Licking my wounds

Government Camp and Sandy, Oregon Thursday, May 16, 2024

Today was a day for reflection and reorganization. Always a challenge to go from hiking-mode to bicycling-mode, today’s transition was freighted with rental car returns, UPS packing, bike-repair pickups, and peeling lips. Behind it all was profound disappointment, for all my trying to put a brave face on yesterday. Seemingly out of reach is my hope to complete the highpoints, is there any point to going on? Do I just go back to Portland and go home?

I’d hoped at least to catch up on sleep, what with the exhaustion, but there was too much on my mind. I completed yesterday’s post, hung out in the lobby and commiserated with Alex and his friend Richard, who are going on to do Mount Saint Helens today. Chatted with Chris, who was loading up his bike to do Hood to Coast, he had just completed his first year of Columbia law school. Two guys came in who had just summited this morning, it seems the slush had refrozen overnight. One of them, Ken, has put my peak-bagging to shame; a recently retired Silicon Valley engineer, he’s climbed over 800 major western peaks, shared his peakbagger.com page https://www.peakbagger.com/climber/climber.aspx?cid=25934 and encouraged me to set one up of my own. As if I need one more obsession.

So climbers were successful the day before and the day after our debacle, so much was just the luck of the draw. So close, and yet so far. Maybe I’ll try again, I just don’t know.

Jane, ever my heroine, texted the perfect thing. “What next options are you thinking about? I know this has knocked the wind out of your sails but I think you’ll regret it if you come home.” She’s right. Both of us have made space in our lives for this summer’s grandiose expedition. She’s having a blast with our daughter Hope, touring Maine, picking out marble countertops, cruising antique fairs, and spending a week on Cape Cod with family. I’ve got my dream bike, newly tricked out with a dropper post, in one of the most beautiful parts of the country. The legendary TransAmerica Trail starts right here. What am I moping about? The horizon beckons.

Or as John Muir is often quoted, “Who has not felt the urge to throw a loaf of bread and a pound of tea in an old sack and jump over the back fence?”

Meriwether Lewis and William Clark had to come back from Oregon, and so do I, following their trail, which conveniently passes near most of the trailheads of the western peaks I’ve climbed. Closing the loop at the Paradise parking lot on Rainier really floated my boat, and so could the others. We could call it the Parking Lots Tour.

And so, as Meriwether often journaled, we proceeded on.

No statistics for today, it was all driving.

©️ 2024 Scott Luria