An Afternoon Lost on Pine Ridge

The Pine Ridge loop is nine kilometres and I hike it twice a month. Post 7 to post 8 is the dullest stretch: flat, straight, twelve minutes through spruce.

I passed post 7 a little after noon — I drank water there and my tracker logged the pause at 12:04. The light was high, hard summer noon, the kind that makes the trail dust white.

Between one bend and the next, the light went amber. Not cloud-shadow: angle. The sun was suddenly low, throwing long bars between the trunks, and the air had the cooled, settled smell forests get before evening. Birds had changed shifts — afternoon insects gone, a thrush doing its dusk phrases.

Post 8 stood where it always stands. My legs felt like twelve minutes. My mouth said otherwise: I was savagely thirsty, and when I drank, I emptied the bottle I had topped up at post 7. My watch said 17:31.

The tracker tells the strangest version. Its graph shows me reaching a point 400 metres past post 7 at 12:16 — then a flat line. No steps, no heart-rate variance beyond resting, no GPS drift. A five-hour hole with my pulse ticking through it like a metronome. At 17:29 the step count resumes mid-stride, as if I had been switched back on.

I walked out fast, beating full dark by minutes, and sat in my car for a long time. I keep returning to the same two details. First: standing perfectly still for five hours is not a thing a body does — knees buckle, heart rate wanders. Second, and worse: something in me had kept time honestly. The thirst was five hours of thirst.

I have hiked the loop since, telling myself forests should not win by forfeit. Post 7 to post 8 takes twelve minutes. It has never taken anything else again. Yet.