Start point
Seiad Valley, mile 1657
End point
PCT and Grider Creek Road junction, mile 1671.8
Miles hiked
4 on a road walk
Wilderness area
Klamath National Forest
Rogue River National Forest
People I met
Chopper (another!)
No Chill and Yelnats
Chia
Peach
The day on trail
What a lazy, lazy day!
We hiked, no, walked, four miles. And even that we took easy.
We started off at Becky’s house. We spent the morning catching up with Cookie, a hiker they brought in this morning. They brought her back to the house after picking her up in Seiad, and brought us back some breakfast, too.
We all spent the morning chatting with Cookie, Becky, and her husband (Jeff? Let’s call him Jeff.) Jeff loves to hike and was an avid hiker, but his knees got messed up and his distance is severely compromised. So he goes out for a few nights at a time but has to stick to 8-12 mile days.
It’s funny how I can remember the distance someone can hike, but not their name.
Anyway.
After talking for a bit, and upon the offer from Jeff, Ketchup and I decided to get a ride almost up the entirety of the road walk to get back to trail.
There are two ways to get to trail from where we are. The first is the official trail, which has reports of being overgrown with poison oak. The second is a dirt road walk. This is reported to have no poison oak and lots of berries, though it is exposed and the day was really hot.
We opted for the second one, as either way there’s a really large climb and climbing in this heat can be brutal. We hung out to waste some time, just so we could go up later in the afternoon and wait out some of the sun.
Finally it was time to go. I was getting antsy, really, since the morning. But hanging out is so nice and I was feeling some weird mix of excitement and trepidation about hitting the Oregon border. More than two thirds of this trail is in California, and the sooner you get to finishing it, the sooner you finish it. I’m enjoying being out here so much that it’s hard to really want to finish it, but the point of hiking is to move, and moving gets you closer to the end. It’s a painful catch-22 and really feels like so many other things in life.
We’re always moving to the end in life. And only we get to determine if progress happens or not. That progress might look any number of ways, like any number of things, and we have to determine whether whatever it is, is actually the progress we want.
I want to progress this hike. I want to reach the end. I want to touch that Northern terminus. I want to hike through Oregon. I want to experience the terrible mosquitoes, the supposedly boring trail, see Crater Lake, see Mt. Hood. I want to hike through Washington, experience Goat Rocks Wilderness, see Tahoma (aka Mt. Rainier) again, find fun trail towns there.
So I have to move. And Ketchup will, too, because she wants the same.
We get a ride up the mountain, but not all the way. All the way feels like a cop out, and walking the entirety of the road would suck too much both with the people driving up and the heat. So we elect to go almost all the way up. It’s about 12 miles, and we estimate for 8, leaving us 4 miles until we’re back on trail.
Jeff drops us off and we start hiking. He turns around to go pick up Cookie (the guy, not the girl who just came into Becky’s house today), Angry Dane, Flamethrower, and one or two others. We start our walk up this rocky, narrow, exposed road.
It’s dusty, in the way that unpaved roads are and trails aren’t. It’s an unnatural, light dust. Not the rich dark dust of fertile soil, or even a light dust of desert. It’s a dust of disturbed dirt and aggressively mechanically eroded rock. It’s a dust of industry, not of nature. The texture, smell, and color is different. It’s one of the parts of a road walk that takes you out of the element and makes you wistful for the trail.
There are a few breaks on this, little waterfalls and small patches of flowers, some with bees. There’s a spiderweb network.
Mostly, though, it’s a climb. There are a few off road vehicles that pretend to be polite and slow down only when they’re right on you, still enveloping you in dust from behind and from the front.
We get to the trail and there’s a beautiful spot in trees to camp. There’s a spring that’s about 200 yards from camp, an easy walk there and back. The next site is farther on. There’s a woman there, Peach, and a few other girls from the Midwest: Chia and a few others whose names I forget. Yelnats and No Chill come in later.
Ketchup and I decide to camp there because the day got away from us and it’ll be easier to go to bed early and get a strong start tomorrow than hike the numerous extra miles to get to the next site.
There are a bunch of pretty flowers near the water source.
And there was this bird that I just couldn’t get in focus, but it had such a fun character.
We hung out with the others after setting up camp. Conversation was flowing and we were all vibing really well because we’re all excited for tomorrow.
Tomorrow we should be entering Oregon. Holy smokes.