PCT Day 94 September 5, 2016 Mile 1764.7-1787.0 22.3 miles (+2 mile roadwalk) In Ashland, I considered sending some of my cold weather gear home. I hadn’t used my sleeping bag liner or my gloves on this entire trip—the sleeping bag kept me plenty warm, and hiking all day kept my blood hot in my hands. In fact, my body continued pumping hot blood throughout the night, and I usually ended up leaving my sleeping bag unzipped. Right now, at 4am, I’m really glad I didn’t do that. Oregon has been frigid the past two nights. I woke up two hours ago from the cold, and about an hour ago I pulled the sleeping bag liner out of my pack and wrapped it around me before climbing back into the bag. I’m gradually warming up, but my feet, always the last to warm, are still frozen solid. I doze two more uncomfortable, unsatisfying hours, and then wake to hear Roadside packing up. I rouse myself and hurry to catch up, and we finish about the same time. Bubble Boy is still asleep across the trail. The trail is a bold streak of meticulously fine red gravel bisecting a jumble of chunky, slate-gray lava rock. Some trail crew has earned a place in the engineering hall of fame with this masterwork. It cuts in and out of forests for miles, and occasionally we get a glimpse of a lone peak up ahead; the map tells me it’s Mt. McLoughlin, the first of a whole series of Oregon volcanoes. After six miles of hiking we hit a road. Two miles west at Fish Lake Lodge is food. Puma and Snooze Button are still in their tents in a clearing just beyond the road, and we stop and chat for a bit. “Sleeping in?” I ask. “A ranger gave us hot chocolate this morning,” Puma says. “Nothing better than hot chocolate in your sleeping bag.” Roadside and I start toward Fish Lake Lodge, planning to hitch a ride, but no ride comes. We end up road-walking the whole two miles. A thru-hiker coming the other direction introduces herself as Pathfinder and tells us the food is excellent. The lodge is a combination country store and somebody’s living room, with a few tables scattered about. One part is a game room, complete with board games. A waiter tells us to take a seat anywhere, and we choose the game room. The waiter looks over at us every once in a while as if he’s thinking “oh yeah, I need to go get their order.” After twenty minutes, he still hasn’t come over. Roadside goes to get us some coffee, and carries it back himself. It takes another ten minutes after that to order, and after another ten minutes I have to get up myself to refill my coffee. Somewhere around then, Puma, Snooze, Hunter, and Bubble Boy come in and grab a table in the other room. It’s another twenty minutes at least before we get our food, and it’s good. I have a full plate of eggs, veggies, and cheese, plus an additional plate of French toast. When we’re done, I’m full, but we decide to stick around a little longer for a beer and to buy some snacks from the store. The other hikers tell us they’re planning on hitching around the next section to Crater Lake, and Bubble Boy says he might quit the trail after that. I’m sad to hear that. I automatically assume that every other hiker has poured as much of their heart and soul into this hike as I have, and the idea of quitting is heart-wrenching. Perhaps it’s not as big a deal to him, but in some small way it feels like it’s me that quitting and I want to encourage him to get back out there and maybe it’ll get a little better. But it’s not my hike. Roadside and I get a hitch back to the trail in the back of a pickup truck. At the trailhead, a guy comes out of an RV to tell us he’s looking for a southbound hiker with curly hair—have we seen him? Apparently this guy lost his phone on a dayhike north of here. The hiker with the curly hair found it and told all the northbound hikers to pass the word that he had it and was headed south. This guy is hoping not to miss him when he passes. We haven’t seen him, but we’ll keep an eye out. We start up the trail with speed. The coffee buzz is back, the lava rock is gone, and five miles of incline on loamy soil feels like hiking on a sofa. The forest is close and completely blocks out the sun. It’s a cool shady hike all the way to the top. We stop for lunch at a wide clearing with enough room for twenty tents. Something has left massive tracks on the trail, and Roadside and I speculate what it could be. It’s not the right shape for a bear, it’s too big for a mountain lion. It sort of resembles a horse, but horse prints are U-shaped and these are round. Besides, I’ve never seen a horseshoe print that big. We ponder while we try to keep up with our never-ending hunger. I shouldn’t be hungry again this soon after that enormous breakfast, but I’m starving. I just can’t get enough calories. The other side of the mountain is a pretty green valley. We’ve been in trees most of the day, and they still surround us but they’ve opened enough to give us an acre or more of view at a time. We’re walking along the side of a slope when we see a lady on horseback coming south. Roadside and I climb up the slope to let the horse pass—horses often spook around hikers, especially if we’re using hiking poles. The lady pulls alongside us and offers us Kind bars and Colby Jack cheese packets. We ask her about her horse’s enormous feet—this is the animal that was making those tracks. She tells us it’s part Clydesdale. A couple miles later the forest opens up and we get our first real sunshine of the day. It feels like I haven’t seen the sun in weeks. We come around a corner to see Pathfinder talking with another hiker and we pull up to share in the conversation. Roadside doesn’t say anything until we’re all getting ready to leave. “Did you pick up a phone?” That’s when I notice the hiker has curly hair. “Yeah,” he says. “The owner is looking for you.” Roadside tells him about the RV at the trailhead and the south-bounder says he’s looking forward to getting it back to his owner. He jokes about getting rid of the extra weight. We laugh, but there’s some truth behind it. You can always trust a thru-hiker not to steal from you, if only because they wouldn’t want to carry any extra weight. We come up over a rise and get a great view of 4-Mile Lake. It’s a beautiful wiggle of a lake, set in a basin that is completely covered in thick trees all the way down to a fifty-yard border of bare dirt where the water has receded. In California, the mountain slopes dropped away precipitously. It often feels like you could slip, fall off the trail, and hit the bottom of a canyon. Here in Oregon, they draw down slowly over miles. This makes the views less dramatic, but the hiking is oh so much easier. Some hikers do crazy things in Oregon, like hike 40- and 50-mile days, or try to hike the whole state in under two weeks, a feat that requires consistent 35-mile days. I’ve done a few thirties, even in California terrain, but I always feel destroyed the next day. Maybe I’d feel less destroyed on this terrain, but the idea of getting up and doing it again the next day, and then again the day after that, sounds like a way to completely destroy all semblance of enjoyment and appreciation.
The end of the day is easy hiking through the forest. It’s a little more open in the evening, and the thick low vegetation combined with the dappled sunlight gives the trail an idyllic feel. I lose track of time and just seep into the forest, trickling downhill like water from a spring. We stop just before sunset, when the light gives the trees a golden sheen and everything is tinted like an antique photograph. It’s been a good day.
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Nick is a teacher, writer, and amateur adventurer. Archives
June 2020
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