Earlier this summer, a co-worker of mine told me about told me about the Wildwood Trail in Forsest park here in Portland. Wildwood is a 30.25 mile trail that winds through much of the 5,100 acres of Forest Park. This lush park is largest forested natural area within city limits in the united states. Hiking 30 miles in a day seemed like quite a feat, but in my foolish mind it still seemed quite doable, and that is where this harebrained idea began! Over the summer I have mulled over the idea and read up on it here and there, but I haven't been able to find much info on it. In fact, out of all the blogs and hiking forums, I've only been able to find 2 people that have actually hiked this in a single day. (most split it up into 3 or more days). I figured that only because most people didn't write about their experience...I think I may have been wrong:)
So, this week, 2 illy prepared friends decided to challenge our minds and bodies and spend a day hiking the Wildwood Trail. After trying to figure out where the exact start and finish to the trail were, and how to bus out to one of these locations, I figured that'd be the hardest part, as there isn't a lot of concrete info on this. After getting a general idea of where we needed to be an how to get there, we set a day, and yesterday James arrived at my apartment on his bike, bright and early. After preparing sandwiches and filling water bottles, we set off to park downtown and hop on a bus. This whole portion took longer than expected, but we were finally on the right bus and headed down highway 30, looking for the vague spot that we knew signaled it was time to get off the bus. The bus driver was nice enough to drop us off on the side of the road, right before the Sauvie Island bridge, at a place where there was no official bus stop. We then hike 2 grueling miles up a steep hill in the sun to find our trailhead. (There was also another guy who got off the bus with us. We saw him on and off throughout the day, but I'm pretty sure he is dead somewhere in the forest, because we picked up our pace and got miles ahead of him I'm sure. and we barely made it out by nightfall).
The First 8 miles were pretty great! We felt awesome! We were out there, keeping a good pace, conquering this big feat! After a while though, the forest seemed to make us feel claustrophobic. This is a THICK forest. You cant see any horizons, barely any sun creeps through the trees, and it starts to feel like there is only forest for miles and you will never see anything other than trees ever again (this could have been true for us!). Its definitely a beautiful trail; lots of bird songs, no sign of the city, mossy nw trees, and shade from the cruel sun. But many miles into this trail, you realize that every square inch of your body is sticky from sweat, and the mosquitoes do not take too kindly to you taking a sitting break.
With naive hopeful spirits, we felt a second wind coming on after our sandwich break, and we continued on. We began quickening our pace a bit, as we started calculating how long it had taken us to get as far as we were. Our finishing time was looking a couple of hours later than we expected it to be. Around mile 13, the stupidity of our journey started to sink in, and we wanted nothing more than to reach the halfway point. By the time we reached mile 15, signs that blister were forming were getting very hard to ignore. I'm pretty sure we took a couple of breaks for food over the next few miles, and aired out our blistered feet. We trucked through the next few miles pretty well and started seeing more and more people on the trail, as we go closer to town (they had all parked at various trail heads and come down to the trail to hike a few miles of it like normal people do). And no, there are no bathrooms along the trail. I peed a great many of times and as the day went on. As I got more exhausted I peed in the middle of the trail, as this trail doesn't really have places where you can walk off the trail, since you are mostly winding around thickly forested gullies. As we got closer to town, I realized that peeing on the trail is probably not as common, but these joggers didn't know what it felt like to have been walking for 20+ miles!!! So yes, I did get caught in the act once.
Once we had around 10 miles left, things started taking a pretty steep decline. Our pace had reached an all out speed walk, and we were now taking a jog when we came to downhill portions. The idea of racing through the trail for 3 or 4 more hours seemed alot more bearable than going at a comfortable pace for 6 more hours. By the time we had 5.5 miles left though, try as we might, what felt like a racing pace to us, was probably a fairly slow pace, as the last 5.5 miles took us over 2 hours. There was a point where I painfully felt a blister rip, and I spent a while limping down the trail. After a while longer though, the pain in my joints (particularly my hips knees) were so distracting that I was able to start putting normal pressure on my feet again and start racing towards the end of the trail...to get out of that God FORSAKEN FOREST that we were now trapped in, as the sun was disappearing. (whenever things got real bad, we just remembered the poor guy that was hiking this alone, and had surely laid down to die miles behind us by now). As we neared the end, we spent our last few miles doing nearly all uphill climbing. (and to think, i had done JUST this portion of the trail, as a hike to Pittock Mansion before). Part of me was thinking "it really is amazing what the human body can do!" and the other part of me was thinking "the human body SUCKS! it can't even walk all day without crumbling!"
When we finally got out of the forest, our joy quickly turned to concern as we realized it was dark and we were not sure of where we were in the Washington Park area. We began hobbling down the street hitchhiking, until we came across a bus stop (never been so happy to see a bus stop).
Unfortunately the journey didn't end when the bus came. After sitting on the bus a bit, getting up was very difficult and we still had about 8-10 city blocks to walk to get to the car. At this point, my knees couldn't straighten because of the swelling, and we were both hobbling down the street like crippled homeless folk (or like Forrest Gump before he got his leg braces). Arriving at the car, we were so thankfully to sit and be done with our journey. It was hard to tell at this point if I was more sore/tired or more hungry. An ice bath with a bag of cheeseburgers was how i ended my day.
Over all, this was a VERY long day. We managed to do the hike at a pace of 3 miles per hour. We didn't train and we obviously weren't very prepared, but it was a good experience and (i think) a pretty big accomplishment; something for us to both be proud of!
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| Exhausted and unable to hold the camera steady on the bus at the very end. |
