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| Fires in Oregon. As we hiked north toward the Three Fingered Jack, we looked back to the south where we had hiked just days before at Mt. Washington and saw a decent fire starting up. The trail is to the right of the mountain, just a couple miles from the fire. This fire ended up closing the trail in this section as it continued burning. |
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| Indian paintbrush north of Mount Jefferson. Definitely one of my favorite flowers on the trail! |
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| Standing in front of Timberline Lodge at the base of Mt. Hood. Good friends told us this was a must see, the trail goes right behind it, and it has a rockin' all-you-can-eat breakfast buffet! We were very motivated by the idea of a breakfast buffet, so motivating that we hiked 41 miles the previous day and 9 more miles in the morning in order to get to breakfast! |
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| Tunnel Falls along Eagle Creek on our last day on the Oregon Trail. The trail literally was blasted into the rock face behind the falls. |
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| Glacial stream flowing from the base of Mount Adams. |
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| Cooking dinner with our long time travel companion, Liz, in the North Cascades just south of Waptus Lake. We had a week of gorgeous weather when we first entered Washington with some days in the 80s. This was the first night of 'Washington' weather--patchy rain throughout the day and a cold night (42 degrees while we were cooking dinner). |
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| Very wrinkled feet after a day hiking into town in the cold rain. Boy are we glad to have a roof over our heads tonight and a place to dry out our gear. From where we are here in Skykomish, we just about 180 miles from the end of this adventure. It has truly been mentally and physically challenging. I've got a smile on my face in this picture, but soaking feet in wet shoes is pretty painful. We've been told that the next and last sections are some of the most challenging and beautiful on the trail. While we will continue to live in the moment this next week as we finish, we are looking forward to coming back to our home in Maryland. It is hard to believe that this chapter of our life journey is nearly over. |