Days 6 and 7.

We had to pass a few other hikers last night to get to a good spot to camp.  Sometimes we have lots of good places to choose from, and sometimes we have to look long and hard to find a place level enough to throw down our bags. Last night there were lots of places to choose from beneath the shelter of a pine forest.  After having a starry canopy above us in the nice open meadow the night before, I thought it would be sad to be under the trees, but I fell asleep so quickly I never even noticed. Because we were sheltered by the forest, it was a little darker in the morning and I think Snickers even had to turn on his headlamp to assemble his pack while I did some stretching inside my sleeping bag.  I woke up with a really sore hip. Once on the trail we passed a few tents full of sacked-out hikers- the sun was just starting to come up- and listened to the chatter and howl of coyotes.  I don’t know if this was the same group which had followed us, or a new pack, but they were close and loud.  You could hear the pups talking back to the moms and imagine the conversation.

After a while of hiking, the soreness in my lower back and hip was a nagging pain that could not be ignored. The pain was bad enough, but the worry was worse.  We were two or three days walking from the nearest town. What if I had a blockage in my intestine and needed medical help?  What if my kidneys shut down?  The enormity of all the possible situations was overwhelming and I had to get ahold of myself.  I stopped and stretched some more, ate a little protein, took some deep breaths and repacked my backpack, trying to get the weight off my hip and more onto my shoulders.  I also adjusted the straps, shifting weight that way as well.  Before we had taken off on this trip I had gone in and had my chiropractor adjust my pack to fit my back and distribute the weight to support my spine instead of working against it.  Wearing a back pack is, after all, like wearing a back brace.  Now that we had been out nearly a week the pack was starting to shift, plus, it was heavier today with the extra water we had to carry. I plugged in the iPod again hoping to hide the pain and worry in the music, but alas, the battery was used up. At least the miles were through pine forest, cool, pleasant and woodsy.   Even when it hurts to be out here, at least I am out here.  You know that old line about the worst day fishing is better than the best day working? I’d rather be hurting walking out here than feeling no pain on an average day at home.  The beauty, the freedom, it’s all worth it.

The shifting and stretching actually helped a bit, my attitude adjusted from panic to confidence, and we made it to our next water stop in pretty good time.  Funny, I kept expecting Mountain Goat to jump out from behind something!!  Just .4 miles off the main trail our next water source was one of my favorite. This was another of Oregon’s wonderful shelters- a Little House On The Prairie log cabin with a big steel hand pump outside.  You didn’t have to prime it with a coffee can full of water like the one with which I am familiar, but you had to really get it pumping before you got any water.  It was also pretty tricky to try to pump with one hand and hold a water bottle in the other, but fun trying. The pump washed us, we washed our feet, our faces and some socks.  We had our cracker and cheese lunch and then we made chocolate pudding to which we added some crushed peanuts and coconut along with some small chocolate cookies.  Another hiker named Chosen One came in, and we talked for a while.  He was trying to decide whether or not to finish Oregon in two weeks. He couldn’t decide whether to blaze through and finish faster, insuring better weather through Washington and also catching up with hikers he knew were in front of him, or to slow down a little and enjoy the sights of Oregon, especially a trip in to the breweries of Bend.  I am not sure what he decided, but we never saw him again. 

After our nice lunch and rest, with cool feet and happy hearts, we hiked quietly along through pine forest, in and out of berry patches and bear grass.  Suddenly it looked as if some giant had poured huge rocks down the hill and all over the trail.  The pines abruptly stopped where they had been run over by this rock deluge, and we had to walk over lumpy, bumpy, hot and unstable black basalt and red pumice.  I thought of our new friend Be Bo, who had fallen on lava in northern California and gotten so hurt.  I took my steps very carefully, but knowing how walking through this might be especially difficult for her, I stopped once in a while to make happy faces on the trail with sticks.  I figured they were just a day behind us. Hemlock branches are especially swoopy and work very well for smiles. 

We were passed by several hikers from the bus to Seiad today.  Faces look familiar, sometimes we remember names.  One guy we call Redbeard because, well, his beard is red, had leapfrogged us several times.  We met him in the Seiad Café.  The first time we saw him on trail he stopped me and asked if I had any scissors with which he could alter the neckline of his newly purchased State Of Jefferson t-shirt.  I created a V neck for him with the handy new scissors I bought for myself before we left. Another hiker was going in the wrong direction.  Tortuga, back on trail after he had been to a friend’s wedding, was heading in to Ashland from the North- his friend had dropped him at a nearby  road crossing.  Always full of energy and lots of stories, Tortuga was a bright spot in our afternoon. 

At mile twenty we found a place to camp near a nice, wide creek.  No carrying lots of water and dry camping today!  We made stuffing and turkey gravy for dinner, accompanied by some cranberry jelly.  Snickers made fun of my cranberry jelly when I dehydrated it.  I didn’t blame him, it did look weird, all leathery and gummy and sticky. But it rehydrated very nicely and tasted great with the stuffing. Having home cooked flavors really helps when you are tired and so far away from home. 

Each day got a little easier.  We were getting stronger, our endurance was increasing, and our sore feet were starting to hurt less.  Instead of needing to stop every hour or so to rest, we could easily do two hours or up to five miles without having to sit down and take our packs off.  We were still snacking and hydrating every time we stopped though; we needed lots of calories.  My favorite snack was the peanut butter protein balls I made from a recipe a dear friend gave me just days before we left and the fresh huckleberries that grew in bunches along the trail.  There weren’t very many yet, and we had seen some that were not quite ripe, but we knew they would be more abundant as we went north. 

There were lots of huckleberries at our lunch stop the next day.  We took our break near cold, fresh little Kristy Spring just a few tenths off the trail.  Many hikers just dropped their packs at the top and walked down to fill up at the spring, but we thought it would be nice to picnic under the trees and get out of the hot sun.  We actually made a hot lunch that day, took a nap, picked berries, visited with Rock Steady (a hiker we met at Callahan’s) and explored around the spring.  There were a few nice campsites downstream from the spring, but it was way too early to camp. A pair of men’s underwear hung from the branches of a tree and we joked about them but left them there. Hopefully we would not find their owner running around without them further on down the trail.  Naked hiker day exists, but not until solstice.  Three women came in and began to fill up their water bottles while we were resting in the shade.  After hearing “wash” and “scrub” and a few other critical words from their conversations, I got up and went back over to the spring with my water bottle in my hand.  There is a pretty strict code of back country rules around water.  Especially in small springs like this it is important to keep the water source as pristine as possible.  All washing, teeth brushing and dishwashing should be done a minimum of 100 feet away from the water.  But here was this woman washing out her hanky right in the flow of the spring.  How do you instruct without being rude when you are pretty unhappy with what you see going on?  So I asked “Is there another source for getting drinking water?”  “No,” she answered, “I think this is it.”  She continued to rinse and wring out her hanky.  “And you’re washing your hanky in it?” I asked, trying (though probably not very successfully) to mask my disgust.  She did not answer.  She finished up her washing pretty quickly and headed up the trail without another word.  Snickers and I referred to this group as “the dirty girls” after that.  We hoped that no one using the downstream campsites needed to get water for an hour or two. 

As hard as it was to leave this little piece of paradise, it was time to move on.  And we moved!  After such a long rest and having cooled down, we did the next three miles in just under an hour and did another mile in twenty minutes.  I loved being in the lead and moving at such a nice pace, feeling strong and capable.  I leaped over downed logs, hopped over rocks and swerved deftly around branches, singing the whole way.  The trail seemed to just melt away.  We had no bad hours, or even moments, that day.  Our feet were good, our spirits were good; the whole project seemed totally doable.

It may have been walking over the lava and it may have been walking so fast, but somewhere during the day Snickers developed blisters- one on the ball of his foot and another under the nail on a toe.  He has never had blisters in his ten years of hiking.  I wasn’t happy he was hurting, but a part of me was vindicated knowing he now understood how hiking hurts when your feet are blistered.  On the flip side, I developed a pretty good rash that day, which is the malady Snickers usually suffers through.  It gave us both a chance to understand the other a bit better.  We had hiked twenty miles the day before and eighteen that day, and though we were feeling it physically, we were pretty satisfied with ourselves as we snuggled down into our bags that night after a filling dinner of corn chowder.