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:
First of all, thank you so much for all of your sleep suggestions, advice, tips, etc. The last few nights have been much better, I’ve been clocking in at 5 or 6 hours of sleep which is a huge improvement over last week, and have implemented a few new things after talking to some of you and my doctors:
Using sleep stories on platforms like Calm and Headspace. These are brilliant. I start a story and get invested. I listened to one last night about Mont Saint-Michele in France, a place I’ve always wanted to go since learning more about France in high school french classes, and the initial details really captivated me and brought me in, but as the story progressed maybe the details got more mundane, or I was getting lulled by the voice, but I don’t remember…cause it worked! I fell asleep. I think these sleep stories will be key for me coming up, especially if I am waking every few hours…which after talking with a lot of you seems very common! We collectively have trouble sleeping solid nights.
More meds. A lot of you suggested THC/CBD products, and some of you told me about other medications. I met with my palliative care doc this week and we talked about sleep, and we decided to try trazodone for a while. I don’t like taking meds, before all of this cancer stuff I almost never took medications and preferred a natural way if at all possible, but given I’m on 437 different meds now I’ve kind of given in and will try the pharmaceutical way for now.
Limit screen time. I was in the habit of picking up my phone when I would wake every few hours, to check the time, first, but then I would start scrolling. Which is all new for me, again before cancer I didn’t sleep with my phone in the room. So many things have changed with how I live my life now! I didn’t have my phone in the room, so would have to get up when the alarm went off in the mornings, and didn’t have the temptation to scroll. If I needed to get sleepy in the before times, I would read a few pages of a book and that would put me out. I don’t have that problem at least because of the HUSO sound therapy. I listen to that when it’s bedtime and I’m out. So anyway, I haven’t been picking up the phone as much, and I think that’s been helping.
What have I been up to this week? I don’t know, the days seem to melt into each other and it’s hard to determine what day is what. But I do have a big day coming up tomorrow, I get another biopsy! The two I had done in December ended up being useless, at least for what we need to know now about my genetic mutation, so I am doing it all over again tomorrow. I get a deep bone biopsy and it’s a legit procedure, so no food tomorrow and only clear liquids.
We are going with Foundation One testing, and the biopsy tomorrow combined with the blood draw I had last week should tell us what we need to know! So of course lets look into this Foundation One:
The company says they are an essential partner to patients, physicians, researchers, and biopharma organizations navigating the complex landscape of cancer care. Their genomic insights help guide informed decisions about treatment plans and research priorities. They built a powerful portfolio of comprehensive genomic profiling (CGP) tests that—via both blood and tissue samples—evaluate more than 300 genes known to drive cancer.
Liquid CDx: I had the labs drawn last week, and apparently this test is an FDA-approved companion diagnostic that analyzes guideline-recommended genes from a simple blood draw. It analyzes over 300 genes—making it the most comprehensive FDA-approved liquid biopsy on the market. Sounds good to me!
I believe the biopsy tissue sample will also be sent to Foundation One, and they will put it through their fancy-schmancy testing system to give us an even better picture of what the heck I’m dealing with.
So hopefully we’ll know more soon (I’m not sure what soon means…weeks? A month?) about the specific mutation(s) I have and what kinds of treatments are available for it.
I’m also going to get another radiation blast to my ribs…my ribs have been achy with the tumors and slight fracture I have going on in one of them, so we’re going to hit it again next week right before my third round of chemo.
I’m telling you, its a full time job to have cancer.
What else do I have going on? The hospital provides Reiki, so I’m doing some of that. My PT is coming over this week, so we’ll go over exercises now that I’m out of the wheelchair and walking around the house. I did a lot of walking yesterday at the hospital trying to get some labs done, and it felt good, and I’m a little sore today. It’s been super mild outside in Bend, so I think I’ll try some outside time here soon. I’m trying not to go too hard too fast, yesterday was quite exhausting by the time we finally got home. It’s going to take me a while to get back into walking outside every day condition again, but it’s on the horizon!
Lets go to intermission
Are you an Oregonian who loves hiking?
As many of you know, I enjoy hiking so much that I’ve become much more active in joining in with other trail advocates around the state to share our love of trails and strategize how we can work together to defend our current trails and build the trails we envision.
YOU CAN JOIN US TOO by registering today for Trails Day at the Oregon Capitol on March 10.
8:30-9:00 am: Attendees arrive at our training venue about a half mile from the capitol to sign in and pick up up a schedule, training materials and talking points, and materials to share with legislators. (There will be coffee and light snacks!)
9:00-10:30: Welcome and training: We’ll let attendees know what to expect, go over tips for a productive meeting with your legislators, and give a primer on our key issues.
10:30-11:00: Small group practice and Q&A.
11:00-4:30: Grab a (free) sack lunch and head to the Capitol for meetings with legislators and/or legislative office staff. Expect to have 2-4 small group meetings (generally 15 minutes) scheduled during the afternoon. We’ll ask each meeting group to share a short meeting report so we can track support for our issues and respond to any questions that legislators or staff may have. (You don’t have to have all the answers!)
5:00-6:30: (Optional) Join a group of trails advocates at the Joint Committee on Transportation Meeting. (We don’t yet know if there will be a public comment opportunity during this meeting, but it’s a great opportunity to see a bit of the legislative process at work.)
4:00-7:00: (Optional) As you wrap up your meetings, join other trails day participants for camaraderie, an informal debrief, and a bite at a local watering hole before heading home!
What are we asking for? Our platform is straightforward!
Oregonians love trails! More than 80% of Oregonians use local trails and are happier, healthier and more connected to their communities because of it.
Oregonians want to keep our trails open! We’re working toward a lasting legislative fix to recreational immunity through passage of SB 179 with amendments.
Oregonians want alternatives to walking, biking, running, and skating on high-traffic roadways! We must address the funding shortfall for the Oregon Community Paths program as part of a safe, green, fairly-funded transportation funding measure.
Oregonians want to see beloved trail projects move forward! We must continue to build on recent planning efforts for Oregon Signature Trails like the Salmonberry Trail and Oregon Coast Trail and not let those plans gather dust on a shelf.
Oregonians love trails! More than 80% of Oregonians report using local trails, so of course we want our state legislators to partner in the work to keep trails open and build the trails we envision for our communities.
I don’t know if I’ll be able to be (game time decision?) in Salem on March 10, which is why I’d like to ask you to consider going on my behalf!
I went last year and many of us were learning to speak up and have meetings with our electeds for the first time. It wasn’t that scary! I wrote up a blog post about how it all went last year so you can give it a read and decide if this is something you would like to participate in. You don’t need to be affiliated with a trails group, and you don’t need to be a hiker! The Oregon Trails Coalition represents motorized and non-motorized trail users, and there are lots of issues we can combine our voices on together.
Early this morning I got an email from Mark Trails (one of my CDT hiking buddies) with a photo that brought back a flood of memories.
Instead of rehashing these first few days going into Colorado with Mark, trying to ski the trail, and getting spit out, I’m going to redirect you to my blog posts from those days to help tell the story of one of the hardest weeks of my life on the trail.
Here are a series of links to my blog that will explain everything:
That was a good chapter of the CDT, things got a bit easier from there, actually did they? No, they didn’t.
Mark Trails and I went low again, he had a scary fall when we headed back to the trail from Creed. I lit myself on fire and had to walk with 3rd degree burns to Salida, and wow, I guess the brutality didn’t end at Durango. Keep reading my blog to get all the deets!! (at the bottom of each day’s blog post will be a link to the next day)
In lieu of another cancer update this morning, I’m going to repost something I just shared over on my Facebook page:
Thanks for the pic Mark Trails! Mark and I had a great stay at Ghost Ranch along the CDT in New Mexico (click for day 32 of my CDT hike here), and I got to take a side trip into Santa Fe to hang out with Extreme Alan (Alan Scott) for a few days too!
Hard to believe this was 10 years ago.
And I’m glad for the memory because there is ALOT of uncertainty and chaos around how our trails and public lands are going to be managed this year.
This week the Continental Divide Trail Coalition is heading to Washington DC with the Partnership for the National Trails System and American Hiking Society to speak to congress on our behalf. These organizations are celebrating their 28th year of Hike the Hill, a joint effort to bring together the trails community to advance shared trail priorities with congressional and federal agency leaders.
They will be advocating for trails funding, public lands management and conservation, equitable access, and other top priority issues that sustain trails and improve access to public lands.
THIS YEAR the trails community faces a sense of urgency unlike any seen in recent years as a new administration and Congress look to reshape the federal government and funding.
It is paramount that the trails community’s voice is heard by attending in-person or if unable to come to DC, to meet locally with district staff to form or strengthen key relationships and demonstrate the importance and value of trails.
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???
I woke up about midnight in excruciating pain. My neck and shoulders were on fire, and I could barely move without setting off waves of muscle spasm. Imagine if this was happening in my tent, 10 miles from the nearest out.
I couldn’t.
This was the reason I wasn’t out hiking this October. I would not be watching the colors slowly change in the trees as the trail tread gradually disappeared under splashes of gold, red, orange, yellow, and maroon. This was the reason I had to distract myself from the huge gaping hole left in the wake of what I love to do more than anything and can’t do…so much so that I designed my whole career around it…what was I going to do if I wasn’t thru-hiking?
The answer is obviously to try and fix the body. But that will require rest and very little movement for the near future…something I’m not so good at.
My neck and shoulders have been painful for two weeks now, and I think that pain was triggered by a rib injury that I sustained almost a month ago now. Several trips to urgent care and lots of epsom salt baths later and now I’m trying the chiropractic route. Last night was probably the most pain I’ve been in this whole time, but after the first two adjustments I finally feel like there is progress in my quest to return to backpacking condition. And yoga! I haven’t been able to do yoga for a month now, or much of anything else. I’m turning into jello with every passing day. How does anyone stand the inactivity?
If I had been hiking the Pinhoti right now, where would I be? Lets see. I would have started walking the Sunday after Pinhoti Fest ended…that was a little over a week ago now, and at a 15 mpd pace, I would have hiked about 135 miles.
Instead of making my first cup of coffee in the zero-dark hours on trail, hunkered in my sleeping bag, trying not to spill it all over myself as I start writing this blog on my phone, I am in front of my laptop in my office at home, drinking coffee through a straw. It hurts too much to bend my neck to sip, so I have to bring the coffee to me.
This not-hiking is agony, and I have weeks of it ahead of me. I am not working during this time; my brain needed a good long walk as much as my body did. Walking is what feeds it with new ideas, hiking causes it to play parkour with ponderings and musings. I need to give this hardworking brain of mine a rest too, so I am going to play a little game with myself while I heal. I’m going to give myself a virtual hike along the Oregon Coast Trail.
Wait, the Oregon Coast Trail? Yes, well, after I had pushed my departure off for the Pinhoti Trail for a second time, I stewed in self-pity for a few days before glomming onto the idea that I could rest another week and still go hiking. The Oregon Coast trail was close, had plenty of towns (outs) to bail if my body couldn’t take it, and I could talk a lot about real-time trail issues our long trails in Oregon are facing (a la Oregon Trails Coalition ).
I could even take public transportation! Walk out my front door, hop on a bus, then another, and arrive in Astoria. From there I could walk as far as my body would let me, and bus back home from wherever I made it to on the coast. A true masterpiece in connectivity. And talk about connectivity! The Oregon Coast Trail ties into other trails that are included in the Oregon Signature Trails project. There’s the Salmonberry Trail , a work in progress that will connect Portland with the coast, and potentially share some tread with the Oregon Coast Trail, and also the Corvallis to Sea Trail …the route Amber and I walked three years ago to its western terminus at Ona Beach. I’d walk right past it!
Then there are all the bazillion times I’ve been to the coast in the 20 years I’ve lived in Oregon. The first time I went to Beverly Beach with some new friends, we whipped ropes of seaweed like 13-year olds. Then there was the time Cindy and went hiking for New Years, and some hoodlums shot a bullet into our rental car. Or the time I taught a light-weight backpacking course at Portland Community Collage and we overnighted on the coast.
With a virtual hike of the trail, I could imagine and research what I would be experiencing in real time. What would that look like? What would I see and learn about the area? Where does the trail go, and why? What are the issues facing the Oregon Coast Trail and the coast itself? For the rest of my convalescing time, I’ll take myself on a virtual journey and share it with you like I usually do in my daily blog. BUT since I’m at home and love maps and multi-media storytelling, I’m going to make a story map of my virtual hike so you all can learn alongside me, in real time.
Each day I’ll “hike” my miles, and the next day will keep up my morning writing routine with you here. I’ll cover 400ish miles, create a story map, and share it with you.
Ok, lets go. (click below to start the journey- This story map is best viewed on a desktop, laptop, or tablet.)
I’ve been planning my Pinhoti thru-hike for most of the year, and now it’s not happening.
The Pinhoti Trail has been on my radar since 2022 when Cindy and I visited our Peace Corps friend Richard and spent a rare snowy Alabama afternoon at Cheaha State Park.
I’ve been hiding from the reality that this is not the right time to hike for about a week now…an injury (actually a series of injuries) and the devastating hurricane that battered the East Coast have contributed to this change in plans, and oh how I’ve been resisting all of it!
Fortunately, the Pinhoti Trail has been spared the destruction of hurricane Helene, but the Appalachian Trail has not. A full third of the trail is now closed, and it could take a looooong time for a full recovery. There are many ways we can help in sending money and support for the communities affected along the East Coast, and I’ll be modifying my fundraiser soon to recognize East Coast recovery efforts along with raising money for the Oregon Trails Coalition.
September has been the hardest month of my life, hands down. The heaviness of this current moment comes from many different aspects of my life…and most of it I am unable to control. I ache for the solace and peace that extended time in nature brings, but what does that look like if I can’t hike?
My body controls my future at this point….I can’t rush the healing, and I can’t let my stubbornness and determination derail my ability to backpack in the future by heading out too soon with full pack weight.
So, I wait, I plan, I come up with backup plans, and backup backup plans. I still have hope I’ll be able to do some hiking in October, but I have to let go of expectations and take each moment as it comes.
After the hike through the Gila, I attended the Continental Divide Trail Coalition’s Trail Days festival in Silver City to host the first of my Intentional Hiking fireside chats.
A big thanks to Silver City Daily Press for covering the evening and capturing some of the sentiment shared by hikers and community members:
Community members and hikers gathered around a campfire Saturday night at the old Silver City Waterworks to discuss building on the sense of community that draws people along the Continental Divide Trail to Grant County in particular.
The Waterworks opened to accommodate CDT hikers for Trail Days, with about 40 tents booked each night for camping.
Veteran hiker and original CDT ambassador Renee Patrick led the discussion focusing on the relationships between hikers and the communities and people along the trail. She is the founder of Intentional Hiking, which offers an online discussion series about various hiking-related themes. One point of discussion was that hikers need to remember to be humble — they are just one of hundreds each year who make the trip from border to border.
Kristy Lopez, owner of Doc Campbell’s Post in Gila Hot Springs, said she tries to give hikers the benefit of the doubt, but sometimes it can be difficult.
“They say, ‘I hiked all the way from Mexico,’” Lopez said. “Two days ago there was a guy that came in, and I said, ‘That’s awesome. So did all the 12 other people on the porch.’”
But hikers have generally been helpful for her family business, she said.
“We wouldn’t be where we are now if it wasn’t for hikers sitting down with us and spending time to tell us what they need and what they don’t need,” Lopez said.
“I think we have to be humble and be thankful for what we have access to in the communities. Sometimes we forget that,” said hiker Mike “Just Mike” McClue. “It’s amazing to talk to the local people and understand the history. It’s not just about us.”
Michael Darrow, tribal historian for the Fort Sill Chiricahua Apache Warm Springs Tribe, agreed that hikers should know about the history of the land.
“For us, the whole thing is considered sacred land,” he said of the Gila region. “Historical events took place all along the way, and they were special to people in our tribe. Keep in mind some of the things that have taken place before, and it can have an influence on the way you think, the way you feel as you go through the area.”
Likewise, people in communities should get more involved with the CDT, Raul Turrieta said. Locals have gone to the Gila River and the Gila Wilderness for recreation for years, he said, but hiking has not been a big activity for people who live.
“We need to spend more time on hiking, because they don’t really understand how important the CDT is,” he said. “Next year, I would really like to get involved in stimulating the community and bringing in the Mining District also for them to come out and do a lot of hiking.”
Turrieta said it’s also important for hikers to share their experiences with youth to help them get interested.
Overall, the CDT is about connections, Patrick said, including the physical connection across the continent, connection to nature and connection to each other.
“That’s something that long-distance hiking has really helped me realize, is I’m connected to everything, I’m a part of everything,” she said. “Finding that connection is what’s so unique about what we do. It helps us understand that in a way that’s hard to do when we’re in our walls, roofs and Wi-Fi all the time.”
—JUNO OGLE
Stay tuned…I plan to hold another discussion at PCT Days this August!
One of the reasons I keep coming back to long distance backpacking is the pure enjoyment of it all. Sure there is pain, and dirt and a fair amount of suffering, but there is a lot of fun.
When experiences are as intense as thru-hiking can be, you learn a lot about your fellow hikers in those times. Seeing a person’s true colors leads to deep connections that often span years between hikes, and often those most memorable times include a lot of laughter.
Friends, and very funny guys, Squatch and Jester are great at putting those ridiculous moments on film. You should check out Squatch’s series, Walk, Still Walking, Even More Walking and Walked. He caught me on film in Even More Walking at the Hiker Heaven hostel in 2006…while he was interviewing me he was also deploying a fart machine.
Jester’s series Wizards of the PCT and Embrace the Brutality are freaking hilarious, for anyone looking to learn about the non-serious side of thru-hiking, check out these two guys’ movies.
Having fun can include carrying ridiculous things (you gotta find out what the Wizard is in Jester’s movie). I won a whoopie cushion in a raffle at the PCT kick-off in 2006 and carried it for most of the trail.
Why? Cause.
Mags deemed my whoopie cushion not useless, so I carried it.
Yep, still have it on the Oregon/California border, 1700 miles later.
Oh yeah, did I mentioned that I shaved my head prior to hiking the PCT? I had a going away party where for every $5 someone donated to my hiking fund, they could take some scissors to my hair. At the end of the night we shaved it all off and also shaved “PCT” into the back of my head (my friends cut enough of my hair off that I was able to buy the digital camera I took on the trail that year!). That lead to lots more shaving that night…
So one of the best parts of the PCT for me was meeting my dear friend NEMO. That girl knows how to have fun. Along the hike she taught me how to knit.
Really, knitting is a pretty good hobby to have on a long trail. Yarn doesn’t weigh much, and you can make useful things like hats for hikers while you walk!
We would knit on all the passes in the Sierra.
I finished my first hat at VVR for my AT hiking friend little g (he later wore it on his PCT hike!)
Before long we had a whole crew of hikers knitting. We started calling ourselves the High Alpine Knitting Club…here we are on Donohue Pass.
And then there was the sword. When we got to Ashland, NEMO and I decided to see a Shakespeare play (Ashland is well known for their Shakespeare Festival each year). Well, it just so happened that NEMO found a lightweight sword that she had to give me. (My trail name is She-ra after all, Princess of the Power).
I decided to knight her on the street in Ashland. (Yes, those really were our hiking clothes, we would hit up thrift stores along the trail for new duds when our old ones were wearing out)
And I carried that sword to Canada.
The point of all this (oh man, I have so many more stories!) is to have fun on your hike. Sometimes the seriousness of day-to-day life doesn’t allow for ridiculous antics that you can get up to on a long trail.
Life is far too short to be so serious.
Donna Saufley got in on the shaving action in 2006 too.
Bama & NEMO at Hiker Town. Not quite sure what’s going on there.
When people ask me how I train to hike a long trail, my first response is, “by eating everything I can.” Then I laugh. But it’s kind of true.
Really? You are going to put that into your body? Well, yeah, sometimes…
During a typical 20-30 mile day on the trail most hikers burn around 6,000 calories a day, an amount that is impossible to carry no matter how much peanut butter, olive oil, or chocolate you have in your pack. By the end of a 5-6 month long hike many thrus look like mere shadows of their former selves, as often the body starts consuming muscle once it has burned off all the fat reserves.
Now for women, this isn’t always the case. Our womanly figures like to preserve the baby-making ability, and will hoard the fat/muscle more than our male counterparts. I’ve heard some women say they didn’t lose any weight during a hike, which can come as a surprise to them.
I’ve typically slimmed down quite a bit over the duration of a long trail, but then again, my preparations have included consuming as much cake, beer, and cheetos as possible.
I found an amazing cache of trail magic at Rainy Pass, mile 2,593 on the PCT. At this point you really can eat whatever you want.
This year I’m doing things a little differently. While I probably won’t say no to a pint of IPA from one of our local breweries in Bend, I am keeping up a regular fitness routine, and I do want to eat more nutritious food on the trail.
Over three years ago I started attending the Namaspa yoga studio in Bend that specializes in Baptiste Yoga, an incredibly challenging yoga discipline, that has transformed my body from regular 2-3 sessions a week. I have never been as strong as I am now.
Now this is a full-body strong, not the typical strong that results from 2,000 miles, a condition we like to call the T-Rex syndrome. The T-Rex is a hiker that has tree-trunks for legs, someone who can climb thousands of feet without labored breathing, but can’t throw a rock past the closest tree. Think T-Rex: all leg and no arm.
Oh I hear hikers say they are going to keep their core & arms strong through daily sit-ups and push-ups. But really? At the end of your typical 28 mile day in the mountains it’s all you can do to lift your spoon to your mouth before falling asleep in your Ramen noodles. We expend so much energy during the day it’s unusual for the idealistic fitness routines to last past the first week of a hike.
So this year I’m starting the trail stronger than ever before (thanks to yoga) and also with a steady program of weekend warrioring. Kirk and I usually get out of town as soon as we can on Friday or early Saturday morning to ski, hike, packraft, raft, bike or any of the other 100’s of activities close to Bend.
Last weekend we went packrafting. This is my patented don’t swallow any of the cow-dung water move.
I’m hoping this will make the first month on the trail a little less painful than my previous 7 thru-hikes, but you never know. I’m 37 this time around, and age has a way of throwing aches & pains your way in body parts that you never knew existed.
But really…hiking all day every day is really hard to train for. The first few weeks will suck and your body will hurt, I’ll try to spare you too much whining when I start hiking north!
Oh feet. That’s a whole other issue the first few weeks on the trail.
Getting through the winter months before a thru-hike is agonizing. I hate to say I’m just biding my time, but that’s it in it’s essence. Watching the days pass is easier if I keep really busy, which is a cinch this year as I have a full time desk job and have been freelancing 10-15 more hours a week. That leaves just enough time for yoga, walks, a bit of skiing/hiking/packrafting and, a bit of reading.
Reading has always been my coping mechanism of choice; diving into a good adventure story is like a salve for the ache. I picked up a few books recently at the local used book store that have helped.
The first book, Walking Home, hasn’t really taken my mind of the CDT so much, but fanned the fire of the next adventure.
Alaska weighs heavily on me. I’ve read so many books about Alaskan adventures, and Kristin Gates‘ last few adventures in particular shout possibility. Kirk and I are thinking an extended packraft/hike/ski trp in Alaska is on the docket soon, but until then I’ll dive into books like the one above.
Other treasures like the book True by Michael Melius is a real find. Small independent press books are some of my favorites, and this one in particular is fantastic.
These are some deep thoughts for my mind to chew on as the days continue to get shorter.
And then there are trail journals. Oh how I love trail journals. I often find an eloquent story-teller and read through their whole five months of daily journals in just a few days or weeks. I’ve been in the middle of Colter’s trip on the Desert Trail lately; his trip is particularly interesting as he’s the first person (i think?) to have hiked this 2,200ish mile route from Mexico to Canada. Just a stone’s throw from the PCT at times, I think people forget there are many other hikes out there to do, of your own devising, or re-erecting the paths of past travelers.
So I continue with my books and journals. Spring will come.
She-ra Hikes 