The third and final day on the trail with my Mom was also our final day in Oregon, and what a fitting end it was. The final 15 miles in Oregon are spent by nearly all thru-hikers, not on the official PCT, but on the alternate Eagle Creek trail. Plunging down 4000 feet, the alternate leaves the PCT and follows the course of Eagle Creek along a series of waterfalls…
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Swatara Creek
Sometimes you just end up in the most unlikely of places at the end of the day, and today was one of those days. My first real day with the new backpack, and it was one of those days that just kept evolving. I thought I'd go about 17 miles to the next shelter, but decided to go a little farther to throw the tent down, then a little farther, and a little farther, and...well, you get the idea.
Brown Mt. Creek
Well, Mom made it through her first day just fine, so we kept on chugging along today. Started a bit late this morning, but I knew the trail would be a lot easier today--mostly downhill and flat with a couple of gentle climbs mixed in. Stretched the day out with a couple of nice long stops by a few of the stream crossings today, taking our time to relax, have a snack, and soak our feet in the cold water.
Muskrat Creek
Date: 3/17/04 Starting Location: Dicks Creek Gap, US 76Destination: Muskrat Creek ShelterMiles: 11.6Total Miles: 87.0
Dicks Creek Gap
Date: 3/16/04 Starting Location: Deep Gap ShelterDestination: Dicks Creek Gap, US 76Miles: 3.5Total Miles: 75.4
Triple Lava Loop
11,249 feet. Not ninety minutes ago, it had basked in the first rays of morning light before anywhere else, the sun spilling down from Mount Hood’s summit until it wakened the glaciers and, eventually, the forests below. Towering some 6,000 feet into the dizzyingly empty space above our heads, it’s a height difference that human minds aren’t fully equipped to understand. Judging with only your eyes, it might as well be 60,000 feet.
Ghosts of the Columbia
Close your eyes and picture the Pacific Northwest. Tell me what you see. Gray skies? An unshakeable mist? Maybe bright green sword ferns, super-sized trees, and fountains of Starbucks coffee on every Seattle street corner?
Tumanguya
The buzzing on my wrist comes as no surprise. In those brief moments drifting in limbo between asleep and awake, I struggle to register what exactly it is floating above my head. Beyond the soft armor of mosquito mesh surrounding me, and through the tarp stretched taut above, an amorphous shape of white bends into unrecognizable shapes and patterns, like sunlight seen from beneath the surface of water.
The Golden Staircase
The confluence of two creeks, a mere stone’s throw from our proverbial bedroom window, seemed not to care that morning had broken. Nature’s white noise machine chugged along, ignorant of day and time. The alarm on my wrist was more particular about exactly what time it was, and its buzzing was as inescapable as the reality it brought with it. Everything ahead of us was in one and only one direction: up.
Evolution
Evolution is a very very slow process. We need only look at ourselves to know how true that is. How long does it take for us to change even the smallest of things—a habit, perhaps? Real change, it seems, requires a patience that does not come naturally to a species whose lifespan is but a fraction of the earth’s.
Troubled Horizon
When dawn broke, it started by touching only the tops of the mountains surrounding our camp, before spilling down the flanks of granite to where we lie in our hammocks. It was nature opening the blinds.
The Other Side of Yosemite
The Sierra must be seen to be fully believed. And Yosemite is the beating heart of that Sierra. Of the more than 4 million annual visitors to Yosemite National Park, the vast majority never leave Yosemite Valley, however. With highlights known the world over—El Capitan, Half Dome, Yosemite Falls, Glacier Point—you can hardly blame them.
A Brief History of Time
Honest question: What day is it? Away from the routines and patterns of home, it’s remarkable how something so familiar vanishes so quickly, each day seamlessly bleeding into the next, only the rising and setting of the sun demarcating one day from the next.
Superstition
The last time I looked up at the sky, it was filled with nothing but stars. By the middle of the night, those same stars were nowhere to be found, as though they might never have been there at all. Was I dreaming?
Land of Mystery
The southwest is a land of mystery. Of wide open space and eerie desolation. The kind that you can easily fill with all of your fears—the setting of the drama becoming a character all its own.
Mogollon Rim
The morning discovered us in a state now quite familiar: strolling past a shallow depression full of dark brown water. Fine crystals of frost on nearby meadow grasses sparkled in the first rays of sunlight, while those that had been warmed for but a few minutes had already melted into droplets that now weighed heavily on the blades to which they clung.
The Grand Staircase
One hundred miles north, far from the banks of the Bright Angel Creek on which we slept, Bryce Canyon National Park sits at the top of a geological feature few will notice. Known as The Grand Staircase, layer upon layer of sedimentary rock stretches from the high elevations of Bryce Canyon all the way to bottom of the Grand Canyon, telling the story of 600 million years of the planet’s history.
History Book
When you take your first step off the North Rim and onto the North Kaibab Trail, it is your first step into a different world. Gone are the ponderosa pine, traded for pinyons and eventually catclaw acacia, yucca, and all manner of cacti. The white Kaibab limestone yields to red sandstone which gives way to band upon band of other rock formations of varying colors and textures.
Garden Wall
Mace said it best when we had reached the crest of Piegan Pass, some 3,000 feet higher than where we’d left our camp this morning, saying: “This is why I do this. It’s places like this that get burned into your mind.” He couldn’t have been more right.
John Muir Would Be Proud
Six weeks ago, as part of a talk titled In the Land of Dust and Fire: Hiking the American West, I mentioned this quote by John Muir which he gave when asked what he thought of hiking: “I don’t like either the word or the thing. People ought to saunter in the mountains – not hike!”
Triple Divide
Well, this is awkward, and frankly, it was bound to happen. Especially here. Just as in places like the Wind River Range, there’s hardly anything I can say about the experience of the scenery found in Glacier National Park that photos can’t already tell you. Under a sky swept clean of yesterday’s gray clouds, a deep blue backdrop conveniently arrived to make those photos all the more stunning.
Homecoming
The air, even overnight, could be worn like any other article of clothing. A bit like a shirt that fits a size too small. Suffocating with its humid stickiness that gives everything an imperceptible dampness, even the things you know to be bone dry. Sleeping in it is an exercise in futility. At least it always has been for me.
Wind of Change
As if bemused by the accelerating pace of our hectic lives, the natural rhythm of the world moves ever onward, inexorably slowly, one season slipping into another almost without our notice. It's one of the many small joys of trail life—the rare attentiveness to even subtle changes in the world around us that might otherwise go unnoticed.
Cirque
How could it end like this? A day of jaw-dropping scenery reduced to a twilight scramble over a nearly impassable jungle gym of blowdown. But in the interest of not burying the lead let's rewind and get to the good part first.
Navigation: Getting from A to B
How do you know where you're going? It's a pretty simple (and important) question, and one that's among the most common we hear (perhaps second only to “Have you seen any bears?” Answer: yes). So, here goes—a crash course in finding your way along the CDT, with something to keep both the new school and the old school happy.
Southbound
It feels like the wrong way somehow, hiking south. With the exception of the entire Montana/Idaho section, all of this hike will have been southbound, a direction that I've never traveled on a long trail with the exception of the far shorter John Muir Trail.
Supervolcano
Strolling under a reborn sun, the snow only a fading memory, it's easy to forget until you hear a low hissing sound coming from a few feet to the side of the trail. Then a puff of steam coming from another spot. Then a small cauldron of bubbling, iridescent water peeks from behind a row of bushes.
Thimbleberry Lane
Late yesterday afternoon while traversing the never-ending burn zone that is northern Montana, a bright sign appeared beside a trail junction. Dated one day before we'd left our last town stop in Lincoln, it detailed the location of a new forest fire burning in the wilderness only a couple of miles due west of the CDT.
Benchmark
The wind that swirled and shrieked finally died away and morning dawned in our valley of death. The trusty dead trees we'd hung between had been more than stout enough despite their frail outwardly appearance. Most noteworthy was the sudden drop in temperature overnight, as the warm evening morphed into a cold chill during the small hours of the morning.
The Death of Puritanism
The world is infatuated with purity tests, or so it seems. And right when I fall into the obvious trap of thinking this must be a new phenomenon with blame to be placed squarely on the Facebooks and Twitters of the world, I stop and remember that: 1) almost nothing is new; and 2) being puritanical certainly is not.
The Sun is Not My Friend
It's my fault somehow, that much I know. A punishment for some past transgression, perhaps. A punishment I receive over and over again, my own version of Sisyphus’ fate, stuck in an endless loop. The sun is my kryptonite.
When Montana Met Idaho
To an outsider, they seem the same. Those are probably fightin’ words to the locals. Returning to the land where this trip had all began, I'd forgotten how challenging it can be to know which state you're in at any given moment. High atop the divide, the trail is more often than not the line of demarcation between Idaho and Montana.
The Case for Less Stuff
It's funny what you don't miss. Maybe surprising is a better word. When you first leave everything behind, my mind makes plenty of room to pine for the things I don't have. That cozy, familiar bed? I miss it. The couch, the chair, the dining room table? The books, trinkets, toys, and artwork hanging on the walls? There's a slightly uneasy, untethered feeling to being without them.
Farewell, July
The older I get, the faster time passes. As a kid, summers felt like they would last forever, each day stretching to its maximum, time expanding as if exposing a flaw in Einstein’s theory of relativity. I miss that feeling—the feeling of infinite time. A never ending summer.
No Thanks, Thunderhead
I thought we were done with this foolishness. If there was one thing we had no interest in seeing, it was yet another storm cloud to start the day. The forecast certainly made no mention of them, and yet there it was, dominating an otherwise azure sky, pouring rain on the valley below and now chasing us down with alarming speed.
The Legacy of Water
Its fingerprints are all around us. The lingering patches of snow that still cling to the coolest of high alpine corners. The lifeblood of the thick carpet of tundra-thriving grasses, bold enough to color such a forbidding landscape with their flowering blooms. Even the glaciers that long ago sculpted the waves of stone we've called home for these past 6 weeks.
Choose Your Own Adventure
Hike your own hike. It's a mantra you hear often on nearly any long distance trail. In real world terms, its meaning is simple: you do you. Hike at your pace, linger when you want to, and take the detours that most captivate your sense of adventure. Answer to no one’s whims but your own.
The Good Old Days
Right on schedule, 45 minutes early. That's our friend Hoa, having changed her uber-punctual habits not at all in the years since she had left Seattle and relocated outside of Denver. Appearing from the woods for our rendezvous at 7am as we were, she was striding across the parking lot having driven all the way out to meet us for the morning. Marathoner, ultra runner, ultra human. That's Hoa.
You're Not Special (and Neither am I)
Armed with a new spoon at last, I am ready for anything. “Why did it take so long?,” you might ask. Remember that box that didn't arrive in time to Grand Lake? Well, it turns out that it was there all along and the best we could do is forward it to our last town stop in Frisco, serving only to heighten the anticipation.
Grand Lake
The mountain pine beetle likely has no conception of its impact on the landscape. No larger than a grain of rice, it proves the adage that even very small things can pack an incredibly big punch. Unfortunately for Colorado forests, that punch has been right to the gut of millions of acres of lodgepole pines.