Notes from Southern Oregon
As we walk farther and farther south through Oregon, we get closer and closer to the time that Ian has to leave me. Thinking about hiking alone again feels like a whole new beginning, and saying goodbye to Ian, in this case for about nine months, will be really hard. We have hardly seen a single SOBO since we left Timberline Lodge. All the people I knew in Washington have gotten ahead of me or way behind. Trail friends move down the trail like a slinky, coming together in towns and camp grounds and stretching apart for days or weeks, sometimes leap frogging. You never know when or if you will see someone again.
I am often that person at dinner parties who gets caught between two conversations, one to my left and one to my right, and soon finds that I am not part of either and have no one to talk to. I feel this way on the trail too. I can’t keep up with some, but I go too fast for others and therefore I hike alone.
Oregon has had a more easy going quality to it than Washington, but I’m not going to say that it’s been easy or that it’s been flat. For me, it has been neither. The Oregon section of the PCT gains 68,911 feet of elevation and loses 63,047 feet in 447 miles. The big mountains are spaced farther apart and we have gradually walked up to and around each one of them leaving each behind us as we continue south. Between the mountains we have walked through quiet forests, lava flows and lots and lots of burned areas. In the five years from 2018-2023, 10% of the PCT has burned. I cannot find the exact statistic, but I can say that walking on the PCT through Oregon it feels more like 60% has burned. The burned areas can have their own beauty, especially as wildflowers and small trees begin to emerge, but some of the areas we have passed through burned so recently and/or so hot that there was no sign of life at all. For the hiker, burned areas are shadeless, dusty and eventually crisscrossed with fallen dead timber.
Throughout Oregon we have been passing the NOBO hikers, and they are on a mission. They are four fifths done. They walk fast, they say little, they hike late into the evenings and they silently get out of camp early in the morning without breakfast or coffee. Their intensity and business-like style is intimidating. Am I missing something? I don’t want to be in a hurry all the time, but maybe I will be once I’ve been on the trail for four months. Or maybe I should be in more of a hurry now. It seems that summer has ended early this year, and we have been having some very cool weather. The days are getting shorter, and we are fast approaching the equinox. I can feel a sense of constriction around getting the necessary miles done each day in the shorter amount of day light.
I also feel that I’m getting really far away from home. I look around me and the plants I see are not from the Pacific Northwest. Many of them I can’t identify. The landscape is drier and the water is more scarce making it necessary to carry heavy water supplies for longer distances. Every town and resupply stop from here to the Mexico border will be a place I’ve never been before. The first stop in California will be Seiad Valley. How do you even pronounce that? We have passed all the big volcanoes in the Cascades, and I am occasionally prone to thinking that my favorite part of the PCT is over. Of course I know that I can’t possibly know that. Tomorrow we will get to Ashland, the last stop in Oregon.
Shortly after I cross into California I will pass my 1000 trail-miles-hiked mark. I will have 1650 miles to go, any of which could turn out to be my favorite.
(Apologies for the out of order publication of this piece)
