Day 15 – 9/8/19

15* miles / 287.7 total

*includes side trip to summit 8420 – Little Cottonwood-Modesto peak

Ooof. We got almost no sleep last night. It was 10pm til we got to bed after mingling with the locals, and then just after lying down, the wind picked up. Like, really really picked up, flapping the tent so loudly we couldn’t sleep. Several times, it gusted so hard a stake ripped out, causing the tent to collapse, requiring us to get up and fix it.

We didn’t even bother waiting for the alarm to go off in the morning, just getting up with the wind still slapping us around.

We immediately entered the Pueblo Mountains and all the hiking today was slow going. Nearly all of it was cross country, including some annoying routing to avoid private property that took us up and down over a whole bunch of drainages to finally get us to a cairned “desert trail” route. But don’t let the “cairned” or “trail” part of that fool you into thinking there’s actual trail, or even that the next cairn is visible from the one you’re standing at. It’s not that kinda trail.

It was a whole lot of bullshit bushwhacking through thick brush and trees while contouring steep slopes. But you’ll notice I did say “trees” which is a nice change. The Pueblos are very scenic, perhaps more so because we just did a bunch of fairly boring road walking through the Oregon Canyon Mountains. I’m also probably grouchy from the lack of sleep.

Just after lunch, I dropped most of my gear and left Dan by a cairn to rest while I made a side trip to streak another of Oregon’s 100 highest. Peak 8420 was just a 2 hour round trip with 1400’ of gain from the ODT. It would be a 3 day weekend from Portland.

We stopped to camp when we found a flattish spot high up along our route. It was still fairly early and I was excited to get to bed…only to discover my air mattress quickly deflated. Like, really really quickly.

I searched for the hole and ended up finding 3 big slashes, all in a line down the middle of the mattress. There must’ve been something sharp underneath this morning as I rolled it up. Thankfully I was able to successfully patch them all with tenacious tape.