Intro

I am out of free photo space on Wordpress, so I am trying out blogger to see if it plays nice with google photos.

My old blog is here:
http://www.mossreport.wordpress.com

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Oregon's Outback

Image
I remember sitting in the living room of our Schaumburg, Illinois home reading this National Geographic article about the empty southeast corner of Oregon. It was 1997. Nathan was a handful of months old. We were on the precipice of moving to Seattle, a leap of faith that we may not be capable of now at our wiser ages. The skin on my neck prickled. The haunting photographs and stoic prose by William Least Heat-Moon resonated with the viral wanderlust that infected me in those days. The article described a place empty and lonesome and sere and also dry, harsh, and caustic.  The photos and prose depicted a massive ridge called Steens Mountain, longer than the Rhode Island-Connecticut border, rising over 2 vertical miles on the east face above an alkili plain. It described lakes that appear and disappear with the seasons. It showed empty roads and bullet-ridden signs. I didn't know shit about the West but knew I wanted to be there. Somehow, a few short years, from birth to age 7, a li...
Read more

PCT to White Pass, Day 5, Adams High Camp to 2nd Walupt Tr Jcn (2018/07/26)

Image
Back on the PCT at the Killeen Tr. Jcn. Today was a fairly leisurely day for a 15mile day. I kept moving all day because there were few views and lots of bugs. I cut the day short when I passed a small lake at about 3:30pm. Ten hours of hiking was long enough and this camp turned out to be one of my favorite camps of the entire trip. The day started out very scenic as I descended from Adams High Camp. Once I completed the steep descent back to the PCT, it was an all day cruise with mostly gentle ups and downs or generally flat terrain. The early morning was entirely in shadow of the trees and mountain. I reached Lava Spring by about 8am. Icy cold water gushes out from beneath a lava flow. People say this is the freshest, cleanest water on the entire PCT. It was quite cold and totally refreshing. Again, I did not pass many northbounders, was only passed by one northbounder, and saw about two dozen southbounders. After Lava Spring, it was about 5 miles or so throug...
Read more

Mt. Adams Loop Trip, Day 4, Horseshoe Meadow to Mt. Adams High Camp (2018/07/25)

Image
I had the best night of sleep and got up around 5:45 with the intent of beating the heat. I again hit the trail around 6:30 and hiked in the shadow of Mt. Adams for the first 1.5 miles or so. I was soon on the PCT. It was a very easy day of only 10 miles or so. I took two long breaks, first on a lava flow looking out toward Rainier (until the flies started buzzing around). The second break was at a stream where I chatted for awhile with two southbound hikers. The woman was pretty young and fit and was going southbound after hiking northbound the previous year. The gentleman was older and it sounded like they had met along the way and teamed up. They were travelling very light and did not look like they had tents. They described how they were seldom more than a day or so from a resupply and were only eating bars and trail mix and not cooking. The trail was not that crowded and I saw more southbounders than northbounders. Perhaps I was ahead of the n...
Read more