WA Climbing, Mt. Hood Bike Touring and Appalachian Backpacking: Turning on Summer, 2008

In the past months, there have been many changes in my life and also the lives of people close to me. I am now adventuring with old friends, new friends, and on my own more than ever. I have said good bye to an old love who has shared many challenges, successes, and failures with me. They will be dearly missed, but I have also had occasion to do some valuable moving-on in my own life. I am doing the excellent and rewarding work of turning on summer, 2008.

In May, I was hopeful about that way that my training in the climbing gym and on the bike had been going, and began to think about some of the trips I wanted to take over the summer, and what I want to accomplish. I am thinking for just me now, as opposed to planning mostly joint-trips focused on myself and my long-time partner. I realized that I have the freedom now to make my own goals happen, just because it is what I personally desire. It is an exhilarating feeling, and I have been dancing to lively rhythms late into the evenings when I imagine reaching out for my own dreams.



In early June, I went to the Icicle Canyon to switch leads on some multi-pitch walls to get the season started. It was gorgeous. Beautiful splitter cracks down granite slabs with great friction. My favorite. It couldn't have been better. We climbed several routes, including on the Icicle Buttress, the Bathtub Wall and more. I had an amazing experience climbing with an all-woman group who were all at similar levels as climbers. Instead of relying on anybody else to do rope work, route finding, leading, etc, we did it all ourselves. It was an almost intoxicating feeling, and I was inspired by it. After, I searched out another set of cams for my rack and decided to really go for it this year. I am excited and hopeful about some projects in the works for August and September, including routes in the North Cascades such as Presik Peak or mountains like Mt. Stewart in the Enchantments.


Besides continuing work training by cragging outside of Portland and running 3-5 miles 3-4 times a week, I also have been continuing to do weekly bicycle training rides, and in the middle of June right before I left on a trip to see my family in Tennessee, I decided to guide a weekend 100-mile bike camping trip up to the woods around Mt. Hood. I had great fun instructing my friend Mia on the delicacies of packing for bike camping and then leading her out myself, and I have even decided it would be a good idea for me next summer to try and get associated with a bike tour-guiding group to earn some money. I can't think of anything that I love doing more. I would guide groups of enthusiastic cyclists and climbers across the ranges of the west to get into fun in the mountains cycling, climbing, swimming, backpacking, fishing and more. What could be better?


The route Mia and I did was a very familiar one to me, and to you as my readers, because I have done it solo and in groups often in the past. Taking Hwy 26 up into the Salmon Huckleberry Wilderness affords even beginners great opportunity for long distance cycling on moderate roads with minimal directions, the Salmon River for swimming, great views of Mt. Hood, hiking trails, a free campground, and bolted crags for sport climbing at French's Dome and Salmon River Slab.


During the last week of June, I went home to see my family in the Southeast, and mostly spend quality time with my mom in the gym and running in the 90 degree heat. But, for the weekend of my 24th birthday, my brother and I set out to go backpacking in the Big Frog Wilderness Preserve for black bears. I was taken back to many trips out to the Cherokee National Forest and Ocoee River wilderness areas around there where I grew up. The smell in the Appalachian woods is different. The air is thick and the cicadas sing all throughout the evening. There is a dreaminess in the air which lends itself to letting yourself drift away for a while. It was great fun being with my brother on a mini-adventure (we just hiked about 3 miles into and out of the preserve)for the first time as adults. The feeling sunk in deeply, and suddenly almost, as I held my head up high and trekked through those forests, of just how it is different being grown up. I felt responsible for myself, and it was a good feeling. I breathed in vigorously and dreamed openly.


The black bears must have been curious about the two of us, as well, because encounter them we did! One thinner looking, maybe younger bear on the trail, and then another larger, healthier looking one scampering off in the brush through the trees. It was a beautiful and exciting sight. We felt vulnerable and wonderfully, utterly enmeshed in those woods of our youth. That evening, after my brother collected a handsome store of wood and I built up and sparked a roaring fire, right before a deluge began to fall and thunder clap, we spotted a white bobcat too. Even though we had to spend most of the evening in our tent, we enjoyed sharing thoughts and memories as two independent, strong people, siblings whose relationship somehow seemed both old and new. The next day was my birthday, and we went rafting down to Ocoee River, where the whitewater Olympics were held in 1996, in some of the highest water conditions in years. We had a blast.

Since I've been back in Oregon, I have been plotting my next excursion, possibly backpacking around the Olympic Peninsula in two weeks; but I am up for much. Yesterday, I ran up and down Dog Mountain, gaining 2800 feet of elevation (and then losing it) over about 7.5 miles in about 2.5 hours. I feel strong, and more capable of achieving my dreams all the time. As I bounded up the trail through mature forests of Doug Fir, Cedar and Vine Maple, I recollected the way that Aldo Leopold put it: "Thinking Like a Mountain." I thought I understood that idea, really believed that it was important and meaningful to put oneself in the place of the mountains, of the wilderness, and to act as a member of the environmental community. But never before has it hit me quite like that, the tangible meaning of those words. There is nothing else but the mountain. There was nothing else but the mountain. And even as my heart beats strong and sweeps me, like a friendly wind upward, that thing, the mountain, contains me sweetly and completely.