September 19, 2016 Mile 2111.7-2125.1 (+14.5) 28.9 Miles Space Cowboy isn’t ready to wake up when we leave. Roadside and I pack up as quietly as we can so we don’t disturb the other campers. I wonder who they are. There’s no way of knowing whether they are thru hikers we’ve met before, NOBOs we’re passing without ever meeting, SOBOs, or just local backpackers. How many NOBOs have we passed this way, without ever meeting? There’s a misty fog permeating everything. My hands are cold from packing up my wet tent, and I can’t dry them on my clothes, because they are damp too. We start our hike by crossing a strip of forest that has been cleared for power lines. I look back at the far end of the clearing and I can see the imposing eastern flank of Mt. Hood among swirling mists where some clouds have lifted. It looks like a Japanese painting. Then I turn and plunge into the forest. All morning it is overcast and misty. As the sun rises, a kaleidoscope of color punches through the trees in great beams of prismatic light. The beams turn and flash between the trees as we walk through the hushed forest. The smell of wet soil and pine needles hangs in the air, and a flash of memory contrasts this with the stale, dry smell inside my rental house in Santa Maria. Given a choice, I will always be happier with the discomfort of my chilly, wet hands and the smell of this living, breathing earth than I will with the dead, dry comfort of the indoors. And yet I know that if a lodge appeared around the corner serving hot food and a warm, dry place to sit, they would have my business in an instant. We are poor custodians of our own happiness. We climb. I pull ahead of Roadside and enjoy the quiet, overcast morning. It’s a morning for contemplation, and I spend it thinking of how a life within civilization could be different. What scorecard would I prefer to live my life by, rather than the status and success metrics that the media culture feeds us from childhood? Relationships are one metric, I decide. Appreciation is another. Growth is important, but not financial growth. If I can live five months out of a backpack, financial security does not require largesse. Personal growth is what I seek. New perspectives, new paradigms to see the truth of the world around me. The trail has shown me just how constricted a civilized perspective is. We can wall out small portions of the world, but nature finds a way back in. Nature always finds a way. I begin to realize that I’ve always believed in keeping a different scorecard. The problem is not one of recognizing higher values, but in holding to those higher values in the face of culture. We float in currents of culture that ferry us along to predetermined roles. Culture’s toxic brine seeps into our pores and deadens our awareness of higher values. The solitude and slow, quiet pace of trail life have allowed me to get away, recapture my senses, and begin to see the poison of the world for what it is, but how can I reenter society and keep my wits? Will my refusal of roles be seen as anti-social or even sociopathic? I have spent most of my life as a loner, though I ache for human connection; will the rejection of cultural norms simply take me farther away from connection? Perhaps it would be easier to jump full-fledged into the poisonous culture and spend my Sundays getting drunk on cheap beer in front of a football game, but I can’t see myself doing that either. Escape from dystopia seems to be hard-grained into my being. I set the questions aside for now and focus on hiking. I find myself high on the rim of a canyon. There would be big views here, if not for the low-hanging clouds and fog. There are trees below, and trees to my right, but right here is rock and grass. It reminds me of the deep gorges in the Trinity Alps and Marble Mountain Wilderness. I catch up to another hiker, a small Korean girl. The Korean couple with whom I shared a campfire a few nights ago mentioned that they had a companion who had gone ahead; I ask her if she knows them, and she says yes, but not much more. Her English is good, but I can tell she is nervous about it, and we don’t speak much. She pauses to let me pass, and I leave her to her hike. I reach a clearing with a picnic table and stop to snack and wait for Roadside. I check my map, and it appears that I’m at the junction to the Eagle Creek Alternate, one of the more popular side-trails on the PCT. Roadside and I have already agreed we’re going to take it. I don’t see the side trail, though. The Korean girl catches up and stops for a little more conversation, stilted but friendly. She says she’s going to continue on, and then disappears behind a bush at one end of the clearing. I suppose the alternate must be somewhere over there, but I’m not sure how she was so confident. Roadside shows up a little while after she leaves, and we stay a little longer to eat an early lunch. We begin the descent into Eagle Creek. The Korean girl was spot-on; when we turn behind the bush, the trail is there. It descends quickly between trees, at times so steep that we have to slow and place each foot just so, or else we will slip and fall on the muddy slopes. It seems like we are descending for hours. The trail flattens out and turns south. I worry for a minute that we’ve taken the wrong trail, but a quick check of the GPS tells us we’re on track. We follow the Canyon south, still descending toward the floor as the forest around us grows more dense with ferns. Water is streaming down small waterfalls and creeks. This is a classic rainforest, dripping on us and all around us. The trail switches back, and soon we find ourselves next to the creek itself. The trail is hewn unevenly from rough stone, trying to turn our ankles and jabbing aggressively at our soles with each step. The creek descends in stages, a placid flowing stream that funnels into narrow dark folds in the rock and plunges far below us, only to return to a gentle meander. After these plunges, the trail sticks to the mossy cliff as a narrow walkway without guardrail. The cliff turns a corner, and suddenly before us is Tunnel Falls. There are a few day-hikers taking photos and videos of the falls. It is so-named for the rock tunnel that passes behind it, through which the trail passes. I take my phone out and start recording. This doesn’t seem like a great idea, staring into my phone’s screen as I walk beside a forty-foot drop on uneven ground. One of the dayhikers seems very uneasy and is sticking to the wall side of the trail. When I go to pass her, I step awfully close to the dropoff, and decide that maybe I should start looking at where I’m stepping. I keep the phone recording, though, and safely navigate my way back behind the falls. I wait for Roadside to make the passage, and then we’re off, covering the last miles toward Cascade Locks and food. From here until the trailhead, there are tons of hikers. The sun has finally come out, though it only reaches us in splashes and splatters of light. I dodge dayhikers and race downhill over the rocky ground, covering miles in the blink of an eye. There are several more waterfalls, and I enjoy them all on the fly. At one of the waterfalls, teenagers are cliff jumping into a pool below. The crowds thicken the entire way, until I am surprised by the trailhead. I fill up my waterbottle at a faucet and guzzle it down, then fill it again and sit nearby to rest my tender soles and wait for Roadside. It’s a good half hour before he arrives. We ask a few people for rides into town, but they’re all going the opposite direction, back toward Portland. We decide to walk to town on a bike path that covers the last two miles. To get there, we first have to walk from the parking lot to the main road on a small road that parallels Eagle Creek. Something large is splashing behind a bush, and we half expect to see a bear or some other animal, but when we pass the bush we see nothing. Then we hear it again and take a closer look at the river. Salmon! Huge salmon, the length of baseball bats and the width of newborn babies are lying still in the shallow creek, facing upstream and only occasionally slapping a tail. We take a couple of pictures and continue on our way, that mystery solved The bike path is quiet, a nice relief after the anxious noise of all those day hikers. To them I’m sure it was a day of quiet and peace, but to me it felt like we were at Disneyland. After a few minutes of walking on the path, I have to start walking on the dirt beside it. My soles are just too tender after the pulverizing rock of Eagle Creek.
We pass under the Bridge of the Gods, where the PCT will cross out of Oregon, over the Columbia River Gorge, and enter Washington. Directly on the other side of the bridge, the town of Cascade Locks begins. We find ourselves two rooms in a motel and then make our way down to the Columbia River for dinner—nachos and beer—at the Thunder Island Brewing Company. It’s a fitting way to finish Oregon.
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Nick is a teacher, writer, and amateur adventurer. Archives
June 2020
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