Lightning in the Air

It’s been about three weeks since I left Cascade Locks, but not quite 300 PCT miles. What gives? Didn’t I just write that I was doing my best hiking of the trail? Didn’t I just say that I was as pain free as I’d ever been? Absolutely. I was and I am. A combination of epic trail, planned zeros, unplanned zeros and what felt like thousands of simultaneous wildfires filled this time with beauty, reunions, frustration, and determination.

Before leaving Cascade Locks, I was lucky enough to spend the night with my friends, Tony and Kaylee, who live in a beautiful space perched over the Hood River where they’ve been busy enjoying and adding to this community with its strong connection to the outdoors and exceptional food and wine. The visit was too short. I’m lucky to have a number of friends close to the trail and the time we get to spend together is truly rejuvenating, but never long enough.

Before I knew it, I was trotting down a path along the Columbia River in the opposite direction of a local road race, a salmon swimming upstream. I was on my way to the Eagle Creek alternate. All but the staunchest of PCT purists often branch off from the trail to visit some of the country’s best known hiking sites and most beautiful stretches of trail. The most famous of these is Mount Whitney in the Sierras. The most taken is probably the Eagle Creek alternate. The best alternates are beautiful and parallel the trail, adding few if any miles. Paralleling the PCT and passing by Tunnel Falls, this alternate hit all the high notes.

Tunnel Falls is epic. The Eagle Creek Trail trail, blasted out of sheer rock, rises through a burn to reveal waterfall after waterfall, each one worthy of a hike of its own hike. Eventually, the trail turns a corner and passes behind 130 feet of crystal clear water cascading down in a thunderous torrent. It’s electrifying. Sometimes the first miles out of town can drag but this trail was energizing through and through.

I continued along Eagle Creek in what must have been some of the most serene creekside hiking I’ve done yet. I had a firm destination of Wahtum Lake which ended up requiring some night hiking. As it turns out, I love night hiking. The air is cool. The miles flow by. It’s energizing. I also love sleep, so I do try to keep the night hiking to a minimum.

Arriving at the lake I hear a helpful voice from under a red headlamp say, “There should be a few spots over there.”

“Jesse?” I asked.

“Allan?”

I had just run into Jesse, now Charmer, one of the very first hikers I met on Day 1, but hadn’t seen in months. Jesse is one of those people who just brings joy and positivity to every interaction and you not only experience it when you’re talking to him, but you also experience it when people simply mention him. A lot of random decisions led to this most happy of reunions, all the better since Jesse was Nobo and was going to need to get off trail at Cascade Locks the next day for a number of weddings. Just in time.

I was eager to push on the next morning. Coming up was Ramona Falls, another stunning alternate, and maybe more importantly, the all you can eat breakfast buffet at the Timberline Lodge (best known for its role as the Overlook Hotel in The Shining). Incredibly, the trail passes within a few hundred feet of the hotel where hikers camp the night before feasting themselves silly the next morning.

A few miles into my day, I asked a passing northbound hiker about a water source. He said he hadn’t gotten to it yet. I asked if he was sure, since I thought it was about a mile and a half behind him. What we had here was a classic case of “someone is going the wrong way” and no one wanted it to be then. Miles are hard. Big miles are harder. Wrong way miles, and the miles to recuperate them, are the hardest. He sounded confident. Even though the sun was in the east and to my left, the trail can double back. At the same time, my navigation app was malfunctioning in a way it it never had. By the time we parted ways he said he’d see how his mileage went and turn around if he was wrong. I was still relieved to see him return a few minutes later. We ran into each other again at the Timberline Lodge the next day I was worried that I had made him feel embarrassed. Instead, he thanked me for saving him even more miles in the wrong direction. I get it.

I was moving slower than I would have liked but it was hard to speed through this section. It was rife with beauty. Ramona Falls is truly mesmerizing. I had hiked to a similar cascade in the Jameson Valley near Sydney back in January. This, I thought, would be more of the same. I was wrong. Ramona Falls is full of moments. Each part has its own details, nuances, moments. In her Desert Island Discs interview, Maya Angelou decides to take a painting of Kumasi Market by John Biggers to the island with her because it is full of hundreds of moments and she could study it forever. That’s how I felt about Ramona Falls.

It’s an often lamented fact of the PCT that, if you want to be close to doing the whole trail in a season, you need to constantly push for miles. In think I only stayed at the falls for a half hour. Sacrifices like these make me want to get faster.

I continued on toward Timberline Lodge and the promise of breakfast. I had my first real creek crossing in some time before climbing up to the Paradise Park Loop, another alternate. The loop promised several miles of wildflower super bloom in a meadow immediately below Mount Hood. The loop delivered. It was an embarrassment of riches. Tunnel Falls. Ramona Falls. The meadows.

Oregon gets a bad wrap with PCT hikers for being boring, and, to be fair, I’ve missed about two thirds of it. I do have to say, however, that if you’re heading south, it sure starts with a bang.

The Timberline breakfast was everything I’d hoped it would be. I’ve been to Passover Seders that were shorter than this meal. Thankfully the trail was downhill. I’ve never carried so much internal weight.

Tourists pay hundreds of dollars to stay at the hotel, a head-turning WPA project, yet don’t seem perturbed in the least that the lobby is full of malodorous hikers charging devices and sorting food. In fact, many want to know more about what we’re doing.

The day after I left Timberline a hiker passed me. Somehow we started talking. About books, I think. She slowed down … a little. I sped up … a lot. I had just met Sweetblood, my new hiking partner for the next four days. We took breaks left and right. On this first day we had second breakfast at Little Crater Lake, took a swim at Timothy Lake, had lunch at a horse camp, had a long chat with our mutual northbound friend, Charm Pony and still managed a 24 mile day! A four hour break for beers on the dock at Olallie Lake? 22 miles. Three breaks before noon? A marathon. We were cooking. This was hiking as it was meant to be done. A couple of days required some dusk and night hiking, but seeing the sun set over the Three Sisters Wilderness is more than worth the price of admission.

The day we passed through Big Lake Youth Camp, a children’s camp that has free facilities dedicated to hikers and feeds them for free in an act of true generosity, we were nearing the end of this run. Sweetblood was going to push on past Bend. I was going to stop in town and zero with my northbound friend, Lite Bright, who had been crushing 30s to make our date.

The night before we parted ways, we could see smoke rising from behind a distant ridge, an omen of things to come. After a few miles of hiking over tedious lava rock the next morning Sweetblood stayed in trail and I went looking for a ride into town. She had shown me what I had suspected: I could hike farther and faster than I had been. I just had to choose to do so.

Among hikers, Bend is known as the vortex of vortexes. I have no doubt that at least one hiker has dropped in for a zero and has never left. It’s not hard to see why. Not 10 minutes after my hitch from Mackenzie Pass dropped me off, I was at the local hostel feasting on authentic Oaxacan food and drinking of the finest local cider. I grew up in a hippie town. Woodstock could have easily happened in my hometown. My introduction to Bend made my hometown look like Gordon Gecko.

Lite Bright got into town the next morning as planned and we did it up. REI. Free Cider. Thai Food. A motel with a hot tub. Life in Bend was good. We even met a celebrity of the trail running world, Scott Jenkins (@scottjjenkins)—an ultra runner in the midst of completing a triple crown of 200+ mile ultras who seemed impressed by what we were doing. We made quite the mutual admiration society. But even as we chatted in the hot tub, easing our aching muscles, the smoke was rolling in.

Optimistically, I shipped packages ahead in Oregon. I ordered shoes to Oregon. The forecast for the day was 98 degrees. I’d wait one more day before getting back on trail.

Meanwhile, lightning had set off fires in all three PCT states. The section from Stehekin, Washington to the border—one of the most epic stretches on the entire trail—was closed, thwarting Kyler and Trevor and Amelia and the rest of the tramily on their March to the border. Fires in Northern California erupted and the trail closed from Etna to Seiad Valley, thwarting Baywatch, Townward and many of the others who had successfully navigated the physical and mental challenges of the Sierras in a year with a 300% snowpack.

Hiking well and far and fast had me focused on finishing my second state. Crater lake was less than a week away. 280 miles to the border was what? 2 weeks? It was in the bag. Except it wasn’t. Even though the trail in Oregon remained opened, I couldn’t convince myself to hike in the smoke.

Even before Bend, I had been considering flipping from there back to Kennedy Meadows to once again head north. Still I could not make up my mind. No matter what I did, though, I knew all roads went through Portland. So I made my way there, had a second reunion with Lite Bright who was there to meet up with his wife, and I rented a car to head south to pick up where I had left off two months before.

It would seem that I dislike certain forms of uncertainty. Like everyone else, I knew a hurricane was headed for the Eastern Sierras but I would just have to play it as it came. I planned resupply. I got trail conditions from rangers. I was headed to the Range of Light with a stopover to stay with my friends Paul and Emily and their two daughters in Sacramento.

The morning after the storm passed, however, I saw pictures of the damage to roads up to the Sierras. If these were the roads what were trail conditions like? It would be a week or so to know. I didn’t feel like I had that kind of time. I didn’t want to head in not knowing. With my headspace at the time, I knew that a false start might break my resolve. I didn’t want to let that end my hike. I decided to change my plan again.

Southbound friends who I started Washington with were about to skip over the Northern California closure. That was enough. I would meet them and create, much to my dismay, two sections of trail to complete. One uncompleted section is the rest of the trail. Two uncompleted sections are gaps. Regardless, NorCal it was.

Before the recent storm there was no snow on Shasta.

When I moved back to New York in 2022, I seemed to manifest pieces of furniture I needed on the streets of Brooklyn. A drop leaf table around the corner? A lamp down the street? Yes, thank you.

Earlier this week I manifested a 200 mile hitch from just outside Sacramento to the trailhead in Dunsmuir. Did the Tesla driver come up to ME to offer the ride? Oh, yes. Did he live 15 miles from the exact trailhead I was going to? Also, yes. He seen the PCT tag on my pack, a tag that had come to me on the trail after 1300 miles via a couple of volunteer rangers. Most hikers go to get theirs the first week.

This stretch in NorCal has been amazing already. I’ve walked along the ridge line as the sun set over Mount Shasta. I pushed through another food shortage—hiker hunger seems to grow faster than the mile. I ran into Townward, my Yurt-mate from Kennedy Meadows, in a truly joyous reunion! Just the other day, I did 10 before 10 (actually, 9 before 9 💅), saw Burney Falls, spent two hours talking tent to tent with a 31 year-old bookbinder, and still did 20 miles.

Have my Dunsmuir friends caught up to me yet? Did I twist my ankle before those 20 miles? Do I want to waste a day resting it? It doesn’t matter. I’m going to go grill steaks with Nicole.

Feast when you can.

Thirteen Days

Reunion Hills