Roadrunner Twice

I meant to post something about the backpacking trip we just went on, but I had some other stuff going on and now it's not really fresh in my head anymore, so I guess I'll just throw together the Short Version. (Maybe for the best, actually!)

So our friend Melissa has been doing the Pacific Crest Trail*, and we joined her for part of it! We took the MHX bus and joined her at Timberline Lodge on Mt. Hood, then we all spent four days hiking north to the Columbia River, and Ruth's mom picked us up in Cascade Locks.

We beat our previous miles-backpacked-per-day record twice, so that's wild! (15 miles on the second day, 17 on the third.) Also, we had a kind of wild amount of equipment failure or prep failure, but it all turned out fine. Aside from that, though, this trip felt super casual for some reason, like, we're just gonna take Monday and Friday off to walk 50 miles, nbd.

Some of that's probably because PCT. Consider:

• We were running into all these people doing the whole shebang, and so it was hard to think of our trip as major project.
• It's kind of just a straight line. Not a lot of navigation or decision-making.
• There's these apps that through-hikers use these days that kind of compress an already linear journey into an even more linear stream of information. "Guthooks" is the big one, and Melissa was using that, but Ruth also grabbed one of the off-brand ones. The app has very precise and up-to-date info about campsites, water sources, elevation changes, and other trail conditions (all sourced from comments from other people using the app), and uses GPS to give you the exact subset you need right now. It's a marvel, but I'm a little ambivalent about what it does to the experience. (Although I do think it made that 17-mile day possible; I doubt we'd have done that if we hadn't known so precisely where that last campsite was and what the upcoming water situation would be.)

IDK. Ruth really wants to do the AT in 2022,** so I'm starting to get excited about that as a Real Thing that Might Happen instead of just an abstract musing, and I'm not sure what place I want that kind of app to have in it.

Here's a pair of Mt. Hood shots, separated by a day of travel:

( +two photos )

* Oregon and Washington segments; was planning to do it all, but fate interfered.

** This is a lot like the question of the purple house, where YES, I also want to do Thing, but also Ruth is the one who's been dreaming of this for a decade-plus and I'm a relative newcomer, so I reflexively present that as "Ruth wants" in casual conversation.

The Wallowas seems to be a collection of little biomes that are all competing to see who's most efficient at completely pulverizing a multi-acre block of solid granite.

There was SO MUCH FUCKIN' GRANITE. Trees growing on a house-sized chunk of granite and using their roots to slow-motion karate-chop it in half. Steep hillsides covered with a thick tumble of roughly car-tire-sized boulders. Slides of slightly smaller rocks with pikas living in them and making smoke detector low-battery "PEEP" noises as you hike past. Granite rocks on the lake bottom that you can hop between if you don't feel like stepping in the muck. Meadows grown on sand and silt that are probably made of totally obliterated granite washed down from above.

Anyway it rocked lol