It was like death...

Without doing much planning or thinking ahead, Matt and I ventured up Milcreek canyon in the heat of the afternoon for a hike. We just stopped at a random trail, parked our car and started climbing. As we were leaving we debated bringing a water bottle that I happened to throw in the car as we were leaving, and at this point I had already drank half of it. I used 3 bits of reason to convince Matt to leave it behind (thus being mistake number 1 of the trip).

a. There was a small group of older people who were finishing the hike when we left, they had all sorts of camelbaks and walking sticks with them. When they told us it was steep I thought, You mean steep for YOU (not me) - you're using a stick to hike, I'm sure we'll be fine.
b. The hike was 1.8 miles each way. I figured if I can run 5 miles up a canyon on my lunch break without water, we'd be just fine. Plus, in learning that the hike was only 3.6 miles total Matt said "I wonder if we'll have to go on 2 hikes to make it worth our trip up here."
c. Every other hike we've been on this summer, I've diligently carried a water bottle and regretted it the entire time when nobody wanted any lukewarm water hours later.

So we ventured up the mountain. About a half mile in we started to get hot and thirsty but we decided to finish what we came to do. Half way through Susan found another dog and chased him around which quickly drained all of her energy, which led to Matt carrying Susan up the rest of the mountain.

When we got to the top and laughed at how stupid we were for not bringing water (mistake #1) and coming during the hottest part of the day (mistake #2), Matt realized that the only liquid he had that day was the milk in his cereal (mistake #3), and neither of us had eaten since about 9am (mistake #4) and it was almost 5pm.

We drove as fast as we could to the nearest chevron and drank an unsightly amount of gatorade, water and diet coke before we even checked out.