 So anyway, we just wrapped up our hike for this Saturday. Last time we went live, we shared with some of you guys that we will start kind of going on longer hikes during the weekend and even during weekdays if it's possible, but really just training, training, training and then we went on a hike today. It was a good one. It was a long one. It was a hot one. So we chose to hike in Usury Mountain Regional Park. It's not a very popular park here in Arizona, but we've been exploring in that park for a couple of weeks right now. We did one hike there. I don't remember how long ago, but today we chose to do a longer loop. So initially the plan was to do the the whole loop 10 miles long. What was the elevation gain? Almost 2,000. More than 2,000. Yeah, I think it was 10.3 mile hike. It was advertised as and there was supposed to be like 2,600 feet of climb. Yeah. But like you said, it's a loop, but there's a spot where you could take a break in the loop, go to a summit and come back and then continue. And oh my god, so really that was a very, it's not a super difficult hike on a normal day, but it was very hot and it just made it so difficult. So I thought, you know what? With our experience hiking out in the desert during summer, I mean, I know it's May, but it's still extremely hot right here. We just had a couple of days where it was 100 degrees. And I just wanted to come here, share some lessons learned from my experience today, from our experience today, hiking in the desert and then just really share with you some tips if you are, you know, somewhere in the desert and you want to go out and hike during this time of the year. We're going to go hike at all in the summer for that matter. Man, oh man. I said this to myself once. I went hiking up in Kamovac Mountain during summer and it was really hot and I said, you know what? This is the last time I'm hiking during summer in the desert. And then I did it today. It didn't go well. I just, it was very difficult, really. I do not enjoy hiking in the desert. In summer is what I mean. So we originally were planning on getting up pretty early, obviously, enjoying it. And we still got up around seven, but waiting to start doing some of these more hiking, hiking trips with, we ended up catching a ride. Yeah. And that ended up like stacking on some hours in the morning. Like we had to get them to stop by a grocery store so we could pick up some snacks because we didn't have anything at home. And then we had to go like grab a little food and all said and done, even though we got up at seven, we didn't get to the trail until 930, which was a little late. Yeah. Four starters. So maybe just to kind of make this sort of organized. I know this is just like a spontaneous live, but let's make it organized in a way that we talk about five tips if you are hiking during summer in the desert. So first one would be definitely get an early start in the morning. The early is the better. You beat the sun. You beat the crowds most likely because if you start around, for us, we started today around 930. And those, those pretty late, I think. Yeah. The trail wasn't busy, but it's just a matter of beating the heat. Don't get us wrong. I mean, we were going to be in the heat no matter what anyway, but it's just kind of nice to be able to get some of those hours out of the way without, you know, without having to get stuck in the middle of it for all of the hike. Yeah. So definitely that's that's tip number one. The early is the better. Watch the mask there. Yeah. There was pretty much no one really on that on that hike. We barely met one group of three people and then we met one guy hiking on his own. Messages. Let's see. Hello, Habiba from Sehfi. It's Barqallah 11 Medinti. Thank you so much, Maryam. Maryam is also from my hometown. Oh, wonderful. Shukran, Maryam. So that was tip number one. Definitely get an early start in the morning. Just beat the heat and try to not really pick a difficult hike. So okay, so let's jump. Tip number two for hiking in the desert during summer. What have you got, Alex? What have I got? Pack a lot of water. I mean really pack a lot of water. The way somebody had explained it to me in the past was imagine that you come across somebody else who needs water. And if you wanted to be able to help them out without getting both of yourself in trouble, like that's so much extra water you should pack all the time. I think we both have three liter bladders that we put in our bag and then we both were like carrying around like extra one liter bottles on the other side and we had another water bottle in our bag. Yeah. It was a it's a lot but it's it's better to have a little bit extra water at the end than is to have none and that's obvious. But really when you're looking yourself in the eye before you leave, tell yourself to grab another. So between the two of us and obviously you don't want to depend on anyone. You want to have your own water, enough water for you and then he wants to have enough water for him. So between the two of us the plan for this hike was 10 miles and we had almost 10 liters of water which it might sound crazy one liter per mile but at the end of the hike we were we didn't have enough water like our water was almost we almost run out it was or probably had like one of these. How many what how much water did we have left? I'd say by the end yeah we had we had more than half a liter of water left. Half a liter yeah and then also we had to we had to change our plan so we didn't really do the whole 10 miles hike based on the fact that we didn't have enough water. So and I think I'm very very happy that we we didn't you know we cut on the miles on this hike because we didn't have enough water. So anyway so just to sum it up tip number two pack enough water with you and like Alex said it's always good to to make sure that even if someone gets in trouble on your on the trail that you are hiking you want to be able to to help them you know just like don't pack for two people but still just have room for extra have room in case you you know you go off trail and you lose the you don't know where you're going and then you have to be out there longer than than planned so water is very important. Like I said that was just guidance somebody gave me a long time ago and it just it works it worked in my head well I always pretend you have to figure out somebody else. May I put a rider on that point? Sure. There are noon tablets out there that we like there are other tablets like these as well like that you can just drop into your water we obviously put some stuff in our bladder we don't put any additives into our bladder but we usually have the bottles on the side we'll throw some of those tablets into and they're good because when you're hiking you will sweat and you'll sweat out a lot of sodium a lot of your salt too so you do want to be able to replace it otherwise you might get those little spots in your eyes if you stand up too fast or something yeah so not only do you want to drink water but make sure that you get yourself some of the electrolytes or some of the other tablets even with a little bit of sodium in there sometimes salty snacks make it thirsty and you don't want to put too much water in because you might actually be carrying around a big little bladder of water inside your body now that could feel weird but um but make sure you put those tablets in it's not just water you kind of want some of those minerals and nutrients too so that's the the noon tablets that Alex is talking about it's just like you know regular tablet you throw it into your water barrel and it's going to provide you with the with the necessary sodium amount of sodium and there are different types of them too some with caffeine some with just electrolytes some with full sport mixtures etc yeah and they come with different flavors so this one is the fresh lime there are all type of flavors that you can think about okay so we talked about two tips uh what was the first one i'm so exhausted that i can't even think first one was getting early start early start of the day and then second one take your water enough water with you for sure okay tip number three so tip number three this is something that i learned throughout the years just from hiking out is you see right now it's really hot outside but i got everything covered like wearing long sleeves and the protecting your skin i mean i'm wearing my long pants yeah so we both are wearing pants i mean it's tempting to want to wear tank tops and t-shirts um you know sometimes i mean i feel the same way too you want to look cute and have some nice cute outfits but it doesn't work like that when it's really hot outside and i've experienced it once in south dakota because it was really hot and i just wanted to show off my skin but really on top of the sunscreen which is very important covering your skin with long sleeves long pants and even for alex he has a special hat oh yeah i'll show it yeah this is the same one if you followed some of our kayaking stuff this is the one i wear kayaking though but it's got a the hat and then it's got these little floppy guys that i can either button up in front of me here if i wanted to all right so sometimes if the wind's blown it'll still kind of keep me in this little area yeah or i can just let it flop around like a big dog with wet floppy ears or i can button it up in the back too if i want to kind of keep it out of the way but i still want that protection keeps the sun off your neck kind of like a buff wood on off the side of my face i think the buffs are another good substitute for me though i've usually had like a full brim hat but still like if i tilt it forward or backwards or the sun starts to set i would still get burnt on my neck so we figure we give this one a try today and i got to be honest it worked out pretty well it always works out really well because one of the problems that alex had before he would even with applying sunscreen he would get sunburnt in his head and his neck so this protects really your neck and obviously if you have high collar like this that's helpful for me i don't have an issue with my neck because my hair is thick enough i feel like it protects it but sometimes i feel it in my right ear right here you know like my ears i feel like i'm getting burnt it's because their hair is on this side yeah exactly like this side would get burnt so so anyway so tip number three is to protect your skin uh we'd obviously apply sunscreen regularly and then wear long sleeves and long pants and if you have sunscreen put it on at the interval that they recommend i'm usually pretty bad about that i usually am wearing a long sleeve shirt as well but i bought some sport sunscreen today and i got to be honest i feel fine but i was putting it on every 80 minutes like they said but uh the the rule that people have given me all the time of the example was when you're driving down here through the desert through arizona etc and you go past a construction site they're not all out there in tank tops and short shorts they're uh they're all dressed to the to the to the top with a full buff a full a full hat jacket long long pants everything uh so keeping that sun off especially if you live out here because you should only be getting sunburned like maybe once or twice a summer at like the worst like and out here you could get it every day and i don't even mean to say that you should be getting sunburned at all but uh so so that's uh that's three tips the next tip if you have any do you have any tip that you can think about oh my tip would definitely be in this case have a map i mean know where you're going before you get there uh all trails is the one that we use and i know habiba's had a couple videos out uh on all trails and such but we certainly like all trails they've just done a retrofit where some of their user interface has changed um but you can download maps you can bring them offline all you need is gps so you can turn off your wi-fi and your phones everything um but it's important that everybody has a map in your group too not just like one person you get separated that's a problem somebody's phone dies that's a problem uh you want to be able to be responsible for yourself so download the map know where you're going before these also let you know or let let you press a button to alert like a friend or a family member it just sends them a text and they can go click a link and follow your location it's called it's a new feature well it's fairly i think it's uh it was implemented last year but it's called lifeline and it basically would allow you to let someone know where you're going which is pretty important so that's uh the next step is uh well during summer here in the desert you obviously want to uh watch out for um some wildlife especially uh rattlesnakes uh so during summer time it's the right time to to come across rattlesnakes um now there's someone who reached out to me the other day on no on instagram asking me oh my god how do you hike in the desert are you not afraid of snakes i mean when i started when i moved to arizona it was uh you know i was always worried about snakes and rattlesnakes but i really didn't understand back then uh with time we kind of learned that snakes don't want anything to do with you they are as scared of you as you are of them and so with rattlesnakes since they have a rattle i mean the way it works when you are hiking you basically just want to don't want to startle a rattlesnake and they do feel the vibrations on the ground when you are walking with your feet or your trekking pole so they will dodge you they're not going to to come your way if they hear you the only problem is if you start a rattlesnake so so the one tip is especially during summer is probably avoid putting headphones and just try to to listen more and be aware of the sounds around you because the rattle that the rattle snake has will make enough noise believe me like one time when i was hiking in the grand canyon i can hear it from far away and i we couldn't even see it the the the rattle noise is really strong so that's something to watch out for when you are hiking in the desert especially in summer time yeah we come across coyotes and such too and you can treat it like bear stuff too like just make some noise while you're going if you have somebody else but uh usually if you're on trail you won't happen across like any nests or anything like that because there are usually enough people on those trails that they're not going to make a home there but if you're off trail or other things like that too be be definitely be aware um because if you stumble across something like that too we we learned what was it the baby rattlesnakes as an example or a bit of a problem because they're not smart enough yet to know not to just discharge all the venom yeah so they're actually worse than the parents the parents will give you a hit of venom and they'll get out but the kids will just latch on and they'll just drain themselves yeah and uh it's problematic so that's basically the season of the time when when the snakes or the rattle snakes are nursing the babies they can't control the amount of venom they they send out so that's something to be aware of so the next tip tip for hiking in the desert during summer is to obviously you want to make sure that you have your emergency kit everywhere you go I try to take it with with us uh we only have one that we share together it's probably a good idea for long and students hike to to have you know each each team member should have their own uh emergency kits you're crazy but anyway so on top of the emergency kit I mean each emergency kit is different this is the one that that we have it's the first aid kit or I call it emergency kit anyway so first aid kit it has all of the necessary you know gauze and alcoholic wipes and bandage and what else scissors and an emergency kit and what else what else scissors and an emergency blanket so all of these are necessary but on top of that if you're hiking in the desert you probably want to have tweezers with you I think it's important because I don't know if you get stabbed by a a chorea or one of those jumping chorea and you want to treat your wound or get rid of that pokey pokey what are they called I'd call it a barb the something's called a needle or a spine needle okay just needle so if you want to remove the needle tweezers are going to be very helpful in that scenario yeah and I'll say even today when we're hiking around especially when we get to this part of the summer where some plants start to die sometimes some of those cactus pieces will actually fall off or maybe other animals might even disturb them in such a way that they fall off and they'll be sitting right there on the trail just like a part of cactus uh that you might not notice it might be like a little small ball and such but you step on it get stuck to your shoe maybe it won't go through the rubber but then you pick your leg up and now it's on your leg and then you poke yourself with it it's perfectly reasonable that you would end up getting poked with one if you were even paying reasonable attention it just happens yeah cool so I see that we have three people watching us that if you are enjoying this like I said this was a very spontaneous chat just to kind of share with you how our hike went and some lessons learned and tips for hiking in the desert if you're liking this conversation please give this video a thumbs up it's going to be very helpful and let us know in a comment where are you joining us from and for what it's worth to I'm pretty sure we have a couple of story things that we could post to about a little hike from the day so we will put them up uh on on the page as well okay so any other tips for hiking out in the desert obviously you want to make sure that you are following leave no trace if you're not familiar with leave no trace thank you someone just gave the video a thumbs up thanks for that so if you if you don't know what leave no trace is there are seven principles I'm going to leave a link in the description box so we're just going with an assumption that you are following leave no trails you know the principles that you want to follow them as well John McCord great advice thanks so much thanks John appreciate it okay so any other tips for hiking out in the desert yes if you have if you are driving to to the trailhead for example I think it's a good idea to leave some water in your car as well so that when you finish hiking you know you either have a cooler with some extra water just to help you hydrate when you finish hiking I just like to keep a gatorade actually yes anything I usually I might take a gatorade on the trip with me they said these new tablets have been pretty good um especially if you refill up some other water they can mask some like filtered water from time to time of its nasty flavors but uh definitely put it in a cooler yeah ain't nobody trying to drink burning hot gatorade unless you're really desperate to to get hydrated and then the next tip I was thinking about and that's probably probably just like a lesson learned from our hike today is know your limits and know how much your body can handle you know don't don't push yourself more than you should especially in the desert especially when it's 100 degrees out or more than 100 degrees out that's something that I learned today about myself obviously we pick this hike we try to not hike during summer I personally don't enjoy it but this was us training for for our Kilimanjaro climb and putting ourselves in situations where we can't push forward but at at some point of the hike today I just realized that I can't handle this anymore because the heat is just beating on me I you know I just there was just no point and I was not listening to my body to a point where I started like you know shivering and feeling like I'm getting heat exhaustion very easily a little bit early on mostly when we were going uphill I will say about six miles in you were enjoying you were loving it yeah but I think to be fair too we got to the the junction where we might have thought to go up and you had definitely been indicating that you know I don't think it's the right choice and in fairness I think it was a very wise choice to not go up too so kudos to you there for that probably the wrong amount of like discomfort for us to practice yeah it was pretty hot today I I I enjoyed and to be fair we do hike in the summer not in the valley as much um but and I always advise you know people who are new to hiking to avoid it unless it's I don't know necessary you start very early in the morning but for us we want to push ourselves because we know when we're going to be doing a bigger climb we're going to find ourselves in very uncomfortable situations but I just felt like today was not the right type of uncomfortable situation it was it was pointless I was not learning anything you know I was not pushing myself the right way you know what I mean I think we had a little bit of stress practice today which is certainly something to be able to practice when you're on that I think we did a good job with it to be fair I think that uh we made a lot of choices as a team and we're back home happy comfy safe not burnt I mean like yeah we're we're grooving it's not that there was any drama or anything but really just to kind of remind you to understand your limits understand how much your body can handle and then just don't push yourself beyond necessary if that makes sense okay so what else hiking out in the desert so I think we covered pretty much a lot of useful tips can you think of anything else I think uh I think that's a good number otherwise they might start falling out other people's people's other ear um yeah if you have other things too I guess we are talking strictly about desert right now just because that's what we experienced today and we figured we'd chat it out but um if you have any other areas that that you have a list of to-dos for that you think are region specific bring them up we're we always go out and travel other places to hike too so we're always interested in having some good practices obviously we're not carrying bear spray around in the desert as much but um you know there are plenty of other ecosystems that have their own rules set so well awesome well thank you so much guys um and uh let's see I think we had the Miriam who joined us and then we had John thank you guys for commenting and uh yeah I think with that we're just gonna go hydrate relax for a little bit and then hop in the pool actually yeah so that will be the next thing for us to do um everything that we shared earlier oh that's a good point yes yeah I guess they are reflective on the one side usually to keep heated in but I guess you can perfectly well keep light out with it as well yeah John is saying another use for solar blankets is to use for shade too definitely I think um there is not a single hike and I this is 100 true there is not a single hike that I go to without an emergency blanket it's not only in the first aid kit but even in my backpack because there are so many things that you can you can do with it obviously and it can be life saving in some critical situations okay awesome so we're gonna get going here I hope you guys are having a great weekend thank you for tuning in and uh we will see you on Thursday we do live streams every Thursday we change the time from 5 p.m to 6 p.m so we'll see you this Thursday 6 p.m and then today's live was just spontaneous but Thursday 6 p.m is our weekly live on the channel awesome thanks guys and we'll see you soon on another adventure take care everybody bye