For today’s walk I listened to music. It’s a simply wonderful combination: walking and song.
I want you to have an experience with these posts; there are links to songs, videos, other websites, and many various adventures. So here is your invitation to leave the tab open and return to find the link to the podcast or watch the movie. Take a walk and play the song. Think some thoughts and make some notes, or just leave space to let them emerge as the morning or afternoon unfolds. You may need an hour, or two…sometimes you might need a week for your brain to untangle and release. At least that’s how I work. You do you.
Today’s song is Frank Sinatra Jr’s Black Night. If you liked that one, you also might like The Ocean by Richard Hawley, The Rip by Portishead, or Empire Ants by The Gorillaz. The crescendo of each song echoes somewhere deep inside. You know how I wrote about using sound vibrations earlier this year to help kill the cancer? I think that’s what these songs do too. They vibrate something vital inside me, and the result is elation and joy. I hope for you too.
Today I want to talk about creativity as a force for survival.
When my neck started spasming last year, the aspen trees in the glaciated gorges of Steens Mountain had just started to turn gold. I was leading a trail maintenance trip for National Public Lands Day, and I knew something was very wrong. I was due to fly out the very next day to start a 400-mile thru-hike of the Pinhoti Trail, which I would connect to the Benton MacKaye Trail, turn east, and hike to its terminus at Springer Mountain (also the start of the Appalachian Trail). I planned to bookend the hike with a visit to Pinhoti Fest before I started walking, and finish with the Benton MacKaye Trail Association’s Annual Meeting and Hike Fest at Unicoi Lodge in Helen, Georgia. I intended to make further connections with the founders and stewards of both trail organizations to explore how I could add my expertise to their trails with my long-distance trail consulting business. This was a working hike, but also my vacation. Where do I stop and my job begin? I’ve never really known, having always (or most of the time) worked within a passion.
That beautiful fall day changed everything. Once my neck started to spasm on the last evening of the trip, the jolts continued to shock me, racing from my brain, down my spine. I had no clue what was going on, and quickly said an early goodnight to my volunteers as tears streamed down my face. I thought rest and lying down might ease the bewildering condition, but no. My neck spasmed about every five minutes during the long, late-September night. I cried with fear and pain, hoping the others couldn’t hear the extent of my anguish. Something was very wrong.
I avoided facing the truth even after I managed to make the five-hour drive back to Bend and directly to an urgent care. An exam showed nothing of concern, so we blamed the spasms on a few nights of a poor pillow. I could still hike, right? Meanwhile, on the East Coast, Hurricane Helen had just hit land, tearing up the communities, towns, trails, and mountains where I had planned to hike. I rebooked my flight for a few days hence to see how my neck and the storms would play out.
This wasn’t supposed to happen, to my body or the inland communities along the Appalachians, but one thing was clear: much of the region I was planning to hike in was devastated. On the bright side, the Alabama portion of the Pinhoti Trail was spared, but it seemed in poor taste to frolic down the trail when people were suffering just a short distance away in Georgia.
The east coast hike wasn’t going to happen, so I fixated on the Oregon Coast Trail. This 413-mile hike was close to home, had many towns (meaning I could find an easy out if my neck continued to give me grief), and I had already planned to be away from work for a month, so I threw myself into last-minute planning to walk a month along the sea.
I planned to travel to and from the trail all using public transportation; it would be a cool experiment! Since my passion is my work, I started to turn this trip into another opportunity to evaluate the resources and infrastructure of the trail to see how I could improve it from a hiker’s perspective. I decided to start my hike a week out from that urgent care visit, which would give me time to get a few sessions of acupuncture and massage, and push past the pain in my neck to keep going and hike anyway. I’ve done it before, hiked through fresh and recent injuries, that is.
The day before I started my October groundtruthing hike of the Blue Mountains Trail in 2020, I walked out of the house barefoot, and a stray nail sticking up from the door frame tore a fourth-inch chunk out of the sole of my foot. The flapper was deep enough that I had ripped through a significant portion of skin and callus. I panicked, immediately cleaned out the wound, put some antibiotic ointment on it, and elevated my foot until Kirk came home from work. I shook as I showed him the wound, but slowly convinced myself and him that I could keep it cleaned and protected as I hiked for a month solo on a difficult backcountry route in north eastern Oregon. And I went, and I was fine. So I’d be fine this time too, right?
After a week of treatments, I was convinced this Oregon Coast Trail thing was a go. Kirk and I decided to head up to Waldo Lake for the weekend in our camper so he could foilboard while I read in a chair in the sun. I still wasn’t 100 percent, but I had convinced myself I would heal on the hike, much like I had done on the Blue Mountains Trail. The morning we were set to leave, I was stretching when something twinged in my back and I instantly knew I wasn’t going hiking anywhere. All the progress I thought I had made was gone in that twinge. I didn’t tell the rest of my body, though, and I packed up my backpack and headed out for the weekend. Over the next two days, it was apparent that I was having trouble moving normally. Carrying much of anything caused more pain, and I finally voiced out loud that I wouldn’t be hiking the Oregon Coast Trail. I returned home in a slump. Two hikes had now been thwarted in the last week.
Now what?
It wasn’t until I was on a morning walk recently that last year’s hiking (or non-hiking) saga gained more shape. I headed out into the frosty morning with freshly charged earbuds in place and strolled along my normal route along the Deschutes River. That morning, I listened to Rich Roll’s podcast featuring author and fellow cancer navigator Suleika Jaouad, and I saw my decisions in the wake of my physical limitations in a new light.
Suleika has experienced survival as a creative act. I read her first book, Between Two Kingdoms, this year, shortly after my diagnosis, and quickly pre-ordered her second book, The Book of Alchemy. The more I learned about her story, the more I identified with her struggles. When I heard her leukemia returned for the third time before the launch of her new book, my heart just bled for her. For us.
Back to last October: when I realized that I would not be hiking the Oregon Coast Trail, I decided to go ahead and do it anyway, but from home. I decided to embark on a virtual journey and pretend that I was out plodding through the sand and feeling the rain sting my cheeks in groves of old-growth trees that rim the bluffs over the Pacific Ocean. I would virtually hike the Oregon Coast Trail.
Ever since I set foot on the Appalachian Trail back in 2002, I kept a daily journal. Those hand-written missives from the AT are lost, but from then on, I wrote and posted them online. From my hike during a break from grad school along the West Highland Way, to my thru-hike of the Colorado Trail and the culmination of my summer of leading trail crews, I chronicled the rain, sleet, and snow. The blisters, spider bites, and those few times I caught myself on fire from my beer-can stove. Yes, there were multiple times. Over the years, I shared my joys and struggles with a small group of loyal blog-readers, but more importantly, I found great joy in writing for the love of writing. I didn’t care if anyone else read about day 56 on the Pacific Crest Trail or day 5 on the Sunshine Coast Trail, I loved waking up in the early morning and capturing the feeling of the day before.
So when my body wouldn’t let me hike last fall, I decided to wake up early each morning, read the guidebook (shout out to Bonnie Henderson and her excellent resource), reference the FarOut app for real-time updates from other hikers, study the weather, decide how many miles to walk, where I would camp or find lodging, where I would eat, what interesting things I’d see during the day, and how I would navigate the many gaps in the trail. I wanted to turn this virtual hike into a visual journey as well, so I planned to create a story map that I would build on, publishing each new day on the story map as I would on an actual thru-hike. The Oregon Coast Trail is a logistical melange of hazards like high tides, which make certain sections undoable, or eroding cliffs from a perpetually stormy sea. I wanted to experience those hazards, even if remotely, and decide how I would proceed if I were actually there.
Story mapping had become another passion by this point, and over the past few years, I had been creating them professionally for other organizations. The medium harkened back to my college days where I dove into multi-media projects, combining images with prose, sounds, and even videos. And since my virtual hike was quickly becoming another work/passion project, I decided to add on elements from a second business I had started recently, called Intentional Hiking.
Yes, the title gives it away – with Intentional Hiking, I hosted several conversations a month about ways hikers could cultivate a deeper engagement with the world around them as they were out for a day hike, week-long backpacking trip, or a long thru-hike. I invited experts to talk about things like collecting data for Adventure Scientists, learning how to identify plants and animals to contribute to research projects on iNaturalist, or even how public land management agencies are integrating Traditional Ecological Knowledge of indigenous peoples into federal planning processes. To apply this to the Oregon Coast Trail, I decided I would identify several aspects hikers (and I) could engage with as we walked. Those items were categorized and marked on the maps as: Fun Facts, Trail Stuff, Environment, Military History, Exploration History, Tribal Nations, Art and Culture, and Take Action. Each morning, I would wake at my usual 4am, spend the next 4-5 hours researching, writing, and adding on to my story map, and publish that day’s hike on my blog.
By the second week, my creative act had become a bit oppressive, given the sheer amount of time it was taking me to create each day’s exploration. The added weight of my painful body didn’t make things much easier. After my morning creation, my days were filled with appointments. They ranged from sessions with a physical therapist, massage therapist, chiropractor, acupuncturist, and my primary care doctor, with little result. I could barely move.
I kept going because that’s what I do. I finished the project on October 31 to reflect when I would have finished in real time. I remember my neck and back were feeling a hair better…in fact, everything was feeling a tad better, that is, until I slipped and fell on a wet floor while shopping on November 1. It was the kind of fall that you knew would be bad on the way down. As my feet flew out from under me, I had long enough to notice the “caution wet floor” sign by my right leg, and also know I was in trouble. I landed hard on my right glute, whiplashed my head, and passed out.
I will tell you the rest of the story another time, but needless to say, my troubles were only getting worse, and I was still about two months out from my cancer diagnosis. Life sucked, but it sucked less when I could focus on things like the virtual Oregon Coast Trail by ignoring my pain as much as I could to do something that brought joy.
I want to say many more things about how the creative act is survival. Many of you have seen it play out in real time through my blog this year, so stay tuned as I unpack more layers of pain and being so that I can continue to not just survive, but thrive through my creativity.
Slueika was in remission for 10 years before her cancer started growing again. The road ahead seems so long that I think the only thing that can get me through this is exploring what it means to be alive, creatively. And what a gift to the world that Slueika and her husband and musician Jon Baptist are giving to the world by doing the same.
Check out American Symphony on Netflix if you want to learn more about these two, they take my breath away.
2025’s Thanksgiving on the River Crew – Cindy, Kirk & Moi (photo courtesy of Cindy)
Kirk and I have had a Thanksgiving tradition of heading to water for the last 10+ years. It probably started because he just loves a flowing river, and even though my river time had been limited before we met, I quickly took to the eddies and riffles as he showed me the ropes of paddling, rafting, and floating downstream.
One of our first trips was a packraft adventure on the North Fork of the John Day River. You can read all about it here:
click for the full post…
We had many other adventures on the water, most frequently coming back to the banks of the Lower Deschutes River as it usually had the most water of any of Oregon’s rivers in late November. We would invite various friends, sometimes it would snow, sometimes it would drop into the single digits, and sometimes those friends never returned for another water-logged Thanksgiving trip…the cold really highlights how a four-day sufferfest can drive people indoors, even if we bring multiple pies.
This year my longtime friend Cindy decided to brave the unknown, and possibly rainy weather to accompany us on our float, and she was rewarded with mild temperatures and minimal splashing as I had asked Kirk to find the smoothest and driest lines through the rapids – my neck and spine still can’t tolerate much jostling.
We launched on Thanksgiving morning and pulled over a few miles later to reheat our feast. I don’t think it was the best of our efforts as my turkey cooking the day before was a bit too zealous and left the meat on the dry side, and we skipped the fancy side-dishes for instant potatoes, stovetop stuffing, canned cranberry sauce, and store-bought pumpkin pie, but it was all gravy. As Edward Abby says, “Hunger is the best sauce,” and the smell of the cooking turkey had started my mouth watering a full day before our dinner.
Dark comes early in late November, but I added some festive cheer with some battery-powered lights and hot cider.
The skies were blue and the nights dark, and we all got a solid 10 hours (or more!) of sleep each night.
It is such a gift to be on the river during this time of year. The blue heron was our steady companion each day on the water, and the sound of the current hushed any background noise that we carried over from day-to-day life.
Kirk and I took a day hike up to the base of 3 Finger Jack last weekend. It may look extreme, but this point is only 2ish miles from the trailhead! The worst part was driving up the washboarded dirt road, which was much harder on my neck than the hike.
I mentioned my intention to hike some of the Camino de Santiago thru Portugal in one of my last posts, and now, buoyed by all the good health news, I’m making it happen…and all of a sudden, the trip is soon, very soon (like September soon!)
I’ll be writing here daily while I walk, and now my time is filled with logistics like:
Whats up with the whole luggage transport system? Since my back/neck/shoulders still can’t support a pack I’ll be paying to have my roller carry-on bag transported each day. There are several companies that offer the service, and you only need to book 48 hours in advance, so that leaves room for serendipity…especially important because I don’t know how many miles per day my body will tolerate yet.
How do I book hostels, hotels, or auberges? Fortunately, many of these lodging options leave half their beds open for first-come walkers….In the day and age of cell phones and reservations, that is amazing, and again leaves some time for the hike to evolve as I see how the miles are feeling. I do have the first three nights booked, though.
Visa? Not needed
Money? Debit and credit cards will work, although I’ve had to check the international fees for both…since my trip is relatively short, just a few weeks, it sounds like getting cash from ATMs along the way will be an advisable way to go
Gear? I’m experimenting with a few different lumbar packs to carry things like a raincoat, umbrella, snacks, and water…I used the Gossamer Gear Piku this past weekend on a day hike, and loved how light it was, although the larger capacity (nine liters) means I can still put too much weight in it, like I did for a walk around town this week 😬. I have a Mountainsmith lumbar pack on order to try, although it comes off the shelf much heavier at 1.56 lbs vs the Piku at 8.9 oz.
Blogging? I thought I would bring my Surface tablet with keyboard to write at cafes along the way, but on my hike around town, it seemed heavy in the pack…I could just type on my phone like I do on regular backcountry hikes…we’ll see. I’ll take some more hikes with it and decide later.
Language? I’ve been taking some Portuguese lessons on Duolingo, but a big portion of the way will be in Spain (about 100 miles vs 70ish in Portugal), and I don’t have time to get good at two languages. Anyway, I hear English is pretty prevalent, and I can always rely on Google translate.
Sleeping? Since I’ll be in a bed each night and can transport whatever fits in my roller carry-on, I’m planning to bring my 40-degree feathered friends quilt, an inflatable pillow, and a silk liner for the beds. I hear i will need to be alert for bed bugs, so I am getting versed I need what to look for.
Food? It will be quite an urban experience, so I’ll have cafes and restaurants all along the way. I will also probably take advantage of grocery stores and hostel kitchens to buy and make my own meals…as for eating restrictions, I’m going to be a bit looser with my diet and eat what is fresh and authentic…I want to immerse myself in the experience, and if that means an occasional glass of wine or pastry with lunch, so be it!
Navigation? I bought the Wise Pilgrim guidebook and app, and I also made my own data book in miles vs kilometers, and have the route uploaded onto Caltopo, which I’ll use on my phone too.
There will be other questions that come up as I’m putting this trip together, and I’ll probably post once or twice more to share that with you. I’ll also post my gear list and anything else you might find interesting. Have other questions? Leave a note in the comments!
I see this as the first of many Camino-style hikes I plan to take since my body is different now, and as I’ve mentioned to some of you, I see developing these type of hiking opportunities for the less-able bodied or people who simply want to eat good food and sleep in beds as a potential pivot for my business once I’m able to start working again. Exciting!
I’ve had really good runs of sleep lately, and then there will be a night like tonight where I can’t get beyond the first few hours of good sleep (I can almost always fall asleep with ease, thankfully!) So here I am, before midnight! Gasp. And writing. I will most likely be up for a few hours and then will go back to bed, but I aim to enjoy these few hours, and what better way to honor the deep night than to write?
I had a successful chemo session yesterday! I was joking with my neighbor Jan across the street…we saw her and her husband Greg on their bikes just as we were getting home from my infusion.…joking that we celebrate being healthy enough to get poison injected into our veins. Totally ironic. Jan had her own brush with cancer a few years ago and is now living life to its fullest. Riding bikes to go get a burger for Greg’s birthday…they are both about 80! They go skiing, Greg makes rock art, Jan bikes to yoga, and they are both very civically involved. What good role models. 🙂 I’m so lucky to have so many people in my life who are busy living. Who spend every day (or almost every day) doing exactly what they want with the people they love. And yes, that involves those still working, too. I have always put emphasis on doing work that I believe in and that energizes me, and the end result of living in that manner is that I tend to surround myself with others living that way too. It’s a great gift.
In fact, when I couldn’t sleep before getting up, I was listening to an On Being podcast on just that subject. Give it a listen:
And I love that both the guests, Atul Gawande and Krista Tippit, gave a nod to Annie Dillard’s quote: “How you live your days is how you live your life.” You have probably read it before in my blog journals. It’s a question I have long kept at the center of my decision-making. I like to live as if each day would be full enough, joyful enough, rich enough to be my last. Before, it was never about death; it was about living a fun, fulfilling, inspired, adventurous life. I’ve had conversations with friends before when they were deliberating a heavy decision…I often say, “There are no bad decisions; some just may be more work than others.” I believe that. And also there is so much time! I look back at the 20-year-old me, and I’m so grateful that I threw my hat in with the peace corps. So many people put too much weight into the job decision right out of college; it seemed so critical that it will set the tone for the rest of your life, but in truth, there is so much time. I’ve had 20 different careers, and sure, now I can look back and draw the connective thread between them all (well, most of them, I still get hung up on the metal roofing gig!) and see how they all make sense. But at the time, they sure didn’t. It was following my curiosity and seeking to learn something from each experience. By taking on the position of student in my jobs, I was usually able to gain a skill that could be used later on, and then it often was easier to know when it was time to move on. Objective complete, next! What else is out there?
Of course, we are living in different times. Generations ago, people kept their jobs for their entire adult lives. Granted, they also had pensions and a social system and work culture that invested in them…we don’t have that now, and it’s much more accepted to hold many, many jobs….it’s now important to tell a good story about how and why you moved around so much.
Man, I’m still getting hung up on the whole short life span with a stage 4 diagnosis. I’m also still determined not to let that slow me down in the “maintenance phase” of life after chemo. I also realize that when I wrap up this first round, it might be the first of several chemo cycles, but hopefully, there will be long phases of maintenance in between where I can live a semi-normal life. It’s hard to fully conceptualize, though. I started seeing a new PT who specializes in oncology patients, and she was encouraging me to think of my daily energy battery as having a finite life. Even walking slower will help conserve the battery, so walk slower, strive to only have one doctor’s appointment a day….to be very conservative with my energy so I’m not totally toast at the end of the day. And I have been. I tend to live my best life before noon or early afternoon and then retire to the bedroom to nap and rest the remainder of the day. Can I get better about spreading my energy out? Will I have more energy when the chemo is done? I’m not working, but I am still chair of the Oregon Trails Coalition board (although I’m about to bring on a co-chair to help share the duties, which will be a huge help!), and I’m also volunteering to help support Oregon Desert Trail hikers. I have tended to ODT hikers for nine years, and I can’t stop now! At least while I have energy. Finiate energy. And then the books, reading the books you all have sent me. I try to make time for that! I just started Mike Beaty’s suggestion, Ursula K. Le Guin’s Earthsea series (thanks Mike, loving it so far!) and an advanced copy of a book that Snorkle sent about the queerness of nature (fasinating!) and have another on deck, Thirty Below, a story of the first all-women’s ascent of Denali that my friend Lori, or Shake N Bake sent me, AND I just got a volume of poetry in the mail yesterday by an unnamed gifter, Marge Piercy’s Made in Detroit. Thanks stranger!
So many books to read, so little time.
How do I want to spend my days? Reading! Walking, visiting with friends and family, spending time with Kirk, netflix and chill (with popcorn), and travel…and fortunately I do have travel on deck. I’m feeling pretty rich right now. Rich in life (not to be mistaken with money…)
I love the excitement of a trip coming up. I keep adding things to my packing list, things I want to bring to Madison, things that I want to do in Madison.
I’ll be seeing one of my childhood best friends, Jasmine. Our houses were within biking distance from each other in the countryside of Almond. I would bike her home, then she would bike me home, and I would bike her home and vice versa. We could spend whole afternoons doing that, making fun of our brothers who liked to bike in circles at the intersections of our roads “turkey vultures” we would cry out as we peddled past. When we weren’t biking back and forth we might be climbing trees, or making forts in the cornfield, exploring the woods behind her house or mine, or making up ice skating routines in the yard ice rink her dad would make with the garden hose when it was cold enough to keep for a while. AND Jasmine hiked the PCT a few years ago! Kirk and I drove out to meet her and her partner at an Oregon trailhead near Mt. Hood. I brought plenty of food and beer, of course, and we marveled that two of us from Almond, Wisconsin, were PCT hikers. Love it.
Then I’m going to see all the friends that are actually attending the conference, like Allgood (my birthday brother…he is a June ‘77 baby just like me, although I’m a few days older). He just got a job with the hiking app Far Out and will be attending on their behalf. Then there is Steph and Chelsea and Jodi, and probably plenty more from the Oregon Trails Coalition, and then there will be all the other folks I met at trail conferences over the past few years. Exciting!
Then I’ll cap off the week with a visit from some high school friends who are driving up from Central Illinois. We all graduated from Dunlap High in ‘95, and as luck would have it, they just came out to Bend last summer for my birthday! Kelly, Melissa, Celena and Hanna got to see Bend for the first time, and we’ll get to hang out again…quite a moving thing because we all lost Missy less than two years ago to lung cancer. We’ll miss Carrie, our other high school bud who is back in Bend (she moved here about 8 years ago), but I’m spoiled; I get to see Carrie all the time 🙂
Hanna, Carrie, Me, Melissa, Kelly & Hanna’s daughter Emma, Celena must have been taking the photo. We drove to Pilot Butte for sunset after a wonderful birthday dinner.
To explain the top photo a bit….we drove up to Elk Lake to have lunch that day when we pulled over for this photo opp with Mt. Bachelor. NEMO sent me a she-ra crown for my birthday, and Kirk gave me some loppers, so I had to carry both around and pose as much as possible 🙂
So again, how do I want to live my days? With friends! Doing fun things!
The therapist I’ve been seeing even suggested to ask myself what this cancer year (years?) has allowed me to do, and if I’m honest, I’ve been able to refine my life down to the very essentials: spending time with people I love: Kirk, friends & family; reading; writing; and travel. And maybe it’s ok to be grateful? Oh man, that’s a hard one. To be grateful for the cancer while also fighting the cancer. It’s a complicated dynamic we have going on for sure.
I woke again about midnight. I haven’t been staying in bed until 3am like I promised all of you a while ago. Oops. Instead, I keep getting up and reveling in the quiet early morning hours to read, write, drink my coffee, and enjoy the quiet. I just like it, ok?
But my new med makes me quite tired during the day. I’ve struggled to keep my eyes open even when visiting with friends, and the extra napping is probably compounded by the short nights. That has been the main side-effect of my new mutation med so far, sleepiness.
This morning I was scrolling on Instagram when I decided to post a TBT image. TBT, you know “Throw back Tuesday” where you post a memory photo.
Then I started reading my blog posts from the Owyhee packraft trip and remembered that my favorite place to write isn’t at 2am at home when I can’t sleep from the cancer in my bones, it’s writing at 4am in my tent or spread-out cowboy-camping style on my tyvek when I’m hiking.
My tradition since starting to blog on my hikes many years ago is to write every day. Get up in the dark, make my coffee, and write. Write for hours even! This is the beauty of solo hiking too; I don’t have to work around anyone else’s schedule, I don’t have to keep quiet so I don’t wake them up, I don’t have to start walking before I’m ready, I can write and nap, and make a second cup of coffee, and write some more, and eat breakfast, and then hike out when I’m ready.
If you browse back through some of the many adventures that I chronicle on this blog, the routine is the same. I write every morning. That is my jam. That is my happy place. To be alone in nature, writing as the day breaks. I know I’ll get back there, I know it in my bones, so I have that to look forward to. This writing at home is the abnormal part. This writing at home is a placeholder for me in the dark in my tent.
So, instead of recapping this incredible adventure of packrafting a 175 miles of the Owyhee River as a water alternate to the hiking route, I’ll just link to my blog posts here for you. This trip did a great job of encapsulating what I love most about adventures….the going out and not knowing if something can be done, but trying anyway. I didn’t know if one could packraft the Owyhee river in July at 135 cfs, but I wanted to find out, so tried. That is true adventure, and the kinds of adventure I hope to get back to…and by going solo I have learned to rely on myself. I have learned to trust my instincts, trust my training, and trust the world to get me through.
I trust the world to get me through this cancer too.
So here are the posts from my 2-week Owyhee solo packraft trip. Enjoy!
Read about my full Oregon Desert Trail section hike here. (I was the 10th person to complete the route after getting the job to establish it the year before. I had to hike it to know what I needed!)
Sleep feels like a wonder drug right now…especially when I don’t get it on a regular basis. And it breaks my heart that so many of you also struggle to get regular sleep! It seems like an epidemic of sorts. My hope for all of you, for us together during this time, is to cultivate better sleep habits…our brains need it, our bodies need it, our communities need it.
Will you do that with me?
What is one action you could take to work towards better sleep?
One that I have been avoiding but seems the simplest to do is to stay in bed until at least 3am. I did not do that today. I woke up several times as usual, but got out of bed at about 1am. If I can stay put and at least try to sleep until 3am (given my usual 7pm bedtime) that would mean I’m giving myself a chance at 8 hours. I pledge to do that the rest of the week. Pinky swear.
So biopsy. I had my deep bone biopsy yesterday at St. Charles Hospital in Bend. I had to get propped up on my stomach so they could take the sample; it was a CT-guided biopsy of the ovoid mixed lytic and sclerotic osseous lesion within the L4 vertebral body….that means they put me through a CT scanner to find the meatiest tumor which happened to be in my back rib. I was awake during all of it, but was pumped full of pain medications, so I felt pressure when the doctor pushed a drill into my bone, but not pain. Very trippy.
The doctors and nurses were most kind, and the world being the magical place that it is, I even had a connection with my recovery nurse when we found out that we had thru-hiker friends in common. Thank you world, you show me support in the most unexpected places!
Lets see, shall we go down memory lane again today? Lets explore the time after my Pacific Crest Trail thru-hike…that hike was so exhilarating and transformative that I decided I needed to find a job outside, somehow related to hiking. No matter that I had just gotten my master’s degree a few years before; I felt a very strong pull to the hiking community and wanted to immerse myself in that world. (Grad school happened at Goldsmiths College in London from 2003-2004 following my Smithsonian internship and will be a story for another day).
I finished the PCT on September 20 with Nemo and Pouch, and returned to Portland to figure out what the heck I would do next.
A triumphant She-ra at the PCT border monument.One of the best things about hiking the PCT in 2006 was meeting NEMO.Pouch and NEMO fell in love on the PCT and now are married and live on a farm in upstate NY!They are some of my best friends to this day.
This seems like a good place to tease my own PCT photo montage video that I made. This one isn’t as long as the class of 2006 one that Pro-Deal made, but at 45 minutes, it’s a commitment!
When I returned to Portland after the trail I found a new place to live…before the PCT I had been living in a group house in SE Portland on 44th and Lincoln (near Mt. Tabor), and this time I found another room to rent up in NE near the Lloyd Center. I didn’t go back to my graphic design job, and instead worked as a metal roofer for a few months.
I know! Random, right? Metal roofing? What the heck?
I became good friends with several other Portland hikers while we were hiking the trail that year, and it seemed like a good temporary job to work with them for the winter on metal roofs. In retrospect, metal roofing in the cold/wet/gray/rainy season of the Willamette Valley in Oregon wasn’t a brilliant move, but because I was working with friends, it was a pretty fun winter gig.
Luigi and Lint and I had spent some good time on the trail together that year; and as for the job, most days we carpooled together down to a Portland suburb to work. I didn’t know what the heck I was doing, but I am pretty good at following directions so was able to figure it out and do a passable job. A kayaker friend of a friend owned the business, and there was a whole group of us hikers/kayakers who worked together.
Those few months in Portland were so much fun. We were big bike nerds then and got into the whole bike-punk, zoo-bomb scene, which basically meant we rode kids bikes and tall bikes around town; we went on midnight mystery bike rides and got into a whole bunch of other shenanigans. Too much fun!
Here are some more pics from that time…
So during this time I was also trying to figure out what a job in the outdoors meant, and how I would get one. Another friend I made on the trail that year was Jack “Union” Haskel, who ended up being a pretty big influence on my next few career moves. I learned that getting certified as a Wilderness First Responder would help me get a job in the outdoor industry, so that winter I took the 80-hour course so I could be qualified to lead trips in the outdoors.
We also decided to apply to be the Backpacker Magazine’s Get Out More team, which would have meant traveling the country in 2007 and talking to people about hiking and camping and all things backpacking. We didn’t get the gig, but I started applying my graphic design and writing skills to outdoor work, which is still a big part of what I do today.
I designed our Get Out More Team Application to look like pages from Backpacker Magazine.
I applied for a bunch of seasonal jobs for the 2007 season, and finally got some traction with the Southwest Conservation Corps (SCC) which was based out of Durango, Colorado. Trail work was another side of the trail community that seemed essential to the thru-hiking world, so I found an Americorps program where I could train to become a trail crew leader with SCC and then lead trail maintenance crews around Colorado that year. I knew I was in the right place at the right time when I had my interview and learned that SCC had just hired a new Executive Director, Nelson Cronyn, who just happened to be my Peace Corps Burkina Faso Country Director! What a small world is that!?!?!
I left Portland in February of 2007 to head down to Durango for a few months of crew leader training, and jumped in head-first to the trail maintenance world.
Of course I met some amazing people down there, and folks who I am happy to still call friends today.
In fact, Amber is coming to visit me TODAY!
Amber and I led a group of tribal youth in a front-country hitch in Colorado that year, and have remained friends ever since. She now lives in Corvallis, Oregon with her wife Anne…You may remember I just mentioned Amber in a recent blog post, we hiked the Corvallis to Sea Trail together a few years ago. Amber still puts her trail work to good use and has been instrumental in keeping the C2C trail clear of logs…she is great on the chain saw!
Amber, me, Laurie, Nicole, Jonah, Artec & Carith (one of our leaders) in the Great Sand Dunes.Amber has skills.
Learning how trails are built and maintained has been core to how I’ve progressed in my career and as a hiker, and my time at the Southwest Conservation Corps was elemental in that journey. Over the next seven months we worked in places like Canyon of the Ancients, Mesa Verde, and the Great Sand Dunes; there were hitches in state parks and on backcountry trails; and I learned how to build massive rock and log retaining walls, cut down trees with hand tools and chain saws, and so much more.
All the time I was working around Colorado that year, the promise of the next trail I would hike was always hovering in the background. Durango happens to be the southern terminus of the Colorado Trail, and overlaps with quite a bit of the Continental Divide Trail too.
I decided to do a solo thru-hike of the Colorado Trail that fall and hiked out of Durango in mid-August and walked up to Denver (some 500ish miles) by the end of September.
You can read all about that hike on trail journals here:
This was on our “Can’t plan a pandemic” Gila Wilderness River Trip in March of 2020. Quite the adventure!
I’ve had a good couple of days since my second chemo treatment, and that even includes a stomach-blow-out near-miss yesterday. I have been handling this round like a champ, and I do have to credit my care team who has tweaked the meds and formulas that I’m on to give me a smoother ride. Thank you!
All of this does make me reflect on the incredible changes that have come to the chemotherapy realm for us cancer patients. The chemo of old would make your skin peel off. It would turn the soles of your feet black, it would poison your tear ducts and make all of your hair fall out. Unfortunately, we are not immune from the cumulative effects of this poison in our body. A quick search tells me over time these things can compound as:
Dental problems
Early menopause
Hearing loss
Heart problems
Increased risk of other cancers
Infertility
Loss of taste
Lung disease
Nerve damage
Memory issues
Osteoporosis
Problems with digestion
Reduced lung capacity
But it’s worth knowing that not everyone who has cancer treatment gets each of the late effects. Different chemotherapy medicines cause different late effects. So if I didn’t receive the chemotherapy medicines that can cause infertility, I shouldn’t be at risk for that effect (I’m too old anyway, so there!)
But that pushed me in the direction to find out what really has changed, and why? Is now really the best time to get cancer because things have gotten so much better? Why and what does that mean?
This article does a pretty good job at giving an overview, and I’ll distill it here:
Checkpoint Inhibitors
The 2010’s started with clinical trial results centered on the use of checkpoint inhibitors, drugs that unleash a powerful immune system attack on cancer cells and the results helped usher in a new era of cancer immunotherapy.
Checkpoint inhibitors seek to overcome one of cancer’s main defenses against an immune system attack.
Immune system T cells patrol the body constantly for signs of disease or infection. When they encounter another cell, they probe certain proteins on its surface, which serve as insignia of the cell’s identity. If the proteins indicate the cell is normal and healthy, the T cell leaves it alone. If the proteins suggest the cell is infected or cancerous, the T cell will lead an attack against it. Once T cells initiate an attack, the immune system increases a series of additional molecules to prevent the attack from damaging normal tissues in the body. These molecules are known as immune checkpoints.
This is where the cancer gets sneaky, but the drugs got sneaky too. Tumor cells often wear proteins that reveal the cells’ cancerous nature, but they sometimes commit what might amount to identity theft, arraying themselves in proteins of normal cells. Research has shown that cancer cells often utilize immune checkpoint proteins such as CTLA-4 and PD-L1 to suppress and evade an immune system attack. Deceived by these normal-looking proteins, T cells may allow the tumor cell to go undisturbed.
The superpower of checkpoint inhibitors come into play here because their goal is to remove the blinders that prevented the T cells from recognizing the cells as cancerous and ultimately for the immune system to lead an assault on them. Huzza!
Demystifying cancer genetics
I won’t lie, this is the silver bullet I’m waiting for.
The sequencing of human cancer genomes over the past decade has demystified the genetics of cancer. We now have a blueprint of cancer genes in every type of cancer and information about the frequency and type of mutations that occur. This has revealed new genes and pathways important for cancer development and in some cases has already led to new approved cancer therapies.
Genetically sequencing tumor tissue samples guides the therapeutic agents selected for a subset of cancer patients. This tailored approach, termed precision medicine, selects patients most likely to respond and spares those that are unlikely to respond from untoward side effects. Recent discoveries that it’s possible to sequence DNA in the blood to detect cancers provide hope that this approach can be used to identify cancers earlier and follow the response to therapy.
Identifying high-risk individuals
Nooooo, please not the cheeto test.
If there was a cheeto test to help identify cancer, I would have been in trouble a long time ago. Cheetos contain Yellow 6, the third most widely used dye and has been linked to adrenal gland and kidney tumors in animal tests and contains small amounts of carcinogens. But all joking aside, we have real agency over how high-risk we allow ourselves to be based on what we eat, where we live, and more. This topic does sink me into a vegetative funk because of how bad the environmental toxins have gotten around the world. Here are just a few ways we are being poisoned on a daily basis:
Industrial Emissions. Factory and manufacturing industries produce common emissions during production. Sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxides, and volatile organic compounds may be deteriorating air quality and causing acid rain.
Agricultural Chemicals. Pesticides, herbicides, and fertilizers in agriculture have adverse effects, most of which end up in water bodies through infiltration. If released into the water, these chemicals can pollute it, harm aquatic organisms, and get into the water being used as a drinking water source.
Household Products. Many common-use products, ranging from cleaning detergents to paints to solvents, are normally enriched with dangerous chemicals. Disposal or accidental spilling of these products pollutes the soil and water resources, threatening the lives of people and nature.
Waste Disposal. Industrial, agricultural, and domestic waste, when not disposed of properly, pollute the environment through the release of toxic substances. Most dumps, uncontrolled dumping, and Waste disposal through burning contribute to the emissions of some compounds like heavy metals, dioxins, and POPS into the environment, including the soil.
And the pathways to these exposures include:
The air we breath. Interior pollutants mostly result from cigarette smoking, the use of cleansers, and emissions from cooking, while exterior pollutants are from industry chimneys, automobiles, and suspended particles. Suspended particulate matter, nitrogen oxides, and volatile organic compounds are dangerous because they cause respiratory and cardiovascular diseases.
The water we drink and bathe in. Drinking water that is contaminated is dangerous due to such contents such as heavy metals, pesticides, or industrial chemicals and brings with it diseases such as gastro and neurological disorders. Rivers, lakes, or oceans that get polluted by the effects of polluted water from agriculture, industries, and inadequate disposal of wastes also disrupt ecosystems and health-related perils by consuming polluted fish or exposing themselves to those water bodies.
The soil we grow our food in. Pesticide residue and fertilizer in agricultural soils can contaminate groundwater and enter the food chain. Sediment pollution in urban areas is facilitated by industrial operations, waste disposal, and vehicular emissions, which increase the concentration of heavy metals and other dangerous substances that are toxic to plants and human health.
The food we eat (damn you cheetos! Why are you so good??) Pesticide residues become potentially toxic when fruits and vegetables are consumed raw due to their accumulation in the human body, which results in several hazardous effects, such as endocrine disruption and cancer. Furthermore, processed foods contain chemicals like food dyes, preservatives, and even flavoring agents, which are feared to have various effects on the human body in the long run.
Enough of that…lets get back to why things are better now that we have all thoroughly dispaired in how things are worse. 😦
Personalized therapy
We finally know that one size does not fit all. This allows us to personalize therapy to a much greater extent than ever before. In some patients, this means we can treat them with less-intensive therapy and still obtain excellent results. Others may require more extensive therapy or benefit from a different therapeutic approach. For all patients, this means better, more effective care, fewer side effects, and, for many, a longer life.
Translating findings to clinical medicine and improving equity
Ah yes, improving equity and access. SOOOOOOOOO much can be gained by improving equity and access, especially in the medical realm.
We’ve made strides in ensuring that evidence from cancer research studies actually makes its way into clinical practice. For too long, research findings often seemed to remain in academia without being translated to clinical medicine.
Professional and patient advocacy organizations have undertaken a variety of steps to not only implement these advances in the clinical setting but also to make sure they’re sustainable. For example, organizations such as the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) and cooperative research groups regularly inform the broader public about research results and work at the state and federal level on behalf of patients. The development of “implementation science” is having a sizable impact on clinical practice.
Where equity issues have traditionally involved issues such as race, gender, and socioeconomic status, we’re broadening the focus to include considerations of gender identity, patient location (where patients receive treatment may affect their outcome), and treatment of the very youngest and oldest patients. These efforts will help ensure that advances in cancer medicine reach all populations.
So yes, there is more hope than ever that I (we) can go through these intensive cancer treatments and live a well-adjusted life after the fact. I’m not under the illusion that things will go back to normal, and the 25 year-old-Shera will be able to do the same things as the 50-year-old Shera can, but I know there can be a quality of life where backpacking, adventure, and regular time in nature is still a reality.
Now I want to talk about the gifts I received this weekend:
Carrie
Kirk
Brooke and Adryon
Mr. President (AKA Bill Tickner)
Robert Andrews
I want to name a few of my lifelines, not to make them blush (are you blushing?) but because each of these folks is an example of what is happening on a much larger scale for me lately. Their energy and gifts are fractal in nature. (Do you love fractals as much as I do?) In fact, some may say fractals are a lever to change the world.
Fractals are self-repeating intricate patterns that are found throughout nature. From trees, leaves, flowers, ferns, to the tissues and cells of our brains, lungs, kidneys, our artery network and capillaries to the mountain ridges, river beds, or coastlines, fractals form an integral part of our surroundings and our own being. To put it simply for the purpose I want to illustrate here, I have been experiencing patterns of kindness and generosity from my community in just a small sampling of my weekend interactions…and these interactions can have much larger and important implications beyond me and the weekend. These people shared their gifts of time and energy with me, and that pattern multiplies the more they and I do the same for others in our lives. By doing on the small scale, we can impact the large scale. We can pay it forward to make real change around us.
Hippy love for all! 🙂 Ok, back to the peeps and a brief ode to their awesomeness
Carrie. Oh Carrie. Carrie and I have known each other since middle school when I moved to Dunlap, Illinois as the awkward 12-year-old who still thought I could perm my straight hair and look cool. I did not look cool, especially as I tried to coax my locks into any of the gravity-defying hairspray styles of the early ‘90s, but somehow, she saw through the bad hair and became friends. We even spent a few years at Bradley University together (senior year housemates!) and in 2008 she made the leap out to Bend, Oregon and moved here to find out how the other side lives (having spent a corporate career in finance in Chicago and NY). Bend has been a welcome change of pace and now I get to have her as a neighbor and bestie and see her all the time! This weekend Carrie came over to give Kirk a respite. He escaped to the snow and climbed some buttes and worked those legs that hadn’t seen skis yet this year. (that is a feat in itself…Kirk and I are usually skiing ASAP in the year and spend almost every weekend in our camper up in the snow parks cross-country skiing, skate skiing, downhill skiing, or back country skiing. This winter has been an ADJUSTMENT, and Carrie’s gift was giving him the time to enter the white room. She also helped me do some paperwork, scan some items for insurance, prepare some things to mail, and most importantly, introduced me to the Apple TV show, Shrinking. We sat on our bed eating some delicious vegan lasagna that Marina had dropped off the night before and sank into some TV time together. It’s the little things, and I needed my Carrie time this weekend!
Kirk. What can I say about Kirk? He does all the things, he takes it in stride even when I get a little snippy and start demanding things 20 steps ahead of where we are now. “When you fill my water, can you also make me a mint tea, but put it in the blue cup, and bring me some blue berries and remember to check the mail, and bring me the book from the other room and after that I might want some lunch and I’ll need to use the bathroom. Oh and my feet are cold, do you see any socks that I left out, and the room is a bit funky, can you light a candle? Sometimes I see him take a deep breath and untangle the list of demands I just threw at him, sometimes he turns it back at me: “one thing at a time” and I’m forced to slow down and ask just one things at a time. It’s not always pretty, but we are managing, and Kirk has made all of this infinitely more tolerable and even pleasurable in ways. My Captain Kirk!
Brooke and Adryon. These ladies, the above folks have been making up my core team and I am all the better for it. We’ve been friends with Brooke and Adryon for well over 10 years now, and I believe it all started over some really good snacks – probably cheese. We bonded over snacks and the friendship blossomed to much much more over the years. B & A are my rocks, they bring us things we didn’t even know we needed, grocery shop to make sure the fridge is full, send us funny videos and texts throughout the day, cook us amazing food and make yummy juices. This weekend we were going to go over to their place for dinner, but the stomach erupting episode had intervened in my plans, and I opted instead to stay in bed and eat saltine crackers. They came over and we had just as good of a time as we would have over a risotto dinner at their place. Good friends can make any space better.
Mr. President. Bill’s trail name is Mr. President, and even though I’ve only known him for about a year, he has brought a wonderful energy and presence into my sphere. Bill joined the board of the American Long-Distance Hiking Association last year, and he had big ideas of ways to introduce long-distance backpacking to new audiences, and provide them with the knowledge and tools they would need to be successful out on the trail. The ALDHA West rucks are an annual event series that takes place in Feb/March each year, and I have been going to them for years, both as a presenter to talk about new trails like the Oregon Desert Trail, but also to participate in the community and help bring a welcoming tone to curious thru-hiking types. Last year Mr. Pres and I developed an online webinar “thru” the lens of climate change where I hosted a panel of expert hikers to talk about the challenges of snow, water, and fire that hikers will encounter on the trails. You can watch it here:
So, putting the panel together is what brought us together, but it just grew from there, and when he was traveling up from the Bay area to go to next weekend’s ruck in Cascade Locks (there is still time to register folks! Check it out: https://www.aldhawest.org/rucks) he asked if he could stop by and say hi. Oh man, what a wonderful visit! He brought beautiful flowers, and I had just mentioned that I was looking to expand my dark roast coffee collection, and he brought up five different varieties from the Bay. Oh lucky me!! But the best part is the conversation of course. Bill has been doing amazing things getting an ALDHA-West Diversity Scholarship Application open to help fund and outfit new hikers with all they need to start thru-hiking. You see, we think thru-hiking can (and has) changed the world, and the more people out there hiking the better, especially those who don’t traditionally feel safe or welcome in the backcountry. Bill put together a self-sustaining scholarship for new hikers (this year’s recipients will be announced soon!) and we spent the afternoon talking about how hiking, empathy, connection, and community can help right a lot of the wrongs we are feeling in the world. There are those fractals again! We will be doing our best to fractal these thoughts and energy into the world, and if you are so inclined to pick up on some of it and pass it on, all the better!
Robert Andrews. This was the cream on the top of the weekend. I don’t know Robert well, he came on my trail work trip to the Steens Mountain in September when things were starting to fall apart for me. I had been planning to thru-hike the Pinhoti Trail right after our trip and since Robert grew up in Alabama, we had lots to talk about, including how in the world to pronounce “Sylacauga” Alabama. I still find it to be a tongue twister. So in a way Robert was there from the beginning of all of this. So, I might as well go into another phase of my troubles that I haven’t touched on before…(Lets make this a new section, I can come back to finish up on my great visit with Robert after…)
The Neck/Shoulder Problems
Ok, so I told you the other day about how all this began, with a trip to the Wallowas sitting all crunched up in the front of our truck and then pulling my intercostal muscles later that month when I was visiting my parents. But the next part is a critical piece to the puzzle.
I normally lead a few stewardship/trail work trips for the Oregon Natural Desert Association each year, even now that they are a client of mine since I started by businesses. I had a trip scheduled to do some trail work at Reynolds Pond right outside of the Badlands Wilderness just a few weeks after tearing my ab muscles, but I was determined to still lead the trip, preform very light duty, and wear a brace and be responsible like a good injured trip leader would. It was just a day trip, and I did a pretty good job at giving direction. The first part of the day we removed an old barbed-wire fence line from near the pond that wasn’t needed anymore; we unclipped the wire, spooled it up and carried it back to cache it in one spot. The second half of the day we were helping improve the ADA visibility of the trail…some crushed gravel had been added to the trail, and our task was to find rocks to line the path to make it a more visible barrier and to block/prevent any sharp drop-offs into the lake that someone in a wheelchair or is visibility impaired might need some help identifying. I might have pushed it a bit too far in the afternoon rock gathering session. I kept a straight back, lowered myself to the ground, and picked up the smallest rocks I could still reasonably carry to add to the trail. I was definitely overcompensating for my hurt abs, and for some reason keeping a very straight back and not engaging the core seemed like a good idea.
Ok, that trip happened and nothing major came of it, so I decided that I could do the same for a 4-day trail work trip to Steens Mountain Wilderness for National Public Lands Day. I traditionally run these trail maintenance days, and we have a great working relationship with the Burns BLM District, so I was looking forward to the project we had on deck to continue reestablishing the Fred Riddle Trail – a project we started last year
I wore my lumbar brace like a good trip leader, let everyone know I was on light duty, tried to duty as light as I could (which is honestly hard for me), and overall did a pretty decent job of not reinjuring myself….at least at the beginning. Steens Mountain is almost a day’s drive for my volunteers who came from Portland, so we had 2 full days of work planned with travel days on either side. (AND Steens is the half way point of the Oregon Desert Trail. If you haven’t immersed yourself in the ODT yet, check out this video that Oregon Field Guide produced on the trail a few years ago….
And I have a daily blog too from my hike in 2016 out there. (You can really go down the rabbit hole if you want to)
So, end of day 2, I was feeling ok, but there was a tightening in my left shoulder. As the night progressed it started getting tighter and soon I was feeling something like a spasm coming on in my neck…it became so painful that I begged off early to bed where I ended up laying in my tent in excruciating pain all night long. Something had triggered neck spasms in the left side of my neck that were so debilitating that no pain meds I had could touch it, every swallow brought on a 5-second spasm, and I lay there in agony with tears running down my face unsure how I would get home the next day.
A few hours before sunrise I managed to emerge from the tent, Leslayann, a new volunteer friend (who has actually been reading my blog for years and wanted to meet me) woke up too and helped me slowly pack the truck with gear. I wasn’t sure if I should drive since my neck and shoulders were so compromised, but ultimately, I decided to risk it and once the truck was all packed started the long slow drive out. By this time my neck had been spasming for at least 10 hours and I loaded up on ibuprofen and it had started to slow down on the drive, thank goodness. It took me five hours to drive back to Bend and I immediately went to the urgent care and let Carrie (who also happens to work at ONDA) know what was happening with me, so she could help out. I had no idea what had caused the spasms other than I was carrying my body weirdly from the intercostal muscle injury. The clinic didn’t do any x-rays because there really wasn’t a mechanism for injury, and we chalked it up to sleeping on my neck wrong. Carrie helped me get home and return the vehicle to ONDA. I picked up some muscle relaxers and called it a day.
This whole time, by the way, I had been intending to fly out the next morning to attend the Pinhoti Fest in Alabama, and start my 400-hike that weekend. The plan was to hike south to north on the Pinhoti Trail, connect to the Benton MacKaye Trail and follow that to Springer Mountain and finish at the southern terminus of the Appalachian Trail to then get a ride and go to the Benton MacKaye Trail Fest before heading home.
Part of my long-distance trail consulting business strategy is to identify trails that could be improved and hike them to do an analysis of what and how they could be enhanced to help the hiker experience. I didn’t have a contract to do the work on either trail, but I wanted to hike, and they seemed like trails that were established enough but could use a little polishing on the edges to make them the best they could be…so I was trying to establish relationships with the leaders of both trail orgs at the same time. Maybe paid work would come out of it later.
But I was in pain and didn’t think I could hike. I postponed my flight a week, and that also happened to be the weekend Hurricane Helene hit the east coast. It was a perfect storm of my body revolting and extreme damage to the trails out east. That next week I got some acupuncture, still convinced that I could walk off whatever was happening to my neck and shoulders and that I just needed to calm it down. But I was thinking the Pinhoti might not be the best trail to hike. The Alabama sections faired ok, but it seemed a bit tone-deaf to go frolicking through the woods next to some of the most extreme devastation that part of the country had ever seen….and my plan had been to end at the AT, and that was all closed too. So I came up with my back-up plan to hike the Oregon Coast Trail.
The Oregon Coast Trail would be the perfect solution! I could take public transportation to it, I could hop off at any time if my injuries were too much for the hike, there were plenty of towns and friends and people I could tap if I needed some extra help. It was the win win, and I was all packed. Kirk and I took the camper that next weekend up to Waldo Lake so he could get in some foil boarding, and the plan was he was going to drop me off in Eugene on Monday morning before he made his way down to the Sotar raft factory to drop off one of our rafts that needed to be repaired. I would take the bus up to Astoria, see my friend Amy McCormick while up there, then start the hike.
Saturday morning though, I had the unfortunate realization that I would probably not be hiking. I was doing some exercises for my neck and shoulders when I tweaked something again and immediately everything froze up and I lost much of my mobility. We still went up to Waldo that weekend, but I was walking around on egg shells trying not to trigger anything else, knowing that what was happening would take a while to deal with. My October hike was off.
Over the next month I saw doctor after doctor. Chiropractor visits, PT visits, massage, acupuncture…pretty much everything I could think of to calm my neck and shoulders down. It kind of worked, ish? But then on November 1 I slipped and fell in 7/11 and everything got much worse. You know that story by now.
So the abs combined with the neck and shoulders, combined with the lower back all equaled out to a very messed up body. I had registered for the Partnership for the National Trail System conference in Tuscon in November and was determined to still go and participate as I could in the events. I took the wheelchair service through the airports on the way there and back, that helped, and I kept my heating pad and tens unit on stand by so I could plug in and treat at a moments notice. I was in pain the whole time I was there, but grinned and beared it. I had a wonderful time connecting with new friends and old and made a lot of fantastic connections that I know will be fruitful in the future.
My last conference of the year was for the Oregon Outdoor Recreation Summit, I am the chair of the Oregon Trails Coalition who hosts the summit, and we had a fabulous few days at the Sunriver Resort to talk about all things trails around the state. I was keeping the pain at bay, but barely so, and had to skip out on some of the fun like ice skating and late-night dance parties.
My trip to Lousiana happened the following week, but not before a fresh set of muscle spasms started on the right side of my neck and shoulder…thus far it had only been on the left. I was a mess and was looking forward to having my Mom take care of me for a few weeks…and well, we all know what happened when I got down there.
So now you know all the ins and outs of my injuries, so lets get back to Robert!
Robert signed up to bring me dinner this weekend via my Meal Train, and even though we didn’t know each other well, I remembered that he had worked for High Desert Orthopedics and probably had some insight into what I was dealing with.
He was texting with Kirk and mentioned wanting to bring a model/replica of a spine so we could talk about what was going on, I was immediately excited to have him over. And what a knowledge drop! We talked through my imaging, what I was experiencing in my spine, and even what some solutions might be to my collapsing C7 (not necessarily surgery!!! I was stoked to hear there might be non-surgical options!) and that got us into his whole field of practice as a Physiatrist. A what? A Physiatrist. It’s not a well-known position in the spine world, but plays a really important part in all of it.
A physiatrist is a medical doctor who specializes in physical medicine and rehabilitation. They diagnose the cause of the pain and develop a comprehensive treatment plan. They treat conditions of the bones, muscles, joints, brain, and nervous system. These could range from back pain to cancer to multiple sclerosis, and physiatry is a medical specialty that deals with the treatment of people who have a disability, chronic pain, or some other physical problem. The specialty is sometimes called physical medicine and rehabilitation. Physiatry uses physical therapy, pain medicine, and other procedures to treat people rather than surgery. It looks at the physical, vocational, and social needs of the patient. Unlike other medical specialties, it aims to treat the whole person.
Robert was the perfect person to talk about all this with, and on top of that he brought a delicious curry lentil soup with some fresh striatta bread. AND we talked about food. He’s been vegan for a long time, and recommended that I check out chef Ottolenghi for some delicious and simple recipes. I mean, check this one out: https://ottolenghi.co.uk/pages/recipes/mushroom-risotto-crispy-mushrooms-kecap-manis-drizzle
Drool
So those are a few of my gifts from the weekend. I’m feeling energized (although it’s 2:12am and I need to lay down now) and am ready for another week of WTF is happening now???
As part of my ambassador roll with Oboz Footwear, I’ve been writing a series of blog posts for them the past two years. While I sat down in the days after the election to write my final blog of the year about nutrition on the trail, I just couldn’t bring myself to start the post when my head was a swirling mess of surprise, anger, confusion, and disappointment at the results of the presidential election. A lot of what I hold dear is in jeopardy under this new “leadership,” so I wrote this essay instead:
Cover image: Wildhorse Lake embodies the incredible beauty of wild places in Eastern Oregon. All images by Renee Patrick
Since I began backpacking 14 years ago, I have hiked through more national forests, wilderness areas, national parks, and tracts of BLM than I can count…literally over 10,000 miles worth of public lands. But their worth has only recently been on my mind. I guess you could say I have taken for granted that the United States is incredibly rich in wild places.
Public Melting Pots
I’ve seen clues…the long distance trails are a melting pot of cultures from foreign countries. Many of those hikers come to the U.S. because of the lack of public lands in their home countries. Their wild lands are gone, developed, extracted, or patchworked so that one could not walk 2,000 continuous miles for months on end in a space that has been created for the trees, elk, butterflies, rivers and recreation.
Oregon Desert Trail
Since starting to work on establishing the Oregon Desert Trail with the Oregon Natural Desert Association (ONDA) last year, I’ve begun to pay closer attention to public lands. ONDA has been working for 30 years to protect, defend, and restore the land in Eastern Oregon, and the Oregon Desert Trail passes through some of the most spectacular areas east of the Cascade Mountains. Not all of these lands are equal; not all are managed for wildlife or river health, or recreation. I’ve learned there are many layers to the puzzle of public land throughout Oregon and the country.
Why does this matter?
No Guarantees
Because there’s no guarantee the land we currently love to explore will be open to us next year, or in perpetuity. Our modern culture of wants and desires do have an impact on the world around us; consumption on a global scale does impact where we get our lumber, minerals for technological devices, and oil to fuel the cars we love to road trip in.
And those resources come from the land. So the question becomes, where is it appropriate to extract versus protect? If we extract too much or cause environmental damages (intentional or not), we can destroy the very land that sustains us and our wildlife and way of living.
Economic Impacts
If we protect everything from development and extraction, the cost of those goods and services can go up; it impacts those who make a living from timber harvest, mining, or drilling. It’s not an easy answer; it’s not an easy question. But since working to build a 750-mile route through Eastern Oregon, I’m ready to tackle the hard questions.
Our land management agencies are trying to strike a balance between extractive practices and protective measures…that balance strives for sustainability, but is often difficult to manage for all purposes out there…even recreation.
After 5 sections and over 6 weeks, Renee finished the entire Oregon Desert Trail.
Multi-Purpose Management
Working to build this route provides an opportunity to learn about the different layers of public land management: what influences it, what threatens it, what happens if pieces don’t get protected… if they do…it’s given me the chance to know a place on a much deeper level than I ever considered before when my main concern was getting to Canada before the snow falls.
Public land is essential for outdoor recreation, and while my recreation has been a relatively personal experience in the past, now I have the opportunity to help facilitate recreation experiences for a much bigger audience: hikers, ultrarunners, boaters, bikers, horseback riders, snow shoers, skiers…the list goes on.
Be The Change You Wish To See
I love the saying “We must be the change we wish to see in the world,” and for my part I wish to better educate myself on public lands, and want to help others to do the same. Through understanding, I believe we can better care for and steward our special places.
The Steens Mountain Wilderness became the first cow-free wilderness in the United States in 2000
I plan to explore these layers of land management by using the Oregon Desert Trail as a guide. As one hikes, bikes or paddles across Eastern Oregon, the maps, guidebook, and companion materials can be a tool to understand the different landscapes, their importance in the ecological diversity of the area, and the ways in which they are managed.
Speak Up
We all have a say in the future of public land, I believe the first step is through exploration and adventure in these wonderful and wild places…the next is through education.
She-ra Hikes 