Oregon Coast Trail = Complete!
We loved our "luxury light" 412-mile thru-hike from Astoria to Brookings. We have now backpacked for ten weeks and 1,000 miles!
We’ve completed our first thru-hike! With perfect hindsight, the Oregon Coast Trail would have been a kinder, gentler warm-up for the PCT. But the OCT was a great interlude while waiting for snow to melt on the PCT.
Things You Don’t Hear/See on the PCT
One week ago we were hiding from the wind in the sand dunes of Oregon, eating lunch with a pack of twenty-somethings who form our newest “tramily.”
KarMMa: “Can you hand me the Brie?” she asks as she slices an apple.
Me: “This?” I ask, while holding up a Ziplock baggie.
KarMMa: “No, that’s goat cheese.”
Me: “This?”
Kris: “No, that’s the Jarlsberg.”
Kat, our new 20-something companion looks at us dubiously while spreading peanut butter on her flour tortilla. Then she says, “Well, that’s something you don’t hear on the PCT.”
The conversation continues after I hand the Brie to KarMMa on my third try:
KarMMa: I think we should stay at a hotel tonight. I have a board call in the morning.”
I looked at Kat, Bird and Ludacris, all perched on their 1/8th-inch rubber mats in the dunes, then ask, “Does that sound bougie?”
“No,” says Kat, “that’s bad-ass.”
Our OCT thru-hike was remarkably different from the PCT. Where trail towns on the PCT were 4-6 days apart, we found lovely coastal towns each day with lots of pleasant surprises— a Farmer’s market in Yachats, a windsurfing resort at Floras Lake, freshly-shucked Umpqua oysters in Winchester Bay, and a fresh ceviche stand in Port Orford. With eleven Oregon State Park Hiker-Biker campgrounds along the coast—with bathrooms, fresh water, and charging stations— we showered nearly every day. Our longest food carry was three days, and we resupplied at local markets, adding smoked salmon and fresh veggies to our occasional freeze-dried meals. We visited all four of the Pelican Brewing Company’s breweries, plus a half-dozen other local brew pubs. Our favorite: The Rogue Ales Brewery in Newport. (My favorite beer: Rogue’s Dead Guy Ale.)
Another first on the OCT: At the Floras Lake campground I found a Cornhole game in the laundry room and began to set it up. Kat casually mentioned she’d like to play. I asked her if she knew how far apart the boards should be. She answered, “No idea.”
We started to play, KarMMA and I against Kat and Bird. Ludacris, a 30-something biology teacher from Germany, with whom we shared the Oregon Coast Trail for several days, stood on the sidelines:
I asked, “Do you know how the scoring works?”
Bird: “I think it’s three points for putting the beanbag in the hole and one point for placing it on the board. You get the differential between your and your opponent’s score for each round.”
I noticed the contrast between the unconfident “I think” at the beginning of his answer and the detailed knowledge that followed. So when Bird put his first three throws in the hole, I wasn’t completely surprised. It turns out that Cornhole was his main procrastination activity while a student at Stanford. Even more, Bird, a lanky six-foot-three-inch thru-hiker, was a pitcher for Stanford’s World Series College Baseball team in 2021. And Kat’s Stanford Water Polo team took home gold at the World University Games in Taipei in August 2017. (She scored seven goals on 12 shots.) We had clearly been hustled by Kat and Bird.
It’s Not an Adventure If the Outcome is Known
In early March, before we began the PCT, we worried about river crossings, sliding off icy cliffs, lightning strikes, or some combination of thirst and starvation. But as KarMMa says, “Expect the unexpected.” With our pivot to the OCT the thing that raised our blood pressure most wasn’t even on our worry list when we hit the trail.
We were walking the beach near Heceta Head when two dogs — a Pit Bull and a German Shepherd— started growling at us. They were accompanied by a 40 year-old couple walking towards us. The Pit Bull was on a leash, but the German Shepherd was off-leash, and the couple struggled to control them. We headed towards the dunes to avoid them and had put a hundred and fifty yards between us, when we heard growling and barking behind us. We turned and both dogs were charging at us, and the Pit Bull’s leash was skipping in the sand behind him. The couple yelled for their two kids to “STOP THE DOG!” The kids, halfway between us and their parents, dove to grab the leash, but missed.
I’m not inherently afraid of dogs— I grew up with hunting dogs— and I assume that “a dog’s bark is worse than its bite.” My tactic when threatened is to do my best to communicate fearlessness and to keep walking while talking to the dog in a soothing voice. But the dogs were galloping towards us at full speed, teeth bared, barking loudly. I kept walking, doing my best to ignore their growls.
But KarMMa stopped walking. The dogs cornered her and were growling and yipping at her feet, teeth bared. KarMMa spun in place, holding her hiking poles between her and whichever dog lunged closest to her.
I could see that the woman dog owner was running towards us to help, but the man was walking, seemingly unconcerned. I doubled-back to KarMMa to distract the dogs, saying in as calm a voice as I could, “it’s OK dogs” to the snarling duo, and “JUST KEEP WALKING,” to KarMMa.
The dogs switched to circling me. I quickly understood KarMMa’s predicament; one dog would lunge towards me from the front, while the other lunged from behind. I contemplated using my poles to knock the dogs on the snout as they circled me, but their owners eventually managed to distract them and the two dogs slowly retreated.
KarMMa and I managed to continue our walk south and our heart rates slowed. But we didn’t have the courage or patience to stop and talk to the owners. As we walked away, I wasn’t sure if they would notice an upraised middle finger, but I guessed that an unconcerned Pit Bull owner is as dangerous as their dog.
Remarkable Trail Partners
We’ve met a few couples on the trail: Scout and Frodo the day before we left, Hawkeye and Achilles, our French Canadian friends, and most recently, Kat and Bird. Like us, these couples have found ways to happily co-exist on the trail in tight quarters for six months, 24/7. But the most remarkable trail partners we have met are William and his dog, Barkley.
We briefly met the pair on the Curry County bus after we flagged the bus down to avoid a Highway 101 road walk. After the bus stopped at the Harris Beach State Park the pair sprinted to the hiker-biker site at a pace that would have left us panting. By the time we arrived at the campsite, they had already set up their camp for the night.
Over two days, using the state park as a base camp for multiple slack-pack outings, we learned much more about William and Barkley. William was initially quiet— you assumed he wanted to be alone— but he was quick to sit with us at our picnic table. A self-described luddite, he had what looked like a ten year-old iPhone. The first time we bumped into him on the trail, he was using an illustrated park brochure as a map.
William was doing the OCT for the second time, and as before, he was going south to north, using a pack-raft to cross the deeper rivers and bays we had circumnavigated via long road walks.
William rescued Barkley, an eight year-old Vizsla, six years ago. Together, the two have done 2,000 miles on the OCT, PCT, and Arizona Trail. William’s trail name is “Marathon Man”— at 59 years-old he has completed more than twenty-five ultra-marathons. Pre-Barkley, William became a triple-crowner, completing the PCT, CDT, and AT.
Together, the two set a blistering pace— about 30 miles/day. William’s surprisingly large backpack includes Barkley’s kibble and plenty of dog-sized clothing— a wool “Night Owl” sweater, a rain jacket, and a reflective vest for road walks. But the heaviest item in his pack is the three-pound inflatable pack-raft, along with five pounds of related gear— a pump, paddles, and a life jacket for each of them.
As hiking partners, the challenge that requires the most teamwork is river crossings. Barkley is adept at log crossings, and happily swims shorter, slower-water crossings. But if the water is deep and fast, they have two techniques for crossing together:
Barkley leaps onto William’s shoulders in a fireman’s carry. William “wears” Barkley like a shawl, holding his front paws with his left hand and his rear paws with his right.
When William needs his hands free, Barkley holds on to Williams shoulders in a piggy-back position.
For long river or bay fords on the OCT, William inflates the pack-raft— it resembles a tiny, inflatable kayak. The backpack sits at the front of the boat and Barkley sits between William’s legs while William paddles. The pair practiced pack-rafting a few times before their first outing four years ago and it was a disaster. Today, after practice, the two make a remarkable team. They have been inseparable for six years.
When on the grid, William is a sales associate at REI. Although he’s in a rare league of ultralight thru-hikers, he uses a kind and measured tone when talking with newbies like us. As KarMMa and I talked about our luxury light thru-hiking goals, he weighed in carefully:
“You can be comfortable hiking— with little weight— or you can enjoy your campsite when eating or sleeping— with more stuff. You need to decide where you want to be on that continuum.”
William got excited when we told him that we had to sleep head to toe in our new Durston Ultralight tent (20 ounces!) which complicates our plan to buy a lighter, double quilt for the two of us. “That’s easy,” he said, just call Enlightened Equipment and ask them to build a custom double quilt— with head holes at opposite ends. They’d be excited to build something like that.”
On the last night of our trip, I managed to set up a Kindle version of Bonnie’s “Hiking the Oregon Coast Trail” book on William’s tiny iPhone. As he fat-fingered the Kindle app, I asked him if he wanted our paperback version. He answered “YES!” so our book is now heading back up the coast. It’s in very good hands.
What’s next?
It’s now Wednesday, June 14th, and we stayed at Trail Angel Betty’s house at the southern terminus of the OCT on Monday night— many thanks Betty! Tuesday morning, Grammy Pat picked us up and drove us to Ashland, where we are now guests of an old Sesame Street/CTW buddy, Seth Meyers and his wife, Annie. We’re enjoying a zero day in beautiful Ashland as we examine snow data and PCT trail reports.
The plan of record is to have Grammy Pat drive us to Old Station tomorrow, and we’ll restart the PCT, heading north, on Friday. While on the OCT we gave the snow a month to melt, but the trail is still a mixed bag, so we’re debating alternatives. The first back-up is an eighty-mile out-and-back hike on the nearby Rogue River, allowing one more week for the snow to melt.
Here’s an example of the snow data we use to help make decisions. Postholer.com uses satellite data to provide a snapshot of current snow levels on the PCT:
The green line is current snowpack, so if you look at mile 1525 of the PCT, just north of Castella, there’s about four feet of snow on the trail, compared to an average year (the black line) of near zero. For reference, the blue line is the last big snow year, which was in 2017. So, we expect about seventy five miles of dirt, starting at Hat Creek/Old Station (just north of Lassen), then a “blip” of snow at mile 1450, then we’ll hit large swaths of four-foot deep snow for 150 miles, between Castella and Ashland. Uh oh.
We’re not afraid of snow. But it often slows our progress from an average pace of 2.5 miles/hour to one mile an hour. It takes time to navigate — to find the trail under the snow— and it’s very wet, sloppy hiking. The worst is post-holing— what happens when you break through the snow’s crust up to your hip in wet, sloppy snow, invariably scraping your shin on the icy crust. There can also be challenging water crossings and it’s sometimes hard to find a snow-free tent site. It’s a potential suffer-fest.
At the moment, our only urgency is crossing the Canadian border before October 1st, which is the earliest expected date for first snow in the northern Cascades. The first storm tends to shut down the PCT in northern Washington’s jagged mountains.
Our master spreadsheet predicts we’ll reach Canada by mid-September, so we have time for alternate plans. We’ll make a decision in a day or so. (Good news: we can now hike into Canada as the border has opened the customs station near Harding Park, B.C.)
Thanks again to the many trail angels along the way, as well as our evolving OCT “tramily” — William, Barkley, Ludacris, Kat and Bird, Swivel, Speedy Gonzales, Bumblebeast, Clifford, Spongebob Squarehands, and bikers Kari & Etienne. This pack of hikers nicely illustrates the bi-modal age composition of PCT/OCT thru-hikers. There are eight twenty-somethings, three sixty-somethings and just one hiker in-between.
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Happy Trails!
Pudding and KarMMa
(Gib and Kristen)
PS. For more photos, you can follow us here:
PPS. If you want a best guess of where we will be when, or to see the crazy spreadsheet that powers our PCT resupplies, click here.
Happy Father's Day Gib and congratulations on finishing OCT & 1,000 miles !
I love reading your updates, and look forward to the next one. I want to pledge my support, and will look into doing that. The OCT sounds very civilized, unlike the Sierra. Be careful out there and enjoy every trail moment!