Category: Trail Journal

I am so, so much happier now than I have been in days. Why? Blue skies. We woke up this morning and looked outside — clouds, but they seemed about to clear off. By the time we were ready to go, about 11 AM? Sun! Blue sky! After nine days of rain, it feels incredible…

Guess what we woke up to this morning? Yup: even more rain. While the rain seems to have dwindled over the past few days to what my stereotypes of Washington expect — all-day, on-again-off-again drizzles, rather than absolute downpours — it’s still nearly constant, and keeps everything permanently wet. (Sometimes, I feel like I might…

The hail blew against my face so hard it felt like I was getting sandblasted. The wind made a racket blowing the fabric of my clothing, and I tried hard to just put one foot in front of the other, watching carefully to see where rocks stuck out of the snow. On one side of…

It all started out so well. We woke up to actual blue sky above our tent this morning, which was downright shocking after the week of miserable weather we’ve had. It even held as we got ready and continued walking the road detour around the PCT fire closure — boring, but fast hiking. We even…

Road walks suck. It may not immediately be obvious that hiking along a road is so much worse than being on a trail, but it absolutely is. Most obviously, pavement is a lot harder than dirt, and so your feet hurt a whole lot faster. Also, you don’t really get to see much that’s all…

We woke up this morning to yet more rain. In fact, it rained literally all night long last night; I woke up often enough to attest to that. As you might imagine, this gets really, really old soon enough. The fact that it not only makes hiking (and camping) a whole lot less fun, but…

This marks our fifth straight day of rain. I thought, most of the day today, that we might actually get lucky and be coming to the end of the wet spell we’ve been having; it didn’t rain at all during the day today, although everything around us was still really, really wet most of the…

It might be taken as a sign of our attitude towards the rain that waking up this morning to “only” a great deal of water dripping off the trees all around us, rather than actual rain, seemed like a relief. We still had to get ready while being careful not to let any important gear…

As I mentioned yesterday, Washington is known as a wet state. As if yesterday afternoon’s rains weren’t enough to prove it to us, last night and today made the point in earnest. Not long after we fell asleep last night, it started absolutely pouring, and continued pouring for hours and hours in the middle of…

I knew Washington was well-known for being a wet state, but I didn’t actually expect the difference to be this dramatic. After literally not feeling a single drop of rain our entire time in Oregon, it started to rain about an hour before we crossed the border into Washington…and kept raining on and off for…

Ahhhh…it feels so good to be in town on a double zero. This is undoubtedly our last double zero on the whole trip, and likely our second-to-last zero, and somehow this only makes me appreciate it all the more. Cascade Locks is a pretty small town, and everything you want and need everything they have…

Today, we took one of several alternate trails we’ve done instead of the PCT at times — this one called the Eagle Creek Alternate. Many of these alternates, like this one, are much more popular than the official PCT, to the point where almost nobody actually hikes the official trail in these sections. The Eagle…

Today was our last full day of hiking in Oregon. Tomorrow, we hike into Cascade Locks, where we’re going to take two full zeroes before heading across the Bridge of the Gods into Washington. This transition, as you might expect, leaves me reflecting on what Oregon has been like — and on my hopes for…

Staying at Timberline Lodge last night felt so good, and this morning, as you might imagine, we were in no hurry at all to leave. We woke up in a warm bed in a beautiful room in an incredible lodge, instead of a cold tent on a really windy mountainside outside. Perhaps best of all,…

Today, I: hiked twenty miles…before lunch; did my first “thirty”, hiking almost 31 miles in a single day; got spectacular views of Mount Hood, which is absolutely breathtaking in person; saw the strangest, coolest little pond ever; watched a huge, beautiful owl watching me as I hiked down the trail; and ended the day at…

There may have been some great views out there today, but, if there were, we certainly didn’t see them. The smoke blew back in last night at about 4:00 AM — I actually woke up and stayed awake for an hour, the smell was so strong — and stayed with us all day long. So,…

The past two days have been exhausting for us — we’ve gotten to camp late in the evening, and so, so ready to just pass out. This has been a bit surprising to us, because, generally speaking, Oregon has been easier overall than most of the hiking we did before it. However, today’s hiking showed…

Mid-morning today, we hit the 2,000 mile mark of the PCT. This is a number that, in many ways, doesn’t even seem real: who hikes two thousand miles? A plane trip of two thousand miles is significant, and doing the same by car is a really major expedition. To hike it…well, that’s just crazy. Apparently…

The Pacific Northwest’s mountain ranges, I hadn’t realized, are completely dominated by volcanic activity. This has been evident on the trail so far largely by looking up at the mountains around us, which often seem to rise out of nowhere and stand alone, unlike the High Sierra. But today we got much more direct evidence…