My sister has a set schedule again! Woot! She now has Thursdays and Fridays off. Boo. We’ll figure it out. We always do. Since it is Spring Break we decided to head out today, Thursday. I had an appointment in Gresham, so we decided to hike in the gorge. I couldn’t find what I was looking for when I ran my normal searches, so I just decided to hit the Pacific Crest Trail at the Bridge of the Gods and see where the day took us.

We found a parking spot right by the trail head and grabbed all of our waterproof gear. It was raining pretty darn hard. We had already stopped at Subway, so we were hoping to find a nice dry place somewhere to eat at our halfway point (where ever that ended up being).

The trail is an “endless slight incline.” I’m going to trademark that phrase. My sister, as usual, hiked quickly and left me in the dust. When she sees a hill, regardless of how steep it is, she just puts her head down and trudges through. She starts walking really really fast and I cannot keep up. When she gets to a point where she can’t see me anymore, she stops and waits. It’s our tradition. It happened a lot today.

The Pacific Crest Trail is well marked. I appreciate that about it. There are so many trails that have no markings and you just have to guess and/or have really good notes. At every junction of the PCT, in the many places I’ve hit it during other hikes, there are great signs. Thank you whoever takes care of that! It’s awesome.

When we hit the junction that met up with Dry Creek Falls, we decided to take a short side trip to see it. There are never enough falls. They are lovely. There was also a nice bridge, feature, that my sister wanted desperately to cross for some reason. We did and we continued to hike up the trail. I would guess we did about 6 miles, but I can’t be sure. I also have no idea how much elevation, but we climbed for most of the hike. At some point, after a couple hours, my sister said, “I’m tired of going this way. Let’s eat and head back.” There was no where dry to eat so I sat on my hoodie in the middle of the trail. My sister ate standing up. There was little fanfare. We shared some water and headed back down.

Today’s conversation was mostly about credit debt so I’ll definitely spare you those details. We did spend some time talking about the trail itself though. My sister said it reminded her of the yellow brick road. The forest is untouched except for the trail. There are no offshoot trails, no other signs of life, just the trail. It’s almost like it doesn’t belong. I thought it was a good comparison.

There were some delightful children in front of us for about five minutes before their dad realized we were there. They were playing a rhyming game. It was cute. I thought my sister was going to play. She loves that kind of thing. A few times, the sun came out to visit us. At one point my sister said, “Look at this moss carpet. I wish I was a sprightly forest nymph so I could lay on that carpet and call the sun to me.” Yep, that’s her. I would love to, at some point, really hike the PCT. Hopefully I can make that happen.

For information about Dry Creek Falls click here.

For information about the Pacific Crest Trail click here.