Start point
Highway 242 and McKenzie Pass, mile 1984.8
End point
Pond at mile 2,000
Miles hiked
15.2
Wilderness area
Mt Washington Wilderness
Deschutes National Forest
Willamette National Forest
People I met
A ton. A TON.
The day on trail
Sleep is so wonderful when your body is recovering from exercise and you’ve had a day with a full belly, great company, and all your gear anxieties taken care of.
I stripped the bed, double checked my room, and took off. They left me the garage code so I could easily leave, as they were took off before I left. I took a Lyft to a coffee shop and met Nonny there. This shop had pastries from a locally renowned bakery, so we ate a few of those, got some coffee (decaf for me, please and thank you), and then walked out to try and score a hitch.
Within about 5 minutes, a guy pulls up. I can’t remember his name, but he hiked the Trail a couple years prior. He said he’d give us a ride in a few minutes, after dropping something off at his friend’s place, and we were welcome to keep trying to hitch anyway. He’d understand if we weren’t there when we came back. We kept trying until he came back.
He had his dog with him, and both he and his dog were super sweet. He worked sound and stage for some musicians, and his dog was known for joining bands on stage and chilling out while they played. He told us he could take us to Sisters and we could hitch from there.
Well, when we got to Sisters, he had a change of heart and decided to drive us the rest of the way so he could show us an observatory he liked.
The whole trip cost us more time than we wanted, but it wasn’t too long of a day to hit our goal. 15 miles and change is a fairly easy goal at this point, so we started off.
The terrain was, predictably, gorgeous, if not still rugged. Again, volcanic ranges are not contained to signs, but regions.
Let’s play find the striped ground squirrel.
Even the signs out there look like they’re struggling.
I tried to hard to get a self portrait in front of Three Fingered Jack, a mountain I was quickly obsessed with. But to no avail.
The amount of effort that goes into some of these photos is incredible. I have to fight technology, time, energy, and do all this working around other hikers. Bah!
We soon left this volcanic region and the Trail turned to lush terrain again, with sumac and pine around us.
I’m glad it was an easy day. Getting trail legs back after a zero day is hard enough, and with the couple hours it took to get a ride, be on that ride, and explore the monument at the top, we were considerably set back. It’s still so nice to be back on trail and seeing everything, like these toxic honeysuckle berries.
Going on, I reached a turn off for Big Lake, which has a youth camp there. There’s an area there for hikers to use for cooking and charging when the youth camp isn’t actively meeting.
Okay, so this youth camp. It creeped me out. And when I finally got there I figured out why. It’s absolutely a Seventh Day Adventist cult youth camp.
But seeing hikers there was great. I topped off one of my phone. I ate a little snack. There was some guy there who was trying to convince me he was Jewish, but he’s a Messianic Christian, calling himself a “messianic Jew”. I pushed back, because I’m not here to let my religious identity get hijacked. I met a couple people who recognized me from the podcast.
I looked in the hiker box to see if there were any goodies — there weren’t.
There were a few small bouts of rain that people were trying to avoid, or lay stuff out to dry in the sun between outbursts.
I didn’t stay long. I don’t like fundamentalist camps, especially those dedicated to indoctrinating kids into cults, so I continued on.
Soon I got to where we were going to set up for the evening, a pond at exactly mile 2,000. The best sites had been taken, but we were able to find two spots just off the shore of this pond.
We set up our tents.
After setting up camp, we made dinner and ate sitting on the rocks on the pond. It was so serene, we were able to watch a ground squirrel climb on a rock, go to the pond, and take a few drinks of water. There were no mosquitoes, which was wonderful.