PCT Day 140 – What to See, What to Do

Campsite at mile 2214 to campsite at mile 2190

I wake to the now familiar smell of forest fire smoke drifting in on the morning breeze. The sky is an endless flat white stretching overhead, and in the trees the soft shadows blend the various hues of green together forming shapeless backdrop to our morning. The forest slides past, indistinguishable, unknowable, lulling my waking mind down into a low gentle hum of nothingness. Occasionally there are punctuations of beauty, warm light dancing across ripping leaves, blueberries bobbing heaving with juice, but overwhelmingly there are trees and trees and trees.

In early morning we reach the top of a ridge and there we can look out onto the world. Beyond 100 feet the dark green of the forest begins to fade and blur into the smoke. A half mile out and lines become soft shapes and shadows; beyond that there is only white, vast shapeless white. On the maps someone has commented “a great view of Mount Hood from here!” Oh invisible commenter, I wonder what you have seen, for I am blinded. We have been set adrift in a sea of white, with nothing but a sameness of green to anchor us to this world our eyes are as good as useless.

The afternoon passes in much the same way as the morning, a sort of walking purgatory. We climb up into the sky where there is nothing and less to train your eyes on, then down into the wallpapered hallway of the forest. And so passes one full day on the PCT, not with a leaping joy but with a frustrated sigh.