About Those 800 Miles

     I dreamed the other night that I was following my father up a very steep hill. He was hurrying fast, carrying two very heavy suitcases, the sweat streaming off his face as he huffed and puffed, walking fast, struggling, and suddenly he keeled over backward and slid, head first, down the hill. I ran after him and picked him up—he was, then, like a four-inch piece of cardboard—and set him on my knee and said, mournfully, "Dad! Oh, Dad. Dad. You didn't have to work so hard."

    Now, my father died at the age of 98 1/2, in the puttering days of old age and retirement. He certainly did not die of overwork. 

    The dream, I think, was about me.

    I suppose it's possible I could keel over and die on a hike, but I don't think the danger is great. In the first place, I don't huff and puff. I measure my energy carefully and climb hills still breathing through my nose. In the second place, all doctors have proclaimed my heart strong, and, in the third place, I am not hiking 800 miles in ten months from point zero. I have been hiking for years.

    In the fourth place, I am well aware that my goal wouldn't be all that ambitious for some people. My friend who is a year older and lives in Colorado, for instance, hikes 1500 miles a year (but he says, "There are all those Colorado Mountains that need to be climbed"). My friend in California, several years younger, easily hikes 20 miles a week. 

    Anyway, hiking is not a competitive sport, and the hike itself is not a race. I'm not trying to beat anyone. I am just setting a goal and striving to meet it. If it's harder or easier for me than it would be for someone else, if someone else gets to the top of the mountain before me, so what? 

    Nonetheless, the dream affected me enough that I took a few days off from strenuous hiking. 

    Then, feeling well rested, as my yoga instructor used to say, I put on a 22-pound pack and hiked up Stein Butte. That was a tough one. At the top, sweating but not huffing, I thought, "Diana, you don't have to work so hard." 

    But there is something satisfying in working so hard. As long as I'm not in danger of keeling over and ending up flat as a piece of cardboard, I think I'll keep on doing it.

Walking 800 miles

     During the year before my 75th birthday, I did 75 things of 75 repetitions each. (See post on July 26, 2018, and following.) That was five years ago. What significant thing, I wondered after my 79th birthday last July, could I do to mark turning 80?

    Well, I thought. I could hike 800 miles before July 20, 2024. And I could hike on 80 different trails, to boot. Skiing would count.

    Goal set

    At first I didn't pay much attention to the mileage. By the end of July I had hiked 35.5 miles. September's backpacking trip in the Wallowa Mountains doubled that number. By November I had hiked 250 miles. Then I had foot surgery. Then I went to Georgia for a siblings reunion. Then I caught bronchitis. I lost two months of hiking.

    By the time I started hiking again, on December 25, I had hiked 263.5 miles. I was halfway through the year but hadn't hiked nearly half the required distance. I started calculating. To make my goal, I would have to hike approximately 20 miles a week in the next seven months. That might be easily doable if all I was doing was hiking, but things interfere: board meetings, articles to write, a journalism workshop to teach, garden work, and the myriad other things of daily life. But I was doggedly persistent.

    Mileage accumulates slowly. Five miles up one mountain, seven up another, only time for frour miles another day. In the face of 800 miles, a jump from 364 to 368 doesn't seem like much. 10-miles hikes are better.

    I have become fanatical. I no longer take walks; I only take hikes. Every empty day I fill with a hike. I love the strenuous exercise, the fresh air, the glories of nature. I have hiked through gorgeous autumn colors and in bracing winter cold. I have skied in deep white snow. Now I walk through spreads of wildflowers carpeting the woods. I am in seventh heaven day after day.

        I indulge in a massage after every 80 miles.

    Thirty-six friends have joined me on hikes. Nine others have scheduled hikes with me. A friend from California came up to hike with me, adding 23.5 miles in three days. My sister Laura is coming from Georgia to do some wildflower hikes with me. In May I'll do an 80-mile backpacking trip with three friends, staying in a lodge at the mid-point. In June I'll be hiking in the Swiss Alps with my sister Sharon. 

    My son will come down from Washington to hike the last of the 800 miles with me (or whatever the number is; I won't stop hiking if I reach 800 before July 20). We'll do that hike on my birthday, walking right from the Jacksonville Woodlands into the Jacksonville Inn, where my birthday guests—anyone who has hiked any of the 800 miles with me—will be waiting to greet me with a glass of champagne. 

    And that, I think, should be a fitting way to celebrate my 80th birthday.

    

Hiking in Jacksonville's Forest Park

Reminder to readers in the Rogue Valley: Poetry recitation Saturday, April 6, 3:00, at the Applegate Library.

    A few weeks ago I was hiking in Jacksonville's Forest Park on trails that would take me to the top of the mountain. 

    Pretty soon I started hearing chain saws. The woods suddenly gave out, and I was hiking through bare hills with lots of stumps.

    The view and the noise told the story. To my left were two hills sloping down to the valley, rounded and green with manzanita. 

Manzanita hillside in the Applegate, not in
Forest Park—just to give you an idea

The hill I was standing on and the ones I had hiked through were denuded. Slash piles of manzanita were waiting to be burned. Chainsaws buzzed in the distance. Soon the green hillsides would be as bare as these. 

    Ninety-nine percent of the manzanitas, which were ninety-nine percent of the vegetation on these hills, had been cut.

   I understood, of course. The danger of fire—and manzanitas, they say, are particularly oily—caused panic in the park managers. They said, "Cut 'em all down!"

    ("My teeth hurt." "Pull 'em out.")

    ("I have a pain in my belly." "Give her a hysterectomy.")

    Looking at those scraped-bare hills. I couldn't imagine that that destruction made good ecological sense. Surely there was a better solution.

    I turned my back on the sight and headed back towards the trailhead, hiking on a trail called Manzanita Tunnel. It will have to be renamed. The large, old manzanitas with their smooth, mahogany-red trunks no longer arch over the trail, making a delightful, magical tunnel. Now the trail goes over barren hills. We could call it Dead Souls Trail.

    When I expressed my dismay at this destruction to another hiker, she pointed out that manzanitas reseed quickly, and, yes, that's true. But earlier this month I was in another area where the manzanitas had been cut at least ten years ago. Baby manzanitas were all over the place. But they were still babies. How old were the ten-foot-high, eight-inch-thick, dense trunks of the old manzanitas that had been cut? 

I love those old manzanitas!
Here I'm hugging one on the Stein Butte trail.

Manzanitas may reseed readily, but they grow slowly. It will take untold decades for the beautiful manzanita forests to return to Forest Park's hills. If they are allowed to return.

    I haven't, myself, returned to Forest Park since that hike through scraped-bare hills. It's too painful to hike there now.

                Beautiful manzanita blossoms.      Photo by Larry Francis.