One of the main attractions of the Chiang Mai area is that we are a unique plot of land that has mountains in all directions. These mountains are very traversable and to people that live in places with "real" mountains would likely consider most of what we have here to be rather steep hills rather than mountains.
There is always a risk that some of the people that make these trails for us are going to intentionally put us in a situation where we have a difficult hill climb to conquer, and that is exactly what happened on Thursday this past week.
Even though the trail only took the front runners just under an hour, parts of this were absolutely gruleing and right around that part that almost looks like the tail of a fish is where it was extremely steep and well, some people got a bit upset that there wasn't some level of warning that it was going to be that way. We take things in stride in the Hash though and since everyone made it back safe we got over our initial anger.
I feel at times as though the Hares do this to us on purpose as you can tell from the elevation readout that the big hill climbs didn't come until nearly the end of the thing so the timing, at a point where all of us were pretty tired already, is when the climb actually happened.
Also, this wasn't some sort of official nature trail that is marked off for hikers either. It is raw jungle with plenty of little stones to trip you up and make you fall. In the past we have had a couple of rather serious slips that resulted in bloodshed but I think a lot of us have learned our lesson from those instances and now seriously watch our footing when it comes to these sorts of things. Nobody took a bad spill, thankfully.
At just 4.5 km, this is one of the shorter runs we have done so far in 2025, but I'll tell you this, it certainly didn't feel easy at all! When we got back to the circle for our post-run chat with beers, we put the Hares on the ice quite a lot for putting us all through that torment. We are normally pretty quiet but our commotion attracted an unexpected visitor as well
The weather has been a bit rainy as of late so the hills were made extra fun by the constant fear of stepping on moss of some wet leaves. That's always fun. I kid a lot about how dangerous this stuff really is, it's not really and we have a great support team should anything bad happen. For me, this is a great way to get out of the house and get back to nature and get some air and exercise, even though it is smoky season at the moment.
We are still doing at least 3 runs per week and you can come and join us if you are in the Chiang Mai area. Full details about the meetups can be found at our website
ON ON!
