Entries RSS(Editor’s Note: Kristin is able to send us her blog entries when she comes to a town with internet access. As a result, the entries are published as they are received rather than on the day the events actually took place.)
“Are you a PCT hiker?” the cashier at Elk Lake asked me. “Yeah, what gave it away?” I smiled, standing there with my loaded pack, unshowered and covered with Oregon dust. “There is a notice up over on the wall for thru-hikers” he informed me. I walked over to the far wall where I read “the Sisters are impassable, do not attempt without ice gear.” The Sisters are the first decent sized mountains that the trail passes by in Oregon, still covered in snow even in early August.
I had met several hikers coming south over the past week who had gotten through the Sisters without axes or crampons just fine. I figured that I would keep heading north, and if I hit a problem, I could just turn around and come back. The following day I went through the Sisters without any difficulty. The trail did disappear under the snow a few times, but footprints from previous hikers made it easy to follow. The hike was so simple that it left me overly confident and very unprepared for the challenge that Jefferson Park was about to bring.
Mt. Jefferson is quite a sight to see. In the early 1800s, Lewis and Clark named the towering peak after their president and today the area attracts thousands of visitors a year. Unfortunately, since the Northeast got so much snow this winter, the higher elevations are completely buried making finding the trail a frustrating guessing game.
The first snow patches by Mt. Jefferson were manageable, but one larger one left me completely disoriented. I finally bushwhacked down through some brush, turned left and there the trail was. I was very happy to have found it, but not sure exactly where the spot was on the map.
I continued down the trail only to find more white. The next snow covered area stretched out forever. Footprints of earlier confused hikers spiraled off in all different directions. My map was not detailed enough to be much help. I walked around the snow field for what seemed like hours increasingly worried. Eventually I stumbled upon what looked like two sets of confident footprints and followed them down the snowy meadow. To my shock, they actually did lead me to a trail. Unfortunately, in my confused state, I feared that this was the wrong trail. It lead me to a ridge with two lakes down a ravine to the west. I took out my map and found the two lakes that I thought they must be, but they were to the east of the trail. Luckily, I spotted a campfire down in the ravine and decided to bushwhack down to confirm that the trail really was on the opposite ridge and then bushwhack up the other side to find the PCT.
Getting down to the camp was much more difficult than I had anticipated. The walls of the ravine were steep and every step resulted in miniature rock slides. After about 30 minutes, I stumbled into the camp to discover a group of boy scouts out for a weekend hike.
I have always been a little suspicious of boy scouts probably because when I was growing up, while my town’s boy scout troop was off on all sorts of adventures, the girl scout troop that I belonged to was stuck in a room in the back of the school learning to make beaded lizards and apply makeup. This boy scout troop; however, erased all of my bad feelings. They insisted on giving me trail mix and a granola bar and let me look at a more detailed map which helped me on my way. Sadly, that way was right back where I had come from and I had to scramble back up the ravine to the trail that I had been so sure was the wrong one.
Four last 32 mile days brought me to the Oregon-Washington border and here I stand with one last state between me and Canada. 2,155 miles down, 506.8 miles to go. Who knows what sort of adventures they have to bring.
