Day 127: no t(r)olls on the bridge

Day 127
Miles: 5!
From Cascade Locks to Gilette Lake

Thunder Island is bright and windy, festooned with little colored peaks and domes, populated with a tribe of hairy, smelly hikers. It’s morning!

I stayed up way past hiker midnight last night, and I’m tired this morning. J and I wander around Cascade Locks for a bit while PCT Days gets started. The Bridge of the Gods is closed to cars for 45 minutes this morning to allow pedestrians to enjoy the bridge, and it feels like a goodwill border relations gig up here, the Oregonians mingling with the Washingtonians, people snapping pictures and playing bagpipes. We stand up on the bridge and watch the mad rush of the Columbia through the metal grating below our feet, but we save our first steps into Washington for later.
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Day 126: PCT Days!

January 11, 2015 by Gizmo Posted in PCT 2014, Uncategorized Tagged backpacking, backpacking blog, gizmo's pct blog, pacific crest trail, pacific crest trail blog, PCT, pct 2014, PCT 2014 blog, pct blog, thru-hike, thru-hiking blog, trail journal Leave a comment

Day 126
Miles: 0
Portland to Cascade Locks

Three days to do my chores just means a mad scrabble on the fourth morning to finish them all. J and I precariously load our bicycles with boxes and make one last ride together, to the post office. Resupply: mailed. We pack up our backpacks, and weigh them and ourselves, just because there’s a scale in the house. Both our packs, with our gear, five days of food, and a liter of water, ring in at exactly 30lbs. Not bad. As for myself, I’ve gained back seven of the pounds I lost in the Sierras, and I think all of it is in my thighs. Bike muscles. It’s a relief to not be on the edge of emaciation anymore.

Days 124 and 125: Going nowhere fast

January 10, 2015 by Gizmo Posted in PCT 2014, Uncategorized Tagged backpacking blog, bicycle touring, gizmo's pct blog, hiking, pacific coast bicycle route, pacific crest trail blog, PCT, pct 2014, PCT 2014 blog, pct blog, pct days, resupply, thru-hike, thru-hiking blog, trail journal Leave a comment

Days 124 and 125
Miles: 0
Portland

My burning desire to finally get back on trail and to start the final push to Canada has been thwarted by my burning desire to hang out in Portland, eating delicious food, taking naps, and seeing old friends. Snap. On top of that, doing our food resupply for this last stretch seems to be a three-day process for me and J. One day to buy, one day to pack the boxes, and one day to mail them…

The weather is beautiful, heartbreakingly perfect, the sort of weather you don’t even realize is weather until you think back on days full of lunches on patios, long bike rides around town, evenings outside: Portland in the summertime.

Our chores are almost done. We’ve been to REI (new undies and socks). We stopped by the Snow Peak store, full of titanium and other things we can’t afford. I bought a new titanium spork. This one is purple. I also bought a beautiful wool blend, long-sleeve shirt, on an incredible sale for a still outrageous price, to replace the purple one I’ve worn down to rags. J convinces me that’s it’s too beautiful to ruin hiking, so I just put in the box of things to mail home instead.

Most importantly, we bought hundreds of dollars of groceries. We sat down on the sidewalk in front of Safeway in downtown Portland and ripped everything out of the excess packaging (so much packaging!) and bicycled it back to J’s brother’s apartment. J’s brother&girlfriend are healthy types, the sort of people who have a house full of delicious, nutritious, organic food and a drawer of high-end chocolate, and it is downright embarrassing to be doing our hiking resupply in their house. J and I wait until they leave to do the necessary work of divvying up bags of candy bars (pounds and pounds), 2 lb bags of gummy bears, 2 lb bags of sour patch kids, 2 lb bags of skittles, potato chips, wasabi peas, instant potatoes, pop-tarts, tortillas, tuna packets, brownie mix to stir in straight with our instant coffee, and on, and on. Once it’s all sorted and packed into USPS priority boxes, J tries calling some of the resupply stops in Oregon to see if we can re-route some of the boxes there (that we never picked up) to resupply stops in Washington. Shelter Cove resort won’t even talk to PCT hikers about their boxes unless you’re there in person to pick it up, and we are no exception. Other boxes we simply can’t find. (J threw away the tracking numbers back in Reno, and I’ve been upset with him about it ever since. I should probably get over it, but it continues to be a problem, over and over. Don’t throw away your tracking numbers! Don’t do it!) But! finally the Big Lake Youth Camp kindly agrees to forward a box for us.

Aside from chores and the temptations of the good life here in Portland, the biggest reason for our delay is PCT days. I’d never heard of PCT days before yesterday, but apparently it’s a thing – a thing sort of like kick-off (aka ADZPCTKO). It’s in Cascade Locks, right where I will be getting back on the PCT, taking place at the same time I will be getting back on the PCT, and I have a ride. (It’s 3D to the rescue again.) I wasn’t initially interested in going to PCT Days – I don’t need any gear, and I don’t know that I’m particularly excited about getting caught in the hiker bubble that will inevitably result. And, one more thing that I don’t particularly like to acknowledge to myself, is that I’m still not sure how I feel about my bicycle detour, and I’m definitely not sure how I want to talk about it to all the other hikers who put the miles in the hard way. (The real way?) There are the things that happen in your life, and then there’s the narrative you spin out of the raw material. I’m not sure that the narrative isn’t more real than the facts. The facts disappear with the passing of time, gone through your fingers the moment they’re over, but the narrative – the story – persists. Every day I spin that narrative a little bit more, here on this blog, choosing what is positive, what is negative, what I will preserve, and what I leave to moulder on the dust-bin of a leak memory.

I don’t have a story to tell yet about the bicycling. It hasn’t needed to be a story, it still was. Now it’s over, and I get to create it from scratch.

Meanwhile, last night in town. A mad push to finish some blogging, a last night with friends. Forward and onward.

Day 123: Work??? and other thoughts

January 8, 2015 by Gizmo Posted in PCT 2014, Uncategorized Tagged backpacking blog, bicycle touring, detours, gizmo's pct blog, highway 101, pacific coast bicycle route, pacific crest trail, pacific crest trail blog, pct 2014, PCT 2014 blog, thru-bike, thru-hike, trail journal 4 Comments

Day 123
Miles: 0
Portland

We wake up on Nick’s floor, next to Pacman, snoozing on the couch. Back in town. So many chores, decisions. The detritus of town-living.

Being in the city is still overwhelming, even after being on the highway for weeks. A city is funny place to transition back to the trail, but that’s the plan. I’ve been texting with 3D, and she’s in Portland too, which is crazy and amazing.

Wait a minute, you say. What DID happen with 3D? Last that Team Whiskers saw her, she was riding away, alone, to find her way back to the PCT. Short story is she pedaled north into the blistering Central California heat to the small town of Weed, fortuitously caught a bus to Ashland, OR, and found her way back to the PCT, then hiked Oregon. (The longer story can be found on her blog, HERE.) She sent us texts of hiker parties and rainbow kitty unicorn butterflies and Crater Lake. We sent her pictures of redwoods and the sea. She was the instigator of this crazy bicycle detour, and then left us to ride it out her own way, on a parallel journey, ending up here, now, same as us.

I have all these mixed, conflicting feelings about the PCT, and being a thru-hiker, and seeing other hikers. J and I have had an on-going discussion/argument about what, exactly, does it MEAN to be a thru-hiker, and we continue it. It’s a good question. I’ve been thinking about it since my very first day on the trail, when I had to decide if I was going to call myself a thru-hiker or not. Can you be a thru-hiker when you haven’t gone thru anything (or hiked a single step yet)? What if you only go part way thru? What if, just for example, you bicycle thru, just for a part of it?

The other question, for me at least, is just how much all of this internal questioning is motivated by what I think my peers will think about it, about me. So much of “cool” crowd in the PCT/long-distance hiking world seems centered around the glorification of those who hike faster, longer, farther than anyone else. Competition seems so firmly ground into our psyches that most of us have no idea how to deal with having dozens of other people around us having parallel experiences. It doesn’t make any sense to think this way – your first 25 mile day is not negated by your friend hiking their first 26. In fact, no one’s achievement is in any way affected by any other’s. The PCT is not a race. It’s a place, 2660 miles long, and one mile wide. Seeing all of it in one year, in one trip, in one go, to see it thru – that’s something special. But it doesn’t have a thing to do with your worth as a person.

Or so I tell myself. The things I know consciously, I am striving to learn to understand unconsciously. A lifetime of living in the ratrace is hard to shake. I know that getting off the trail and onto the bicycles has saved my PCT trip. My feet, after a month of not hiking, have finally stopped hurting. (The shooting heel pain struck as recently as last week.) My body is strong again. My spirits are high again. More importantly – most importantly – my soul-destroying, neurotic obsession with an “orthodox” thru-hike, at the exclusion of finding meaning, hope, or joy in my journey, has faded and left. I would not have relinquished it voluntarily, but the fires took it from me. Gave my heart back to me. A gift.

This is something I will have to think about some more.

Speaking of the ratrace, I’m going to go into the office today. (It weirds me out just to write this sentence.) I was lucky enough to get a leave of absence for this summer, and I didn’t have to quit my job like so many others. However, my work email password expired in… May… so I don’t actually know if I really still have a job. They could have laid me off two months ago for all I know. I can’t update my password unless I’m on the company network. I tried to update my password in Reno, as my friend Jule, who was hosting me, works for the same company, but the network was down that day. So, I’ll try again today, at the office in Portland.

I borrow Nick’s car, and navigate his standard through Portland traffic and a maze of freeway interchanges and through the suburbs – all terrifying. I’m out of practice at this sort of civilized thing. Wearing my hiking pants and the shirt without any holes, I walk in and convince the admins to let me borrow a computer, and I catch up on my email.

Can’t say I’ve missed it.

I still have a job, and I’m relieved/disappointed to have real life waiting for me, just around the corner. You have to pay for adventures somehow, I guess.

I haven’t managed to take care of any trail chores – resupply, etc, – but those can wait till tomorrow. J and I relocate from Nick’s place to J’s brother’s, and say goodbye to Pacman, who we leave to his own devices. Then, biking down the streets of Portland, we run into Chris and Sarah, fellow thru-hikers who were stranded by the fires in the town of Chester with us. The PCT! It’s almost here. PCT, PCT, PCT I chant to myself, pedaling across town. PCT. PCT.

Day 120: the end of a road

December 25, 2014 by Gizmo Posted in PCT 2014, Uncategorized Tagged backpacking blog, bicycle touring, detours, gizmo's pct blog, highway 101, pacific crest trail, pacific crest trail blog, PCT, PCT 2014 blog, pct 2014 blogs, thru-bike, thru-hike, thru-hiking, trail journal Leave a comment

Day 120
Miles: 20*
From Clay Myers state park to Cape Meares

Despite all the gray and the clouds and the gloom of the coast, it hasn’t actually rained on us – until last night. Nick must be our bad luck charm. Or perhaps he’s just his own bad luck charm, seeing as he forgot to pack his rain fly for what is turning out to be a very rainy weekend trip. Ol’ Big Blue, our trusty tarp, kept him dry last night, but it’s not going to be any help for any of us this morning.

We pack our things into plastic bags and get ready for a chilly morning. I zip my frogg toggs jacket on over my pack and the four of us ride out.

Riding uphills in pouring rain, downhills in pouring rain, and I think about how this bicycle trip is almost over. Nick is riding with us all the way back to Portland, and this will be over in the length of a long weekend. I feel like we’ve been riding bicycles forever. The Pacific Crest Trail seems like a long ways away, although technically, I’m closer to it than I’ve been in weeks. I’m glad to be getting off the bikes, but I’ve also sort of hit a stride. Maybe not today. This rain is cramping my style.

Nick is much faster than us, and he takes the front with J while they buddy it up. Pacman and I bring up the rear today, stopping first to fix Pacman’s flat tire, then to fix mine. Looks like we both ran over the metal staples in the road.

It’s lunchtime, I’m wet, I’m hungry, I’m cold, and we’re riding into the little town of Netarts. We find an espresso shop and set up camp at a table by the window to warm up. It’s a good thing the staff is friendly, because we stay there for hours. The evening is going to creep up on us quick, though, so we head back out to find a place for the night. The clouds have rolled back to let in the sun and the steep uphill to Cape Meares reminds us that we probably didn’t bring enough water. (Where’s the PCT water report when you need it.)

Cape Meares has a road that wraps up and around the headland before coming back down to run alongside Tillamook Bay. A series of landslides has destabilized the road, so it is closed to cars. But it is open to bicyclists. This sounds like a bicyclist booby trap, but’s it’s actually a bicyclist’s dream – a windy, scenic road that is totally closed to cars? We walk our bicycles in past the gate and start a dreamy ride down the winding road pasted with wet leaves, silent except for wind in the trees.
“This is pretty post-apocalyptic,” Nick observes. The black, nice pavement looks both new and abandoned. We look for a place to camp, but the trees are too thick. We keep riding with our eyes peeled for a temporary home and we finally find it where the road meets the landslide.

The landslide turns out to be below the road, not above it as I had imagined. Instead of sliding onto the road and covering it with debris, the slide is pulling the road out from under itself and the landmass slumps. The road itself is crevassed with tension cracks, all backfilled with gravel. On the downhill side we see the original curve of the road, with old pavement curving out until the pavement disappears in huge blocks slumping far down the cliff. The old road section is bermed off, but just on the other side of the berms are long stretches of pavement that used to connect. Plenty of room to pitch some tents! We just need to remember to stay away from the cliff side when we get up to pee in the middle of the night.

Like always, the free campsites are the best ones. Quiet, spacious, with a view – we watch the clouds turn gold, then pink, we make pot of soup to share, we watch the ocean go from blue to silver to gold to purple. “Well,” says Pacman, “looks like a good time to get a little squirrely.”

Last night by the sea.

The end of the road

Looking out over Tillamook Bay

Day 116: working hard-ish

December 19, 2014 by Gizmo Posted in PCT 2014, Uncategorized Tagged backpacking blog, bicycle touring, detours, gizmo's pct blog, highway 101, pacific coast bicycle route, pacific crest trail, pacific crest trail blog, Pacific crest trail blogs, pct 2014, PCT 2014 blog, thru-bike, thru-hiking, thru-hiking blog 1 Comment

Day 116
Miles: 22
From Coos Bay to the Umpqua Lighthouse State Park

The hardworking young couple is at work and out of the house long before I get up. Pacman has been up’and’at too – I can tell by the smell of sizzling bacon that draws me into the kitchen. Pacman is flipping pancakes. “Mornin’,” he greets me. “I thought we needed some bacon and eggs.”
“Shucks, that smells awesome. Need some help?”

I get started cracking eggs. J is reading the morning paper. Man, the bicyclist’s life is the life.

We tidy up after ourselves (leave no trace still applies) then roll out. It’s noon.

Our first stop out of town is in the bicycle shop in North Bend, the little town just past Coos Bay. J is in the inner tube section while Pacman and I wander around looking at bicycle accessories that we would like, but won’t buy. “Hey, check this out,” Pacman calls over to me.
“What?” I ask, wandering over. He’s standing in front of a t-shirt display. Printed on the t-shirt is a picture of a logging truck on a bridge, about to run down a cyclist who is screaming in terror. The text says: “North Bend Bridge SURVIVOR”.
“Ha! Ha!” I crow. “Who knew a t-shirt could so perfectly capture what it’s like to be a road bicyclist?”
“Check out the tick-marks for cyclists run down on the logging truck bumper,” points out Pacman.
“Oh man, I want this shirt. Do you think it’s bad luck to buy the shirt before we’ve crossed the bridge?” (All the south-bounders hit Moe’s Bicycle shop after the ride of terror. We still have it coming up.)
“Good question,” says J, who has just joined us.
“Maybe it’s a show of good faith?” I ask again.

We decide to take our chances, and J and I pick out shirts. It comes in all sorts of colors, but we get it in neon yellow hi-vis. Pacman already has a hi-vis shirt so he forgoes the purchase. Bedecked in glowing yellow, we ride off to the bridge.

The moist coast of Oregon is watered by a ladder of rivers, running straight west from the coastal range to the sea. All the bridges seem like they were built at about the same time, in the same style, elegant, simple, with art-deco details. And every last one of them is barely wide enough for cars to pass each other. The spans are huge, crossing the river right where the river meets the ocean, swollen with tides and estuaries. There’s no shoulder to speak of, so we clump together and take the entire lane in the hopes that no one will try passing us (someone always does). It’s a study in adrenaline, pumping the pedals to get over the rise of the bridge, huge metal machines breathing down your neck. Logging trucks are scary, but they’re also driven by professionals, and they usually give us plenty of space. I can’t say the same about RVs, or trucks, or jerk-faces in compact cars.

The North Bend Bridge is just another span to cross, although maybe a bit longer than usual. We make it off the bridge in one-piece, only getting yelled at three times between the three of us. The headwind is back. We pedal for about an hour then take a three-hour break. Another forty-five minutes in the saddle and we’re at Umpqua Lighthouse State Park. It’s embarrassing to write this blog post. Thru-hiking is going to be a terrific shock to my system… either that, or I’m going to be strong, muscled up, and well-rested, and I’m going to cruise through Washington. That’s what I keep telling myself. I am feeling much better these days. I’ve put some weight back on so I’m not looking so super-model scrawny these days, and you could bounce quarters off my thighs, which have put on muscle with bicycling in a way that hiking never did.

We’ve had three days of clear weather, but the fog rolls in right as we roll into the gray whale lookout point. “See any whales?” J deadpans, looking out into the featureless gray expanse.
“Oh, about twenty,” I snark back. By the time we ride up to the campground hosts to check in, there’s a fine drizzle. We’re drenched in sweat from fighting the headwind and all three of us are deeply chilled. We’re about to go to our campsite when Betty, the host who has been checking us in, asks if we need anything. “Some hot chocolate would be great!” J says.
“And a yurt,” adds Pacman.
“Haha, oh, well, I don’t think I can help with that,” replies Betty, in a lovely midwest lilt.

The campground is shrouded in fog, and filled with huckleberries, if you look around. We’re sitting around the picnic table boiling pasta when Betty walks up, carrying three styrofoam cups filled with hot chocolate, which she leaves for us. We sit and laugh at our journey, at the goodness of the people we’ve met, about the marshmallows that Betty put in our hot chocolate. Time for bed.

Hi-vis for the win! My bicycle family.

Nice view, dude.

Day 114: Losing things

November 18, 2014 by Gizmo Posted in PCT 2014, Uncategorized Tagged backpacking blog, bicycle touring, gizmo's pct blog, pacific coast bicycle route, pacific crest trail, pacific crest trail blog, pct 2014, PCT 2014 blog, PCT2014 blog, thru-bike, thru-hiking, thru-hiking blog 1 Comment

Day 114
Miles: 33*
From Port Orford Heads to Bullards Beach

Not even the crack of dawn, and we’re strapping down our gear and rolling out. It’s windy and cold – it’s supposed to be beautiful and calm, right? We aren’t supposed to have a headwind till the afternoon. Life is supposed to go as planned, right?

We go screaming down the steep hill and brake into the coffee shop to warm up. If it’s already windy there’s no point in hurrying. I discover I’ve lost my sunglasses. It’s not too far to where we slept, as the crow flies, but there’s no way I’m riding back up at hill. Darn. I’ve had those glasses since Campo.

We compensate for the wind with long and frequent breaks. I don’t think we’ve been biking more than four hours a day… going back to thru-hiking may be a shock to the system.

We’re inland all day until arriving in Bandon, where we while away a few hours at Face Rocks, yet another spectacular stretch of coast, but it’s as windy here as everywhere else. There’s some debate about what to do or where to go but I’m antsy to get to a camping spot. I so often feel like I don’t have a place – like I’m homeless. I never felt homeless on the PCT. I felt like I was home all the time. Somehow that feeling didn’t transfer to the tiny strip of asphalt right of the white line on the highway.

Food and supplies at the local grocery store – Pacman gets in an involved conversation with a passerby about our trip just as I want to go. He’s posted a cardboard sign on the back of his bike that says “Mexico to Canada”. He uses it to get people’s attention, and from there, to try and talk them into giving us stuff. It’s had a mixed record, attracting more crazies then road magic. Lots of people will talk to us, but no one gives us a cold soda.

From the grocery store it’s a short trip to Bullards Beach campground, set mercifully into a little lowland between the coast and the hills behind us, and we get out of the wind for the first time. The hiker/biker section is small and cramped and packed with cyclists. The rest of the (huge) campground is packed with (huge) RVs. Tent camping is dead here too, I guess. It’s like we’ve kennel-trained our own selves, taught ourselves that we can only be comfortable when we’re separate from each other, hemmed in by walls. We take our boxes with us. Even the other bikers (all in tents) are flabbergasted by our tarp and lack of separation from -outside-. Pacman is cowboy camping tonight and they can’t even start to wrap their heads around that one.

Hopefully we’ll get a good night’s sleep tonight in this campground. It was a bit brisk on the top of the headland last night. I’m thinking fondly of bed when I realize that I’ve lost my titanium spork. My spork! I’m devastated! I was going to pass that thing down to my grandchildren! I hate to lose things. It’s somehow worse when the thing was free. It’s like I’m squandering gifts from the universe.

We spend the evening hanging out with the other cyclists, a motley crew tonight. I think a bike allows for a greater range of traveling styles than backpacking does. There may be some seriously heave packs roaming the trail, but none that weight 150 lbs+, like some of the kits here tonight.

J and I tuck ourselves into the back of crowded campground for bed. “Well,” I say to him, “another day of biking and we ain’t dead yet.”
“Not yet, not yet,” he replies. “Good night Gizmo.”
“Good night Dirtnap.”

Day 113: leisurely afternoons

November 13, 2014 by Gizmo Posted in PCT 2014, Uncategorized Tagged backpacking blog, pacific coast bicycle route, pacific crest trail, pacific crest trail blog, pct 2014, PCT 2014 blog, pct 2014 blogs, thru-bike, thru-hike, thru-hiking blog, trail journal Leave a comment

Day 113
Miles: 27*
From the Rogue River to Port Orford

There’s a man out there, fishing. I rouse myself. “J, did that guy have to walk down the trail by us while we were sleeping?”
J, laying beside me, answers, “I think so.”

I’m creeped out after all.

Pacman is already packed up. We get up and get our stuff and our heads together. The guy finishes fishing and walks past, obviously uncomfortable. “Don’t worry!” I want to tell him. “We’re all respectable, lovely people! Tax-paying good citizens!” I don’t say anything besides good morning. It’s strange to be suspicious. I’m not generally considered to have any dangerous potential.

Even with a stop at a diner for some biscuits and gravy, we’re on the road by 8:30. That’s the time we got up yesterday, so I feel good about that. It’s not windy yet, and we cruise easy out of town, over some hills, through forest, across a long stretch just above the sea – then I catch myself. “Gizmo!” I think. “Are you enjoying yourself??”

I’ll be durned. I am.

We take a break at an ocean overlook. It’s spectacular, like the rest of the coast. “Pacman,” I tell him. “I was thinking about what you said yesterday, about bicycling with a headwind being better than hiking through snow. I haven’t tried that, so I can’t say. But I was thinking about other scenarios.”
“Oh yeah?”
“Yeah. Like, would you rather bicycle with a headwind, or ride big mountain passes?” I pause.
“Passes,” we both chorus in unison.
I laugh. “Exactly! How about headwinds, or twisty roads with no shoulder?”
“Headwinds!” we say together. So things could be worse. So far, Oregon has had lovely shoulders, and a lot less traffic. It’s nice to not be terrified all the time. We pass lots of south-bound bicyclists, and one pair on roller-blades. The woman looks absolutely petrified with fear. I hope she’s not planning on taking the 101 south of crescent city. She’ll get killed for sure.

We’re almost to Port Orford when the wind starts picking up. Noon, just like yesterday. It looks like we’re going to have to do all our riding in the morning. Riding into a headwind is a waste of time. It’s only 27 miles from the Rogue River to Port Orford, but it’s our stop for the day. Pacman has some mail to pick up in Bandon, another 27 miles from here, but it’s Saturday. We can’t leave Bandon until the post office opens, so we might as well take our time.

We get seafood, hang out at the dock, hang out at the library. I’m still dreadfully behind on blog posts.

We go up to the Port Orford Headlands, a day-use area with a totally unnecessary hill to get up to it.. The Oregon coast is probably as incredible as the backcountry of Kings Canyon, with the cliffs dropping down to the sea. We cook dinner – a huge pot of spaghetti. “Cheers to the best travel companions,” says Pacman.
“Cheers!”

Four hours of pedaling, we’re all exhausted. We lay down our sleeping pads for a an illegal camp and fabulous views. We’ll have to clear out early tomorrow.

Picking blackberries by the sea

Day 112: going the wrong way

November 12, 2014 by Gizmo Posted in PCT 2014, Uncategorized Tagged backpacking blog, bicycle touring, detours, gizmo's pct blog, pacific coast bicycle route, pct 2014, PCT 2014 blog, thru-bike, thru-hiking, trail journal 3 Comments

Day 112
Miles: 27*
From Harris Beach to the Rogue River

Bicyclists aren’t quite the same breed as hikers… 8:30 in the morning and every biker in the campground is still here. We’re the same as ever – last ones out of camp, even here. We haven’t really meshed with the bicyclists that we’ve met so far. It’s obvious that we don’t belong – I feel like we’re the biking equivalent of a wannabe thru-hiker that shows up on the trail with an external frame pack and blue jeans, heading southbound. The thing about the Pacific Coast Bicycle Route, see, is that everyone is SOBO. We’re the only northbounders we’ve met. The other cyclists all think we’re crazy. We know, because every single one of them tells us. “North! Ha ha don’t you know you’re going the wrong way?!” they tell us. I swear, the next person who tells me that… Our steadfast denial of the existence of the seasonal headwinds has so far served as a prophecy.

The plan for today is Port Orford, a fifty mile ride. We’ll see how it goes. It’s a beautiful day, mid-seventies, sunny. The ocean gleams like hammered metal to our left, with tucked away beaches and rocky shores. It’s downright spectacular really. My pictures all look beautiful, all look the same – ocean, cliff, ocean cliff, sunset ocean cliff.

There are couple good-sized climbs today, and my legs burn. I’m having to learn how to watch out for this. When hiking, I can hike through the burn into a steady cruise, but with biking my legs burn and burn. I think on a bicycle I can hang myself out there a little too far, stay geared up a little too high and get myself into a pace I can’t maintain.

We’ve only been going for an hour, but the wind that everyone keeps blabbing about has finally blown in. The headwinds aren’t a hoax after all, a myth of the road planning department in order to keep all the bicyclists on the same side of the road. Our uphills are uphills, but now our straightaways and downhills are uphills too. I feel a strong sense of moral outrage at having to pedal to go downhill. I guess this is what I get for going the wrong way.

At a pullout we stop and drape ourselves over our handlebars, spent. “So this is the headwind everyone kept talking about,” Pacman remarks dryly.
“No kidding,” says J.
“Yeah, this kind of sucks,” I add in. We’ve only done ten miles and we’re exhausted. “Maybe let’s not go all the way to Port Orford today?” I suggest. Everyone else is ok with that.

I’m looking forward to walking again.

The wind gets much worse, but we battle through it for another 16 miles to Gold Beach and a Subway restaurant. We eat our sandwiches and cookies while we try to figure out where to camp. There are day use areas, but no campgrounds nearby, and we don’t have another 10 miles in our aching legs. A chat with a local guy at the Subway diverts us to the south bank of the Rogue River, just north of town, to hopefully find a spot on the river bank to stash our bikes and stealth camp.

About a mile in we find our spot – a little parking area and paths to the river bank. It’s not even creepy. I’m ok with some mild concerns about getting washed away in the high tide or getting attacked by sea lions (why do they sound so close??) and whatever that noise is in the trees in the dark… as long as it’s not people I’m worried about. (So many friends have told me to be sure to be safe on the trail, but as far as I can see, it’s about the safest place around. The fewer people around, the safer you probably are. Just based on personal experience.)

We’re going to try an early start tomorrow to beat the wind, which appears to escalate throughout the afternoon. I hope we have a respite, at least for a little while.

Watching the sea lions hunting salmon in the Rogue River.

Day 111: back in the saddle

November 10, 2014 by Gizmo Posted in PCT 2014, Uncategorized Tagged backpacking blog, bicycle touring, detours, gizmo's pct blog, pacific coast bicycle route, pacific crest trail, pacific crest trail blog, PCT, pct 2014, PCT 2014 blog, pct blog, thru-bike, thru-hike Leave a comment

Day 111
Miles: 28*
From Crescent City, CA to Harris Beach State Park, OR

This morning is miraculously clear – like we carried the sunshine back with us. It’s our first sunny day since we left hwy 36 – a good day to restart the journey. I’m nervous but it’s time to go.

We meet Pacman at the Burger King, his bicycle leaned against a bench out front. There’s another bicycle there as well. It matches all of ours, but it’s a local itinerant, not a bicycle tourer. I can never decide if we have more in common with bicycled homeless or the lycra-clad vacationers with $2000 machines. We’re our own sub-category, I think.

“Damn son, so good to see you guys,” Pacman tells us. “I fell in love with a homeless girl, gonna come back and marry her.”
“Oh yeah?”
“Well, maybe not. You guys ready to ride?”

And we’re off, riding into the sunshine, happy to be together. It’s good to be reunited with Pacman, our last link to the PCT. This journey feels so derailed, directionless. We’ve left our path and our fellow pilgrims for beaches, redwoods, fog. Restaurants and hot showers. Cell phone service all the time. Fresh fruits and vegetables. Part of me doesn’t believe that this will ever loop back around, but the road is there, it goes north, and that is our cardinal direction of choice.

Roadside blackberries, a pleasant day, the Oregon Border. Oregon! Done with California at last! One hundred and eleven days in California. I wish we’d been able to walk the entire way, to be able to say we walked California one end to the other… Well, we’re still self-powered, and we’re here. Oregon!

As soon as we cross the border the highway shoulder gets wider. This is a good sign. (Almost as good as the Welcome to Oregon sign, ha.) We ride the wide shoulder to Brookings, stop in town. I go in a thrift store on the main drag to try and maybe find some bicycle shorts that aren’t size XL mens, but I buy a pair of gleaming white Nike hi-tops instead. Pacman and J go across the street and spot that says: Brewery. The arrows point down a set of stairs to the building’s basement, and they follow like it’s the Pied Piper. We go down a long hallway into a very small tasting room, with a few locals inside, drinking pints. We plant ourselves on the stools and pretty soon the tiny room is packed to the brim with a friendly crowd from town, pans of food and desserts filling the countertops: it’s their Thursday afternoon potluck. (What is this, Cheers?) They fill our plates and make us tell our stories, egging us on (as if I needed encouragement). One couple offers us a place to stay for the night, but I’m still not very good at taking advantage of hospitality and I somehow flub it, and after everything we end up back on our bicycles, looking for a place to stay. I don’t know if being so reflexively self-reliant is always a virtue. Maybe I should learn to accept help.

Luckily there is a state park just down the road, and we ride the two miles just before sunset, pay $5 each for our hiker/biker spots. J and I go down the cliffs to the beach, a wonderland of gleaming sand, cliff faces, water and light. Cormorants skim the waves. A family of sea otters runs down the beach. Sea otters are terrible runners. They look ridiculous.

The state parks here in Oregon come with free hot showers, but it takes me half an hour of wandering through a vast parking area of RVs to find the bathrooms. I see one family sleeping in a tent, and hundreds of RVs. When did “camping” turn into “RVing”? Why does one night at a camping spot cost $35? I though camping was supposed to be the cheap option, the way for families on a budget to get out and see the world, or at least a way to make your kids learn how to entertain themselves for at least one night without electricity. This place is so lit up you can hardly see the stars.

I’m not even grateful for my shower. The coast is fabulous, but this campground depresses me. I miss being able to sleep under a tree for free.

Goodbye Crescent City

WE MADE IT! WE MADE IT!

Hi-tops

Harris Beach State Park

The Incline of the Crest

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