This is a two-part post - I will post part 2 tomorrow~!
***Part 1***
Well, everybody... I'm back in Portland for real, now. I didn't want to come home; I've still got the fire and I'm not ready to stop. But recent events have made it starkly apparent: Winter is here. I don't have the right equipment, and more significantly, I don't have the skills or the background knowledge to be able to prepare for it this season. You've got to know when to call it.
I already called it too late.
To the gentleman from Trout Lake; the retired forest ranger who saw me outside the grocery, preparing to walk headlong into the storm on Friday afternoon: You were right. I never should have left.
When I arrived in Trout Lake on Thursday the 26th, I had been pretty thoroughly soaked since leaving Cascade Locks four days before. I had seen a couple pretty gnarly storms down south, but this was the autumn rain of the Pacific Northwest — a weather pattern all too familiar to a girl from the Oregon grey. It alternated for days between a pervasive drizzle and a full-on downpour. I've always liked the rain, but I'd never tried to live outside in it before. I was cold and damp and miserable the entire time. All of my stuff was wet and gritty; my shoes never dried out and smelled like a rotting bog. Every night I'd try to wring out my socks, and every morning, I'd have to tug them back on over my feet, cold and clammy. And after having stayed two nights in Portland, I was all alone.
That Thursday, the sun broke for the first time in days. I had studied the weather patterns carefully before skipping town, and the blue skies were right on schedule. Unfortunately, a new storm was on its way — something big. I didn't know the details, but people were talking vaguely about some residual dregs of a typhoon in Japan, caught up in our jet streams or something. I was apprehensive. Really apprehensive. The storm was supposed to dump 6-10 inches of rain on the area over the course of two days, and I've seen rain like that before — it's CRAZY. But I had spent much of the past week learning how to cope with being wet, and I'll admit: I was feeling brazen. Like, "I am motherfukken' ROCKET LLAMA and I will NOT be knocked out by my native weather." That was what was going through my head when I left.
I don't know why I never considered the possibility of a snowstorm. It never even crossed my mind. Maybe because people were tossing around words like "typhoon" and "monsoonal," which in my head means warm, tropical storm. Or perhaps I was in denial. I had zero winter backpacking experience, and I wasn't properly afraid of snow in the backcountry anyway — I had no idea what I was getting into. But if I had even had a hint of what the storm was going to become...
The snow came in the night. I hadn't made it too far north from Trout Lake anyway — I kept relatively dry on Friday, but the heavy rain set in overnight and my tent flooded on Saturday morning while I was still convalescing in my tent. Everything got wet — my sleeping bag, my warm clothes, everything. I considered turning around. But against my better judgement, I pushed on... across three foamy, swollen, churning creeks the color of chocolate milk, that flooded my shoes and rain pants and threatened to drag me under. By the time I made it across, there was a cold snap coming on. The air temperature was dropping and even though I was still on the move, violent chills ran up and down my spine. I was nervous — it was autumn and hypothermia is a very real danger, and my only chance of resisting it was to have a warm, dry sleeping bag to crawl into at the end of the day. I no longer had one. So around 1 o' clock in the afternoon, I pitched my soggy tent in the driest spot I could find, on a slight slope under some trees at the Killen Creek campsite at mile 2253, and called it a day. I lay in my wet sleeping bag and shivered there for hours, hoping the heat from my body would dry it out before the night.
I was stuck there for seven days.
The wind positively howled. It ripped through the tree branches over my head and buffeted my tent so hard, it tore stakes out of the ground. That first night, I couldn't fall asleep because of the sound of the wind and the rain hammering against the walls of my shelter. I had to leap outside the tent four or five times to fix the guy lines; I was so scared the rainfly would fail and let water into my tent all over again. It was so cold. Finally, in the middle of the night, everything quieted down. I was relieved: I thought there had been a break in the weather, and finally, I could go to sleep.
At 3am, I realized I was wrong. I was woken up by a gale of wind, that caused something heavy to fall from the tree branches and strike my tent from above. I groped for my headlamp and turned it on…
Ice. It was piled up in a layer so thick and so heavy, the rainfly was pressing up against the walls of my tent. I spent a couple of minutes breaking it off from the inside, as a creeping sensation of dread began to rise through the feeling of shock and bemusement that had overtaken my senses. I was in trouble. I peeked outside: Half a foot already blanketed the campsite, covering up everything — I lay awake in a half-stupor of fatigue and sleeplessness, trying to calm the panic that was beginning to pulse through my body.
I was too high. I had to get out.
The moment the sun began to rise — blue through the filter of snow that was still building up outside my tent — I flew into action. I shoved everything back into my pack, yanked my icy shoes onto my feet, and rolled up the tent. I could barely break down the poles. My gloves were wet and my fingers completely lost feeling after just a couple of seconds of exposure to the icy metal. Through my panic, I had managed to formulate a plan: There was a road to the north — a forest road. I didn't know where it lead or how it reconnected with civilization, but I felt it was my only chance: I couldn't go back towards Mt. Adams, let alone recross the creeks. I couldn't follow the skinny little ribbon of a trail in the snow. But I might be able to follow a forest road. It was only 6.5 miles due north, and it was a thousand feet down in elevation. My compass was busted but I had recently downloaded Halfmile's app. If I just got MOVING… I just needed to move. I had to get out. I had to get out.
I swung my pack onto my shoulders and began to crunch through the snow, cutting across the sandy field where I remembered the trail to be.
There was no trail.
I knew there wouldn't be. It was something I understood intellectually, from the moment I realized the snow was falling. Now I understood it with all of my being. I had been in denial, as I was trying to prize frozen tent stakes out of the snow just minutes before. I wandered around the field in a big circle, scanning for the smallest dip or divet in the smooth blanket of white; for even the slightest hint of a trail that I might be able to follow. There was nothing there. I hadn’t expected there to be. I considered, for one wild moment, just starting to walk in the general direction of the trail: I’m good at playing it by ear, that’s usually how I swing, things usually work out pretty good for me that way. But logic kicked in and I thought, “Right now, I know exactly where I am. The moment I leave, I’m lost.”
I looked back towards the campsite that I had just vacated, with dawning horror. Slowly, I retraced my footsteps through the snow, to a spot under the trees in plain view of the open white field that lay before me, and began to unroll my tent.
| -Rocket Llama |
