August 17th, 2022 by Jon
We woke in the morning to the sound of the nearby creek. We decided to sleep in quite a bit because we planned on a shorter day today. Although we could get to town on Wednesday if we wanted to, we are trying to get to Cascade Locks on Thursday so we don’t have to pay for another night in town. We slept in an extra 20 minutes before finally forcing ourselves to get up and get going. We had a nice breakfast before hitting the trail just before 7:00. We crossed a fallen tree to get over a rushing creek, and then once on the other side, began the long climb.
The trail was steep, and as we got farther from the creek, the air temperature grew much, much warmer. The trail was very brown, bushes didn’t seem to grow right here. We switchbacked up the mountain for a while before coming to a creek running across the trail about halfway up. We stopped there to catch our breath and collect some water for the next stretch. Feeling a little refreshed, we steeled ourselves and continued uphill. The trail continued being quite steep, although we entered a much greener part of the forest. We hiked for a while before finally coming to a junction at the top. We had done it. We checked our phones and had service for the first time in a while, so we did a few online chores before hiking down. We switchbacked down the other side of the ridge along a ledge, with cool views to the east. Eventually, we got to the bottom and took an actual break there to eat at a road that we had to cross.
After the break, we entered the Bull Run Management Area, which provides all the drinking water for the city of Portland. There were a lot of signs telling people they had to stay on the PCT or the Huckleberry Trail and not wander into the forest. We hiked underneath some high-voltage power lines that buzzed loudly as we crossed underneath them and had magnificent views of Mt Hood. We continued afterward, climbing along a narrow ledge with a steep drop-off to the side. We stayed on that ledge for a very long time, all the way until we came to a small spring just down off the trail where we ended up taking our lunch break.
Stealth joined us about 5 minutes after we got to a few shady trees right by the water. We ate lunch there in the shade of the trees and enjoyed that we only had 9 more miles to go to a trail junction we would take into town tomorrow morning. We had about 15 miles to get into town. We had quite the leisurely lunch there, taking our time before finally leaving. After we had eaten, we got up and hiked along our ledge once again. It was totally covered in pine trees, except for a few moments when the trees spared us a small gap through which we could see. For the most part, it was just ledge walking through. For about a mile, we had to navigate some very large, very difficult blowdowns. We ended up having to basically crawl on the ground to get around many of them.
We came to a small spring that was barely coming out of a rock just below the trail. Someone had added a leaf, so there was an actual stream of water to collect from, rather than just dripping down the rock. We sat there filtering for a while and left right as a large group came up to the spring. Many people had skipped around to be able to hike into PCT days, and the bubble was well and truly here. We got up and started hiking, pushing to do the last 5ish miles to the junction. The trail was yet more ledge-walking of the same kind we had done all day. There was one part, however, we came out on a rocky point, and we could actually see the hazy outline of Mt. Rainier far in the distance between Mt. St. Helens and Mt. Adams.
We finally came to a trail junction, with lots of spots spread out at the junction itself, as well as a few ledges that made flat spots down the nearby hillside. We got as far down as we could, anticipating that there would be lots of people here tonight. We got camp set up and then ate at a picnic table before heading back to our tent and realizing how many people had shown up in that time. There were probably about 25 tents in a fairly small area by the time we got into our tent around 7:00. Tomorrow, we look forward to town, food, showers, and a real bed.
Good to talk with you. This is day 132 for my cousins John Mcaferty and wife Aja on PCT trail. Dana❤️