Dirty Harry’s Peak is not a hike I look forward to every year, but it is a good challenge and great for conditioning your legs. Old legs need all the conditioning they can get.
This year was no different in that regard, but the hike did hold a couple of surprises.
Early Morning
As anyone knows if they have been reading these posts, I like to go hiking very early in the morning. So I pulled up into the Dirty Harry trailhead parking lot at 3:45 AM. I got out of the car to make some last adjustments to my pack and looked up past the sky. It is my custom to see how much cloud cover there is or just to look at the stars.
When I look up I see what appears to be a passenger jet going across the sky from y right to my left. It appeared to be higher than most passenger jets. Then it stopped. It did not slow down.It stopped.
Arrested Attention
Haver you ever had something happen where all of s sudden all of your attention was focused on that thing? This is how it was that morning. The “jet” moved down to the right. I grabbed my phone and started taking a video. It moved around some more and then I stopped filming it and I put my phone down and looked back up. It was gone.
Where did it go? I had no time right then so I went on my hike. A typical brutal last two miles to an area that doesn’t have much of a view compared to other places I go.
The Answer?
When I finished my hike it was about 9:45 AM. As I drove from the trailhead to the freeway along a cement but potholed road, there on the side of the road were about six or seven military jeeps and trucks and soldiers walking around.
“That was it,” I said to myself. A military drone. That’s what I saw. This explains it. The military has some cool stuff.
Then I got home and watched the video: https://studio.youtube.com/video/D_g_oYl1YnA/edit