So I thought a short hard hike would be a good thing after a full day of trail work in Bend. The part that I didn’t consider was that Bend is three hours away from home. Ok, let me back up a second here. Some of you may know that after the Eagle Creek fire I heard my calling and I’ve been volunteering with Trails Keepers of Oregon. It’s a great organization that does trail stewardship. For the most part they organize work parties in the Gorge and around Mt Hood but are trying to expand statewide. Following this effort, they participated in a trail maintenance summit organized by the Mountain Biking Community so they had this event which included a morning with interesting lectures and the afternoon working on a trail in a nearby park that will be opening later this year. It was a great experience but to participate, I had to leave my house at 5AM on Saturday and didn’t get back until about 7PM. I was super tired and needed some sleep so went to bed early to wake up early again on Sunday for this hike. Fortunately, the drive to Kings Mountain is short and the hike is not that long – it’s just steep. Weather was not perfect but at least it wasn’t raining still, it made the lower part of the trail very eerie as we were walking through clouds. Once we got to the junction where you veer off to Coronary Ridge – which I was amazed to be able to recognize as soon as we got there, the skies cleared up a bit. We huffed and puffed up that mountain and got to the sign pretty quick Views were still magnificent even though we could not see that far. As we continued thru the ridge, we walked thru overgrown sections of the foot path collecting all the water from the leaves. By the end, when we got to the Kings Mountain trail my pants were drenched. I guess I should have thought about grabbing the gaiters that morning. I was pretty warm from the exercise so decided to just keep pushing uphill towards the summit of Kings. As I climbed my pants dried up completely so when we got to the picnic table, just below the summit, I was completely dry.
We made our last push to the signpost and signed the logbook before retracing our steps to the open meadow for a quick bite to eat. Once we started getting cold, we packed our stuff and headed back down, this time taking the Kings Mountain trail all the way to the car. Once down, we celebrated the achievement of the day with a picture and then stopped for well-deserved lunch and the corresponding beer. As you might guess, I crashed as soon as I got home and didn’t open my eyes until Monday morning.
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