Rebecca Hikes

New address:  https://rebeccahiking.wordpress.com/

Dear family and friends, We’re writing to share that we’re off trail, and that we were able to rent a car and drive down from Oregon to Johnathan’s parents’ place in Modesto to pick up my car.  We spent the past few days in Bend at a residential motel trying to figure out what to do. It was too smokey to camp outside. We looked at maps and forecasts and talked through how we might either wait out conditions or continue to hike sections of open trail. We wanted more than anything to at least hike sections that were open and not give up. We touched base with HQ. But the closure of all of the national forests in California, combined with dangerous conditions and closures in Oregon, makes continuing in any form right now unsafe and impossible.  Once we had made the decision to leave, the challenge became figuring out what would be the safest way to get out of Oregon. We considered flying out, but there were no direct flights from the closest airport north of us. The route we chose...

Dear family and friends, Right now we’re holed up in Bend, Oregon, waiting for some dense smoke and high winds to clear up before we get back on trail. We took a bus to get here from a place called Government Camp at the base of Mt Hood, skipping over a trail closure and several fires.  Oregon felt different from Washington almost immediately. We hiked out of Cascade Locks from practically sea level, climbing to 4K ft in 95 degree heat and somewhat smokey air. By the time we made it over the Benson Plateau the next day, we could barely make out Mt Hood — Oregon’s highest mountain — a landmark that we had been able to see all the way from Sourdough Gap just outside of Mt Rainier National Park a couple of weeks ago. When we got to Timberline Lodge, a cool historic place that’s practically on the PCT and where parts of The Shining was filmed, we could see a huge fire developing south of us several ridges over and practically self combusting at the base of Mt Jefferson. We had cell rec...

Dear friends and family,   Most of the last 150 miles out of Washington were really beautiful. And actually, it would be hard to overstate how stunning the Washington section of the PCT is in in August and early September. We continue to feel so lucky just to be able to be out here hiking.  We stayed one extra night back in Packwood close to White Pass, a night longer than our new trail friends. I had been starting to feel a small pinch in my right knee — nothing serious — but it seemed like it would be safer to rest. It went away after the second night, and then we were able to hike several high 20 mile days back to back, with similar effort that we had been putting in to lower mileage days a couple of weeks ago.  During the first 20 miles out from White Pass we made it to Goat Rocks, a place that north bound hikers had been raving about for the past few hundred miles of passing them. SoCal will always be my favorite part of the PCT, but there are points in that wilderne...

Dear friends and family, We felt more at home on this section of the PCT through southern Washington, because parts of it reminded us of northern California. We have gradually hiked out of the rugged North Cascades and the profile of the hills have become softer and more rounded. The trail curved west to take us through Mt Rainier National Park, and to get there we skirted the watershed that contains Seattle’s drinking water and crossed over many dirt roads.  It had been probably a hundred trail miles since we had first seen Mt Rainier at Red Pass close to Glacier Peak, and we next saw it again unexpectedly, hiking around a corner through a clear cut strip with power lines overhead. It doesn’t look like anything else in this landscape and it seems to have its own weather system. As we got even closer over the next few days the sky was cloudless except for over the mountain. We got our first “trail magic” — a couple drove their truck up one of the dirt roads and set up a sandwich ba...

  Dear friends and family, Hello from Snoqualmie Pass, PCT mile 260, where the trail crosses underneath the I-90 east of Seattle. We hiked fairly quickly to get here, covering 71 miles in 3 days, with our longest day yesterday around 27 miles with 5k up and down of elevation. The local hikers here look at us strangely when they see us starting a 5 mile, 2k ft ridge ascent in the early evening as they are making camp. We don’t look like the northbound thru hikers that come through here, and certainly our packs are too heavy looking. But we have been out here for about two weeks now and our legs are getting really strong.  We stayed for the night at a motel / chalet across from some ski lifts that’s a ten minute walk or so from the trail. The inn has an off-season special rate for PCT hikers and they receive resupply packages (we got our box, thanks Walter!!). We were lucky that we got an early start yesterday to get here, because fog rolled into the mountains In the early after...

Dear family and friends, We’ve made it through another leg of the trail and are writing with a quick update to share what we have been experiencing.  Stehekin was a beautiful summer paradise, but the shower at the Purple Point campground was broken, so we decided that it was time to head back to the trail only a few hours after having gotten there. A shuttle operated by a resort there is on a limited schedule and there are no roads that go into town, but in the early evening we were able to flag down a small truck willing to give us a ride back to the bakery. A teenager named Quinn had just loaded up the truck from a big rig that had been ferried into town on the lake, and we sat on the back as he sped away from the lake leaning against the ice cream, eggs, and frozen pork bakery delivery.  From there we caught a ride the rest of the way back to the trail head with a guy who claimed to know everyone in town because he does everyone’s internet. The beautiful weather has continu...

Dear friends and family, We’re writing from Stehekin, Washington, with a quick update about the first leg of our hike. Stehekin is a remote town on a lake in northern Washington. You can only walk, fly, or take a boat to get here. There’s a bakery in town where we had pizza and chocolate chip cookies when we got in earlier today.  We started our hike at Harts Pass At around 5pm on August 7th. Harts Pass is about as far north as you can drive to up here in Washington. From there it was a 30 mile hike north to the Canadian border, where we then flipped back and retraced our steps to start hiking southbound.  Getting to the monument at the northern terminus was surprisingly moving for us! We thought of all of the friends we had made when we did our long section hike in 2016 through SoCal and how it must have felt for them to get there that year. And how amazing it is that that trail that we had hiked through the deserts of SoCal  is connected to what we’re walking up here. ...