Square Rooter, Square Rooter, Square Rooter… Why, oh why, oh why???
He was looking even more smug and proud than usual when I got to the runsite at Doi Suthep – what had the wily bastard put together for us this time? One thing could be sure – it wouldn’t be flat… The hare brief promised us around 4km, that would take over an hour – shit, shit, shit… Why had I come?
We set off into the water fall, and even though the trail took us along the concrete path, the rain and moss made that a slippery, dangerous adventure. I found myself the wrong side of the waterfall at one point, but decided it was probably the better side to be as we would inevitably rejoin at the road. And at the road the trail continued on scrambling on a muddy, slippy, path barely gripping to the side of the mountain. When he’d had enough of that, it was time to climb. Up, up, up one of the main trails.
With Suckit and 2 Dutch boys up front, I settled into a comfortable climbing pace, and eventually got to a V check where both were calling check back and heading back… A quick gamble and I decided that Suckit was probably correct and the visitors probably didn’t have a clue what they were talking about, so I went to the right and sure enough the trail scrambled through shit to cross over to the other main artery. Square Rooter must have enjoyed manufacturing that ‘connect’… With hardly any trees to hang onto, and just wet leaves to slide along, it wasn’t much fun, but I managed to get across and hit the inevitable circle check on the other trail. I suggested one of the young Dutchmen ran up the hill, and like a eager rabbit he did just that. I chose the trail down, with little intention of coming back if I was wrong – sure enough there were soon calls off to the left.
I figured it was the little loop SR had used a couple of weeks back, and they would rejoin us at the clearing, but the calls got fainter as the trail must have descended sharply towards the Boy Scout Camp. From there, what goes down must come back up, and I quickly got back to paper – with a kicked out circle from the wimp trail. There ahead was Frozen Dick with the hare – FD can either talk or walk, but not at the same time, so I quickly caught up with SR keen to show me where the rambos would rejoin the trail. As he described what he was putting them through, I wasn’t sure if he was trying to encourage me to go back and do it all, or congratulate me on my short cut – either way I wasn’t remotely tempted to climb back up the hill, only to go back down one side, to climb back to where I already was – the better option seemed the 600m or so down to the cars.