Aside #1: The necessary backstory for you to understand why today was awesome is this: it has been raining in Klamath Falls for about 8-9 straight days. That is not hyperbole. Or, at least, it's very slight hyperbole. It stopped raining briefly a few times. But, for the most part, it rained for a week and a half nonstop. This is weather that I might expect from a place like Ohio (where this happened a few times, at least, in my memory) or Portland (where it apparently happens at least once a month according to friends who live there). But in Klamath Falls, in a desert climate, and specifically in a place that claims to have 300 days of sunshine a year (a claim I believed until this week)...last night Lindsey and I were out running on a level street and there were puddles of water that went up above my ankles when I stepped in them.
So, anyway, I went to bed last night with no plans to get up and do anything outdoors today. I slept in later than I've slept in in a long time, because most of my weekends here involve willingly waking up at 7am so I can get an early start on whatever wilderness/hiking/climbing pursuit I have planned. Today, all I had planned was sitting by the window, mournfully watching the rain pummel passers-by into mush-piles.
Imagine my surprise when I woke up instead to find fingers of sunlight streaming in between the blind-slats and a mostly clear, blue sky doing its best non-SAD impression.
Having already lost a few morning hours to sleep, I slammed a remarkably heavy breakfast down my gullet, threw the dog in the back of the truck (okay, not literally threw) and tore off toward Moore Park.
Aside #2: I'm going to include an aside here that condenses a lot of my life lately into a paragraph for the sake of making this post make more sense. I think in the past a lot of why I've had a hard time getting back into blogging has been because back when I first started blogging, I blogged about everything because I didn't really have any other hobbies or friends. I still have that inclination, but I blog way less often now. Which means when I load this page up and start typing, I always have to wrestle with the urge to spend a weekend hammering out detailed posts on everything that's happened to me in the last three months and how I fucking feel about it SO THAT THE BLOG WILL KNOW. Basically, if I indulged that urge, I'd never actually write anything. In fact, that urge is the main reason why I haven't been writing anything lately. Hence, Aside #3...
Aside #3: I have a dog now. His name is Doctor, and he is a blue heeler. He is pretty awesome, and we are training him to hopefully be a running dog and a hiking dog. He is currently five months old and very small, so he is not good at these things yet. But he sure as hell likes to try being good at them.
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| Doctor, either lolling his tongue or vomiting a roll of Bubble Tape. |
Doctor and I didn't climb Moore Mountain together, though, because a) all of the trails up it are unpaved and were still a morass of mud from the rain-week and b) as a heeler, Doctor still has an inborn tendency to nip at my heels if he senses that I don't know where we're walking, and climbing Moore Mountain without a map would lead to many such moments. I have tender ankles.
I think we still had fun, though, as there were stone bridges to be crossed...
...and Ponderosa pines to sniff and pee on...
We managed to hike for almost two miles in a loop without leaving the paved trails in the park, and Doctor managed to hike past three people without attacking any of them (he still has a problem with people, and it's unclear whether the problem is just overenthusiasm or actual hatred). About halfway through the walk, he started giving me the over-the-shoulder, tongue-wagging smile, which is the closest thing to an expression of clear happiness that a dog with a bobbed tail is capable of producing.
We managed to get back home by 2pm, which got me thinking that with 4 more hours of daylight and no dog, I could easily actually climb Moore Mountain. I'd climbed it before, with Lindsey, but this go-round would be made interesting by the fact that I had no map to help me navigate the labyrinth of bike-and-hike trails that criss-cross the mountain, only a few combinations of which actually lead to the summit thanks to thick foliage even during winter that makes simply bushwhacking not an option. I left the dog happy with a ball full of food and some water and drove back to the park.
I had a vague memory from the past of using the road to hike to the main "scenic drive" loop and then jumping on to a mountain-biking trail at about 10:00 of a counter-clockwise circle of said loop. From there, it was all eyeballs and intuition. My intuition is bad and one of my eyes was already swollen half-shut from a broken blood vessel that had, it seemed, doubled the size of my eyeball. Oh well.
Things started off well enough as I found what might have been the same trail we'd used last time to approach the ridge leading up to the mountain summit.
After walking for about fifteen minutes total, I could actually see the mountain summit, which I took to be a good sign.
Then, I took a right turn instead of a left and ended up at a trail that ran straight up the ridge to the west of the summit. From previous experiences hiking this trail, I knew that it didn't actually lead anywhere except out around to the right of the summit and to a beautiful view of Upper Klamath Lake. But I didn't want a fucking view of Upper Fucking Klamath Lake, I wanted to climb Moore Mountain. So I backtracked for about five minutes, took the next trail branch I saw...and ended up at the same ridge trail again.
This went on for awhile, but eventually I systematically eliminated three trails until realizing the fourth one was the correct one. While switchbacking my way up to the ridge on this trail, I almost plowed headfirst into two large female deer. "Plowed" is not an exaggerating either. Moore Park deer are so acclimated to humans that if you're not paying attention you can damn near walk right into one before it moves out of the way. This one hunkered down about twenty feet away and waiting for me to leave.
After playing awkward switchback-hide-and-go-seek with the deer for a few minutes, I started actually gaining altitude. Now, the climb from the parking lot to the summit is only 800 feet, which is about a third the altitude gain between breakfast on a normal climb of mine. But it's the off-season and I was busting ass to finish before the sun went down, so I was already a little beat. Fortunately, the sight of snow on the trail motivated me to get moving again.
Shortly after merging onto the ridge-climbing trail proper, I got my first view of the lake.
Shortly after that, I took another wrong turn and ended up goddamn slogging uphill at a ridiculous angle on a deer path for about 200 vertical feet, in mud that threatened to pull off my boots and through thorns that threatened to pull off my skin. Because I'm a moron who can't tell the difference between a deer trail and a human trail most days. Fortunately, I eventually topped out on this obviously human path with the secondary summit's radio tower in sight.
From there it was a pretty easy romp through more thorn bushes to get to the summit. But this is why route finding is actually very important when it comes to climbing Moore Mountain. Because everything along the north face of the thing that isn't a maintained human trail is fucking thorn bushes.
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| Pay the blood-toll to the thorn god, mortal! |
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| Stukel Mountain in the distance, to the left. |
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| Mount Shasta to the south. |
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| Mountain Lakes wilderness and Upper Klamath Lake over the hill. |
Overall, it was a hell of an afternoon for leg-distancing, and a great excuse to try to encourage myself to start blogging about Life Stuff again. I hope if you read this it did not kill you of boredom.
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