Helpful advice on the rez border
Possibly the easiest 20 miles I’ve ever hiked. The trail was clear and even and mostly slightly downhill. The forest was rich, the trees were large and graceful. Most of the route is through the Warm Springs Reservation.
There were occasional views of Mt Hood, but mostly it was just a forest walk, one so smooth and seamless that I fell into a kind of hiking trance. I think this is the region of Oregon where (young) hikers do the “24-hour challenge”, trying to hike 50 or more miles in a day.
I am not even slightly tempted to do this. It’s in the same class as other PCT challenges: “the half-gallon challenge” (eat half a gallon of ice cream in half an hour. Your reward is a wooden ice cream spoon. Plus severe intestinal distress) or the pancake challenge in Seiad Valley (eat a 5-lb stack of pancakes and they are free). One of the benefits of being old is that you have no interest in doing things that you know are going to hurt, even if they do sound kind of fun in a crazy way. Enough things hurt already.
But who am I kidding? My dearest wish is to carry a backpack 700 miles while sleeping on hard ground, sweating in the heat, shivering in the cold, all so that I can reach an arbitrary line that separates the US from Canada. A line that I could drive across in comfort. Pretty hard to characterize that as the hard-won wisdom of old age.
After being too cold for a couple of days it is now too hot. As with much of Oregon, the trail follows the crest of the Cascades, up where there are few water sources. Water carries are long and heavy. But at least today’s long heavy carry is downhill on a good trail.
The downhill ended at the Warm Springs River (just a stream here) where I watered up and rinsed out my sweaty socks and underwear. I considered camping here, but it was not yet dinnertime.
The 20 miles were easy but I hiked 23. The last three were steep uphill from river with hot sun shining through the forest, rays low enough to avoid the shade-giving tops of the trees.
The first plausible campsite after topping out was near a crackly powerline, but I felt satisfied I had walked enough and rolled out my groundcloth. I was soon joined by Brennan, a choir-singer, and Cream King, a biotech recruiter from Boston.
Turns out he was hoping to relocate to Boulder and find a biotech firm to work for that was not run by egotistical assholes. I did my best to gently disabuse him of the notion that such a thing exists, and shared a round of whisky shots to ease his disappointment.