This is an excerpt from a blog journal written by a 23 year-old woman who hiked from Mexico to the pacific northwest. Nearing the end of the adventure, with just a few hundred miles to go, she encountered nature's furry. This is her story of the last few days of her journey. (She lived). She is a the daughter of a friend of a friend of a friend of the lodge. Congrats Rocket Lama - you have many journeys ahead...
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.
