Mile 2,251 to mile 2,221
Miles: 30
John and I timed our departure around the hotel’s continental breakfast, arriving in the hotel lobby at 7AM right when breakfast began. I took Jabba and Badger’s advice and loaded up, eating all of the “free calories” that I could. I piled a waffle, four sausages, eggs covered in sausage gravy, a yogurt, orange juice, and coffee onto the table in front of me, basically one of everything. I ate fast so that I could get down as much as possible and we could get out of there. John, the King Glutton in our family, approved of my strategy.
It took us close to two hours to get back to the trail intersection where we had initially left John’s truck. There were much faster ways to get to that spot, but we had taken a handful of wrong turns on our way to finding it the first time and John felt that it’d be better to “stick to what we know.” The Goat Rocks trip had clearly instilled in him a craving for the familiar. I didn’t complain. I needed the time to slouch in my seat while my system wrestled with the mass of heavily processed carbs that I had just jammed down my gob.
Arriving at the trailhead, I dropped the rear gate of the truck and popped open my resupply box to do my final food packing. John offered up his extra food and I traded out my Clif bar flavors and snagged a king-size Milky Way bar. That’ll be a major morale booster.
I hit the trail at 9:45AM. It was a late start, but I was fully refreshed and ready to hike hard. I put in my earbuds from the very beginning, finishing Malcolm Gladwell and starting Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep. Fifteen minutes into the trail, I heard a commotion on the trees on my left side. I froze. The trees near the trail were too close together to see into them. Suddenly, the commotion turned into a pounding of paws or hooves or dragon claws or something else really big taking off at a sprint. A cloud of dust billowed out of the trees and I half crouched, my pulse racing, deciding which way I should dive off the trail and away from this mystery beast. A moment passed and the pounding faded. I realized that I must have crept up on a herd of elk and frightened them off. The surprise/terror was mutual.
My first ten miles marked my descent out of the Goat Rocks and the beginning of the never-ending Southern Washington woods. The bugs quickly intensified, pushing me to hike faster, constantly swatting and brushing at mosquitos. I established a rhythm to my swatting: right elbow, left elbow, back of the neck, right knee, left knee, grab a spider web out of my face, breathe in a gnat, cough, spit, repeat.
Eventually, I emerged from the trees and found myself on Mt Adams. Funny thing about hiking the forest is that you can’t see things coming. Having hiked three days through thick all-encompassing smoke, I had forgotten to look up.
Logs Rule Everything Around Me
I was at the base of Adams, the timberline, and still the mountain seemed a distant spectral vision due to the thick smoke. Nonetheless, the scenery was gorgeous thanks to the streams, ponds, and blanket of wildflowers that encircle the mountain. The flies and mosquitos kept me from stopping, but I’d slow at times to admire Adams while I caught my breath.
This creek may look pretty but do not be deceived. It is a m*****f****** s** o* a b****.
I didn’t run into many hikers on the trail, so was without regular accounts of the trail ahead. That’s how I was surprised by the second worst stream crossing in Washington. Thanks to the hot temperatures and Adams’ melting snow and glaciers, the creek had swelled to twenty feet wide, waist deep, and milky opaque with silt. There were footprints a hundred feet along the creek in both directions, evidence of past hikers searching for a safe crossing. I spotted a small log spanning the creek upstream and headed the way. Stepping out a few feet onto the log, it bowed. My poles were useless as supports since the current swept their grip away anytime I tried to plant them midstream. I bent down into a crawl along the log, realizing that my task was no longer to cross the stream, but to find a way to retreat backward without going right into the drink. I gingerly crawled backward, navigating by touch and willing the log to break another day. Back on my starting bank, I hiked down the stream, finally finding a few rocks sticking out from its breadth that, hopping over them, would get me most of the way across. Since it was a better option than any other I had spotted, I began hopping out onto them, knowing that they didn’t extend all the way and consciously deciding that I’d cross that bridge when I came to it. That bridge, or lack thereof, came very quickly. I was perched on a wet rock with about five feet of rushing stream in front of me and only a small foot-sized patch of bank on the other side. I managed to plant one of my poles in the stream in front of me, told myself not to think and just focus, and I vaulted across. Even though both of my shoes were soaked through as my stepping stones had been partially submerged, I breathed a sigh of relief to have made it across.
I kept up my 3 mph pace all afternoon, enduring a naggingly painful twisted ankle and bad chafe. Like the bugs earlier in the day, I established a rhythm to cope with the chafe: three steps forward, twist the back of my shorts to relieve the friction, three more steps, twist the front of my shorts. I hoped that no one was within eyesight behind me since I was constantly grabbing at my crotch. The chafe is real, folks. The hiking blogs that I had read were right on: the only cure for the chafe is not moving, specifically, sleep. But not hiking wasn’t an option.
Bucket to collect water gushing straight out of the mountain - so cold, so delicious. Not pictured: swarms of bees helping themselves to my water, swarms of mosquitos helping themselves to my blood.
I pushed on into the evening, hiking until 8:30PM. It was my latest and longest day on the trail: I finally broke 30 miles!! I finally arrived at a stream, filled up on water, and scoped out the area for a campsite. Though there were sites marked on my map, I couldn’t find them near the stream. The woods looked like they may have been cleared years ago but in the meantime, underbrush had grown up and fallen trees had blanketed the area. I was about to resign myself to clearing a lumpy patch just big enough for my tent when I decided to hike just a bit farther down the trail to search for the promised sites. A hundred yards down the trail, I found another fork of the stream (note: streams are mischievous and will fork/twist/turn to confuse you) and an expansive site with three people already set up. Luckily, there was a flat site open adjacent to the trail. I set up camp and chatted with Will the NOBO thru-hiker who had powered through all of the Sierras, Dova who was 17 years old and five days into her NOBO Washington section hike, and Spencer who was accompanying Dova on her first stretch and getting off the trail tomorrow.
We mostly peppered Will with questions about his NOBO journey. He told us about the hundreds of miles of snow in the Sierras and how, in addition to tough going, the snow had slowed him down to the point that he had run out of food during a 10-day section. Luckily, he was hiking with a group and could eat off of his fellow hikers for the last two days of the section. Wowza. He then told us about his Oregon adventure. Apparently, after having trudged through the Sierras, he hit a snow-free Oregon and accelerated to warp speed. He did all of Oregon in only 12 days. His average mileage was 35 miles/day. He saw that we were shocked and intimidated by the huge miles. He reassured us, “oh, don’t worry. I wasn’t doing 35 miles every day. It was more like 25 to 45 miles per day.” Oh, great. Good to hear that you had 25-mile rest days in there. He went on to tell us about a couple trail feats that NOBOs took on in Oregon:
24-hour challenge - start whenever you want, just hike for 24 hours straight. “Some people were doing 60 to 70 miles during their 24 challenge.”
50-mile day - you know, just a standard, straight-forward 50-mile day. “That’s always the goal, right?” Uh, yeah. Sure.
It turned dark, and we all retreated to our tents. I began my nightly ritual of journaling while eating a candy bar when I saw a light on the trail twenty feet outside of my tent. I set down my phone and Twix bar. The person took a few steps down the trail and I could see them through my tent’s bug netting. I squinted at the bright flashlight and saw that they were wearing a hat. Immediately, the realization sunk in that the hat was my highschool friend Sean’s signature T-Rex hat.
“You’ve got to be kidding. Sean, is that you?”
“Hey buddy.” He sounded tired but relieved to have finally tracked me down.
I jumped out of my tent, gave Sean a hug, and he handed me a beer, a Gifford Pinchot Pilsner. I was stunned and overjoyed to see him. Apparently, he had been texting me with questions, updates, and requests for directions for the past two days but I hadn’t had a lick of service and hadn’t seen a single message. He began pulling treats out of his pack: a bag of BBQ Kettle chips, oatmeal cookies, bug spray that didn’t smell distinctly carcinogenic, and more beer.
Note that the beer is a Gifford Pinchot Pilsner which is quite appropriate. Also, note that Sean is wearing a dinosaur hat/helmet which is also quite appropriate.
We sat on a log next to my tent catching up, joking around, and just enjoying each other’s company out in the darkness in the woods. Sean told me that he had been hiking all afternoon, a total of ten miles up and down this section of the trail looking for me. He was able to check my GPS location from his car, but once he set off into the woods, he couldn’t check where I was. At one point, about to throw in the towel, he had given another thru-hiker a ride into Trout Lake. In his car, he checked my GPS location one more time and saw that I was on a portion of the trail that he had hiked through just an hour earlier. He decided to give it another shot and retraced his steps through the nighttime woods a mile from his car. That’s when he found me.
Thanks to one beer and my 30-mile day (hiking big miles makes you a cheap date), I was sacked out at 10PM. Sean hung up his hammock near my tent and we both crashed with plans to have a leisurely morning hiking a little ways along the trail together.