Hulls Gulch and wolves because a friend and I were out there the other day running and we ended up taking longer than expected so by the time we got done running it was starting to get dusk. When we were finishing (unexpected later than we wanted to) we heard howling. I know what cyotoes sound like and they are usually solitary. We heard larger animals howling. They sounded as if they were one hill over. Lets just say we ran on pure adrenaline all the way back to the car. We kept asking ourselves if they were what we thought they were but there is no doubt that they are.
I just thought I would share this.
Take care.
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