Go on short walks first. Build up to five days. If you can happily do a five-day trip, you can do a string of 35 or 40 of them. That’s a thru hike!
July Walks: Pretend Appalachian Trail Idea
July 7, 2024
Today, I felt the urge to walk first thing! I walked an hour in my neighborhood park in the freshness of sunrise. I took a 30-minute breakfast break at home, then drove over to Taylorsville Metropark. I walked the same circuit as I did yesterday in the opposite direction, taking me first down the hill to the bank of the Great Miami River. The melodic rippling of the shallow water was mesmerizing, and I listened to the call to stay for a spell, emphasis on “spell”. I recorded words in my favorite Cinquaine form.
Love Your Gear: New Shoes
I need to update my list of 20 or so pairs of shoes I’ve worn since I started walking in service to others. It’s February, 2024, and I need bigger shoes! There’s a pun there, I know! Something about “those are some big shoes to fill”. Hmm. Maybe my own purpose is getting bigger, so I need bigger shoes?? Anyway, since that time walking on the Continental Divide Trail in 2013 when my shoes felt just too small and I bought a pair of used Reeboks with pink trim in a second-hand store in a trail town, my shoe size has increased again!
How to Start Your Appalachian Trail Walk
I’ve walked the Appalachian Trail twice, plus another 2,000 miles working as an Appalachian Trail Conservancy ridgerunner for seven seasons.. How did I start all this? By locating the nearest trailhead to my home and setting foot on the trail. That one hour greeting let me hear my call to the trail “If I just keep walking, I can get all the way to Maine!”
Next step: a half day walk with my husband, exchanging the car key in the middle as we walked in opposite directions. Over the next four years, we built up to a full month on the trail, two trips per year, from over night to three nights, a week, two weeks. There are landmark steps, I think:
Oregon Coast Trail: Port Orford
September 13, 2019
There are many aspects of this particular journey that are different than my other long walks – the Appalachian Trail, Pacific Crest Trail, Benton MacKaye Trail, and others.
One of those is what piques my interest today. Generally, I have walked each trail once, in a single direction. By contrast, we have now actually traveled the length of the Oregon Coast trail three times! We’re staying in the same Sea Crest Motel in Port Orford where I made my last post a week ago! Let me explain with a brief recounting of our week’s itinerary.
Oregon Coast Trail: River Crossings
September 4-6, 2019
Three days, in which we walked into the night toward a lighthouse, stopped briefly at a County Park, camped near a river to cross at midnight, stopped briefly at a State Park, walked another six miles on beautiful beach and finally rested at a hotel in Port Orford.
I’ll bundle these three days because they flowed together in an unusual -and exhausting- stretch of walking outside my circadian rhythm. There were rivers to cross at low tide which didn’t happen at convenient times. Ironically, this was the longest stretch of undeveloped beach along the Oregon Coast. We saw just a handful of other hikers and uncountable and varied scenes of coastal beauty on the beach for three days!
Oregon Coast Trail: High Tide
September 1, 2019
Our hotel rest stop was a welcome break and a sort of new beginning for the rest of the trip. We took an entire day off at the Villa West Hotel, at the crossroads of US101 and 126 in Florence, Oregon. We stayed until checkout time at 11.
John’s willingness to take a taxi out of Florence, skipping a few miles of roadwalking, and even a little forest walking, made today a delightfully easy day! Well, mostly, anyway. The cab driver dropped us off at the Wax Myrtle Trailhead, 3/4 mile from the beach. Yes, there were wax myrtle trees on the route!
Oregon Coast Trail: Amanda
August 28, 2019
Although I have been disappointed by the roadwalking along 101, my suffering pales to that of Amanda, the Yachats woman, and the thousands of others, who were cheated out of their homeland here, tortured, murdered, and forced to walk along the lava rock coast to an encampment. It would have taken great foresight to preserve a natural coastal corridor for our trail, yes. Even better would have been to ratify the treaty in 1855 giving the original people their twenty-mile wide coastal area.
Oregon Coast Trail: Seal Rocks
August 27, 2019
This day had similarities to yesterday, with a few variations in the details of food and campsite services. We had beautiful beach walking, some awesome rocks, not so much roadwalking, and early evening arrival at South Beach State Park Hiker-Biker site.
My notes for the day:
7:20 away from camp at South Beach
8:40 stop to cook breakfast on beach; Potatoes onions garlic cheese
10:36 shoes off. In close view of Seal Rocks cliffs. I’ve been trying all variations of beachwalking: sandals, barefoot, shows and socks. All have pros and cons. The sandals work if I wrap my toes in gauze tape. Barefoot feels great – for a while, then my feet are tired. Shoes are most supportive – and get my shoes wet.
Oregon Coast Trail: Whale of a Day
August 25, 2019
On which we walked big miles, made a big leap in our thruhiking style, and saw some really big creatures!
Adding a few more words or phrases to the words above, like in one of those grammar games, we walked something like sixteen miles, starting our day at 5 a.m. at Devil’s Lake State Park and ending at 7:30 p.m. at Beverly Beach State Park. We made a big leap in our thruhiking style by catching the Lincoln County bus to skip four miles of walking on US 101 between Taft and Gleneden, making our day’s trip miles jump to 20. And, for our first time on this trip and over several hours of our day, from Boiler Bay south to Cape Foulweather, we saw whales – Gray Whales! Mostly, we saw the spouts of water sprayed from whales, and sometimes the backs of whales, to the tune of about 20 sightings in four to six spots along the coast. We just caught a glimpse of one whale between two houses as we walked down residential Coast Street in the southern streets of Depoe Bay. It was a whale of a day!