Photos:

• Paul's camera (32)
• Roy's camera (133)

This turned out to be one hell of a hike! Congrats to everyone for enduring it. Photos to follow later, though it'll be a more limited set since my camera malfunctioned early into the hike. I did borrow one from a fellow hiker (thanks Royw) to take a few more.

• Thanks everyone for being on-time! There were 8 hikers, 2 cars of 4 each. Pickup was done in Foster City and SF for one of the cars.
• Hike started at the Matt Davis trailhead just behind the fire house in downtown Stinson Beach, at pretty much sea level. Starting time: 8:52 am.
  • Lunch was at the East Peak parking lot from 1:28pm to 1:52 pm.
  • Returned to trailhead at 5:36 pm (5 hikers) and 6:07 pm (3 hikers).
• Distance and elevation.
  • I had originally wanted to go about 22 miles and cover some 4500 ft in elevation. After doing some rough topo, I realized we would only go about 20 miles tops.
  • In the actual hike, we covered around 18 miles, even though I'm sure everyone felt it was closer to or more than 20 miles. It definitely wasn't 20 miles, though. There are several reasons it felt farther than it actually was:
    1. There were numerous junctions: we went through at least 40 of them. Each junction meant a bit of waiting and loss of momentum.
    2. Many of the trails were really rough with loose rocks, steep sections and thick obstructing bushes.
    3. we got slightly disoriented a few times, partly because some of the trails were not well-marked, or not marked at all
  • Elevation-wise, my rough calculations shows a total elevation gain of about 5400 ft. Yes, over a mile!

Summary: 18 mi / 5400 ft for an average grade of 11.3% - this is an incredible average to keep up for 9 miles! (Compare to Mission peak which is 15% grade, but only over 2.8 mi)