Day 31 – 9/24/19

33 miles / 673 total

My body is tired. I’ll be glad to finish tomorrow and sit on my butt for a while. I finished up some cross country this morning, including an off trail detour to a cattle trough that is marked in the trail info as “reliable until the end of September.” What exactly does that mean? Is it still reliable on September 24 of this particular year? I was very glad to find plenty of water in the trough, but it appeared the source had already been turned off (nothing came out the pipe when I depressed the float), and despite all the seemingly freshly torn up ground and poop, there were no cows around. Summer has ended early this year, and I think a lot of the cattle have been moved out of the high country in the last week or so.

The rest of the day was a mix of primitive and gravel roads through pine forest, which was a nice change of scenery. I had decided the night before my minimum goal for the day was to get to Pine Mountain Observatory, 33 miles away. I cached water there before the trip, and remembered thinking how nice it would be to camp at the BLM campground there (pit toilet and picnic tables among a pine forest!). Any further would be bonus miles to shorten my finish day, and when the day started I felt highly motivated to get as many bonus miles as possible.

But by mid afternoon I was dragging. Still moving along at a decent pace, but tired. Then I got a text from Marmot asking me if I’d been to Pine Mountain yet, which seemed like a very odd questions. When I told her I was 6 miles away and planning to camp there for the night, she responded that she and Gabriel were waiting there with kombucha, apples, and veggies. WHAT?!?

I turned on my jets and powered out the climb up the mountain. This may be the fastest I’ve ever walked. Nearing the campground I caught sight of my friends. Our reunion was so joyous I kinda felt like I had just finished the trail.

We put on all our layers (it was sooooo cold up there!) and caught up on all our ODT happenings while eating our trail dinners at the picnic table. They had decided to bail on their hike from Denio the day before when they saw the weather forecast was a high of 8 degrees when they would’ve been going over Steens, along with a snowstorm on the way. No thank you! They had successfully hitched back to their car in Bend and were now on a cache and resupply box retrieval mission. I was sad for their bad luck with conditions on this hike, but super happy to have their company tonight. Yay friends!!!