This particular post comes after many folks have asked for an explanation to the cryptic social media clues that the Woods and I left via social media as we abandoned our original travel plans, and made everything up as we went along. This was in no way the trip that we planned - but I guarantee we could not have planned it any better.
Last year, just after Spring Break, we began dreaming of a backpacking trip in California. After some research, Katie found the perfect trail, and even altered our plan to be a bit easier when Emily found she had mono. We were prepared for the perfect, calm, backpacking trip along the coast. I was prepared to finally mark CA off of my 50 states list.
I didn't arrive at the Woods house until late on Friday night. We hurriedly finished packing, and went to bed hoping for 5ish hours of sleep. While I layed awake checking the clock every 5 minutes, somehow both of the Woods got up and got ready without me noticing, and suddenly it was 5:25am, and they were yelling for me to get into the car. I was confused, but mostly excited. During the car ride to the airport, I chose every California themed pump-up song that I could think of. We checked in, checked our bags, and waited.
Emily and Katie told me that the first rule of standby is to never talk about standby - it's like fight club. But when I realized we weren't getting on the flight to San Francisco, I asked (really quietly), "How will they know not to send our packs to San Francisco." They reassured me that this was no concern. We soon learned that Portland was our next best bet to get to the West Coast, so we waited to get on that flight while looking up potential trails in Southern Oregon, perhaps one that would touch the CA state line, maybe something near the coast - we're dreamers, not realists. We got on the flight, slept a few hours, played bejeweled for a few hours, and finally landed in that land of the coffee, home of the hipsters - Portland, OR. It was beautiful.
We were fairly certain we would have to wait for our packs to make it in to Portland on the next flight, but we were content with the idea of getting dinner and returning in time to grab our stuff, set up camp, and set out the next morning. We were wrong. Our packs were in California, and weren't going to make it to us until Beyonce knows when. We accepted this in stride, and ventured out to explore the city. We stopped at the first sign of breakfast foods at Elmer's, wrote a list of priorities, and planned our next few hours. I introduced the nerds to Powell's, and then we stood in the rain simply for VooDoo Donuts, and then we sat in our rental car for an hour looking at our options for the night. Soon, we learned that we wouldn't be reunited with our packs, yet again, until the next morning. We hunkered down at the Hampton Inn, searched trails on the hotel computers, begged for toothbrushes, and took advantage of the vat of coffee in the lobby. After our final night of sleep, real sleep, we awoke knowing we would have to waste time until noon. Emily called the airport "just to check" every six minutes until we were out of cell reception.
One of the priorities we had listed at Elmer's was "see the coast," and we figured there was no better place to go in our morning of no plans than Cannon Beach. We drove to Tilamook through the greenest, Oregon-iest forests, and then drove the same route that I biked this summer from Tilamook to Cannon Beach. All we had was the radio, but we entertained ourselves fully by rewriting every song we heard as a Christian song - because it was Sunday (this is surprisingly easy to do). We stopped at the first sign of the Pacific, in the same spot many of us stopped this summer. We continued on to casually pass a couple getting engaged, and finally decided to stop and go down to the beach. As we approached the beach, we noticed it was somewhat windy, but we continued on anyways. Pain. So much pain. The wind whipped the sand around, and even pushed our bodies down the beach. It must have been at least 45mph winds. We touched the water and tried to play on the beach as long as possible, but we were back in the car at least 15 minutes later. The first thing we heard on the radio: "High Wind Advisory all along the Coast."
Oh gosh, we're still only on day 1. Got the call our packs were at the airport. Retrieved our packs. Took over the bathroom to change and repack. Grabbed burritos. Headed to Mt. Hood. National Forest.
Oh gosh, we're still only on day 1. Got the call our packs were at the airport. Retrieved our packs. Took over the bathroom to change and repack. Grabbed burritos. Headed to Mt. Hood. National Forest.
It was already late in the evening, so we set out to hike about a mile to the first campsite. About 5 minutes into our hike, we heard gunshots. Katie, unfazed by our fear, led us onward. We set up camp, ate our dinner, and set up a sad excuse for a bear bag before settling into our tent - which we soon learned did not have an adequate rainfly. After many adjustments, we settled in for the night, fell asleep for a few minutes, and awoke to the sweet, sweet sounds of 'Sweet Lorraine' by Patti Griffin as performed by yours truly. (You're welcome). We took our time breaking camp and getting on the trail, as our plan was to hike a little over half way Monday, and have an easy 5-6 miles out on Tuesday before flying home.
Our first 5 miles were fairly easy with the exception of "ford every streams" line from the Sound of Music. We broke off onto the second segment of our loop just after lunch, and realized that we were climbing a lot. By the time we took our next break, we had climbed from 1400 ft to 4000 ft in a matter of 4 additional miles. While we gained another 1000 feet in the following, scariest trail of my life.
"Hey look guys, it goes up!" - Emily
We stopped climbing just in time to enter a completely ruined forest. At least 150 trees (not an exaggeration) had fallen across the trail. Knowing that we couldn't camp on top of this mountain in the approaching storm, we climbed over each of these ginormous trees at a crawling pace until we reached another campground - still on top of the mountain. The good news was, this site had signs that pointed toward water. I dropped my pack and started looking down a side trail, but it was easy to tell that the water was not until another 4 miles down the trail (at least), and was also covered by trees (but much more dangerous and steep). We figured it couldn't be much further to another water source, and didn't want to get stuck on top of the mountain, so we continued on.
Around 6:30PM we finally found a sign. It told us that we were 3.6 miles from the campground that we had not intended to reach until the following day, but we decided that we had to keep hiking to this site until water or a safe camp site - whichever came first. We didn't realize how steep the trail would be considering we had to descend 3600 ft in these 3.6 miles.
Just before dark, we were stopped by an uprooted tree on the side of a steep dropoff. Emily went first, and slid down on her butt. I went down second and basically surfed down the sifty soil. Katie came down step by step into our loving arms. Soon, we had let it get as dark as possible, and we pulled out our headlamps, put on our jackets, and prepared for the scariest 2 miles of our lives. Just after stopping due to shaky legs (we've been hiking for 12 hours now), we rounded a switchback and stopped mid-step. Four eyes, low to the ground, were staring back at us, about 20 yards from us.
"Guys, do you see that."-me
"Stay together, look big, and sing as loud as you can." -Emily
The 2 sets of eyes set off in two different directions. (We did our research after getting off the trail - most likely coyotes or cougars). Emily and Katie sang, and for the first time in the entire trip, I could not think of a song.
About 45 minutes of singing and shaking later, we hit our final obstacle. Four giant trees crossed our trail and there was no way around them, and no way to see where the trail went passed them. We worked together to get over them, only to find four even larger trees. Once Emily made them over, she was convinced there was no trail. It took a few minutes, but eventually we found it and continued on. Most frustrating thing ever - you can hear water, but you can't see it. Finally, about 20 minutes after the trees, we found a sign, and then a road, and then our car.
We threw our packs in the car, changed into dry, warm clothes, and started grabbing the necessities to camp at the site right between the car and the river. With Katie in the car, and Emily and I standing on the other side, we see a headlamp approaching us. We called out to say hello, acknowledge that we saw them, and size up whoever this was. It turned out to be a rather drunk, grandpa-aged man who just wanted to say hi and let us know he was staying off in the distance in his car for the night. We chatted with him for a bit, and concluded that we were safe, and he was going to mind his own business for the night.
After setting up our tent, beginning to purify our water, and getting the stove going, we noticed that the old man's car headlights had turned on. We all immediately turned our lights off and stood in front of the stove (because nothing would come between us and chili mac - priorities). His car slowly pulled forward, and we began devising plans for which way to run. His car stopped right behind ours and we began freaking out. After the longest 60 seconds ever, his car continued over the bridge and out of sight.
We finished making our chili mac, listed our pros and cons, and decided to find another, more populated, place to sleep. None of us would sleep here with the sound of the river drowning out any approaching sounds (be they eyes, old men, or the gun shots from day one). We were tired, hungry, and on edge - it took less than three minutes to break down camp and get all of our stuff packed into the car.
As we drove back toward the main road, we passed the old man's car, which was parked next to a trail that definitely led back to our site. We decided he was probably throwing up. We had to believe that, or we never would have slept. We pulled into the ranger station parking lot, and decided this was as far as we would make it. We bedded down in the car, woke every 20 minutes to folks pulling in to use the public restroom, and got up just before the office opened.
We "freshened" up (aka brushed our teeth and threw water on our faces) in the public restroom before approaching the ranger inside.
"We're looking for a map of Old Salmon Loop." - us
"Oh, are y'all about to head out?" - him
"No, we just did it. We want to see what we did." - us
*blank stares* - him
"By the way, has there been a big storm recently? You have a lot of trees down." -us
"By the way, has there been a big storm recently? You have a lot of trees down." -us
"haha yeah" -him
Super helpful. But he did direct us to some $5 showers. We cleaned up, feasted on breakfast foods (a theme), drove around Mt. Hood, and headed back into the city. Our first stop, Stumptown Coffee to sit and document these events in Emily's journal. She's great at spelling. Also, I may have accidentally mentioned out of context that my water bottle was filled with poorly filtered creek water to the woman who took our order.
Our legs were cramping, so we grabbed our remaining peanut butter tortillas and walked (read: hobbled) around a local park. We drove around, returned to REI, explored a bit, and grabbed dinner before (what we thought) would be our flight.
Our plan was to fly from Portland to Atlanta, but we didn't make it on the flight. I'm not quite sure what the next 4 plans were, but I know they didn't work out, we played Rummy waiting for them to work out, and then we fell asleep on the Portland Airport floor. At 3am, I asked Emily if we could share jacket/blankets and cuddle. At 4 am we admitted we were awake. At 5am Katie brought us coffee. And at 6am we started our journey, via car, to Seattle, upon learning there was not a chance in Cannon Beach (Hell) that we would make it out of Portland that day.
I sang the entire Thoroughly Modern Millie musical to Emily as she drove. Also CA jams. Also WA jams. Also Macklemore because that's her power music.
We arrived to the Seattle airport just in time to watch 3 seats to Atlanta fly away without us. We're still not sure what that was. Then plan E, F, and G, and then we made it on a plane to Salt Lake. Yippee. From Salt Lake we learned that DC was our next best stop. I contacted Arden, a Bike & Build contact who is fairly high on the cool-scale, and she allowed us to sleep on her couch. After a solid 6 hours of sleep, in a place meant for sleep, we were back at the airport. We made it onto a flight to Atlanta. We danced. We sang. We drove to see their mom and convince her we were alive and well (hahahaha). Showered, shared the tales with their family, napped hard, ate dinner, and tried to assimilate back into a world of somewhat normal people.
I know this was a long story. I learned a lot. I'm sure I'll reflect on this for hours/days/whatever, but the most important thing is that there was not a moment that we weren't having fun. The Woods were the best possible people to be stuck in extremely un-ideal circumstances with, and I'm thankful we had this moment to remind me how to go with the flow, to be spontaneous, and to hang out with friends that I rarely see now that I've moved to Nashville.
I still haven't been to California, but that's just our excuse for the next trip.
