10 miles of hiking • 250' elevation gain •
A good friend of mine who is getting over some health problems that have prevented her from strenuous activity has decided to make 2019 the year she starts hiking with me.
She insisted it would be a girls only day on the trail, so we headed out alone at 8 am from Portland. I decided to pick a trail that I knew would have no gain, so as not to scare her off from hiking with me again.
However, as I tend to do, I may have overdid it with the mileage, as I find on straight trails the miles come easily. As I heard my gps say mile 5, I decided we had better take lunch and turn around. She did great until around mile 9, when she told me her feet officially hated me.
It was an oddly cloudy day in the canyon, the only bit of sunshine that hit us was at our lunch stopping point at a small waterfall in a side canyon, which was rather fortunate and beautiful. We didn't see another soul the entire day, until we were at the Harms Road trailhead (which we SHOULD have started at to cut out 1.5 miles of farmland.) A local farmer was riding an ATV and looking for missing cows, and was actually very friendly to us. We joked if he was there to bring us the rest of the way to our car up ahead at the Centerville Hwy trailhead. I don't regret the extra mileage, I thought the farmland around us and the snowcapped peaks visible from Centerville Hwy were quite beautiful. However, next time (which will honestly probably be by bicycle) I'll skip it and start at Harms Road.
