Three long-distance wilderness hikes in or near Oregon will stretch your legs as well as your sense of adventure
By Bob Keefer
You’ve run the Eugene Marathon. You’ve climbed South Sister. How about a bigger outdoor challenge, one that has you racking up miles by the hundreds?
Long-distance backpacking is a different world from out-and-back weekending. Here are three Northwest wilderness hikes that can keep you on the trail for weeks or even months at a time. Before you set out, remember that planning is required for such adventures, along with good conditioning. And learn to pack very light!
The shortest of the three isn’t in Oregon, but it’s so close it might as well be. At 14,410 feet, Mount Rainier, just north of the Oregon border, is the tallest of the Cascade peaks. People train on this heavily glaciated mountain for bigger adventures, such as climbing Mount Everest, but you don’t have to drag yourself to Rainer’s summit to enjoy spectacular views.
The 93-mile Wonderland Trail goes all the way around the mountain, meaning you see all sides of the peak, and, for the altitude-wary, you never go higher than about 6,000 feet. Most people do the hike in about 10 days.
My wife, son and I hiked the Wonderland in 2003, and found it much more beautiful and harder than we expected. We’d imagined an easy traverse; the Wonderland is more like hiking a roller coaster track up every ridge and down the other side to cross yet another rushing stream. The cumulative altitude gain — and loss — for the trip is a knee-jarring 25,000 feet. We made it, though, and relished hot showers, a restaurant dinner and comfortable beds at the National Park Inn on our first night back.
For camping, you need a permit from the National Park Service. It took us a year to get ours, so plan well ahead. More information at NPS.gov/mora/planyourvisit/the-wonderland-trail.htm.
If 100 miles seems short, try walking Oregon’s share of the 2,650-mile Pacific Crest Trail, which runs from Mexico on the southern end to Canada in the north. The Oregon segment stretches 450 miles from the Bridge of the Gods near Cascade Locks to the California border south of Ashland. Our son thru-hiked the PCT in 2011, completing the trek in 123 days, and we provided ground support for all four months. Logistics are key to long hikes.
A popular way to tackle the PCT is a section at a time. Eugene writer and former Register-Guard columnist Bob Welch section-hiked the entire PCT with his brother-in-law over seven different hiking seasons and then wrote about it in his book Seven Summers (And a Few Bummers) — a good introduction for anyone contemplating doing the whole trail or any part of it. And of course Cheryl Strayed’s Wild is a classic.
For hard-core adventurers, the 750-mile Oregon Desert Trail, a decades-long project of the Oregon Natural Desert Association, offers coyotes, golden eagles, rattlesnakes and amazing views of the emptiest wilderness you may ever visit. It runs from the Oregon Badlands Wilderness near Bend to Lake Owyhee State Park on the Idaho border. I haven’t hiked the ODT, which is mostly a cross-country route rather than a finished trail, but I have meandered along a ridgetop stretch in the Pueblo Mountains near the town of Denio, on the Nevada border; ever since, I’ve wanted to go back for a much bigger walk. Hiking hundreds of miles of empty desert is daunting — water is the first problem — but as with the PCT, you can chop it into segments. For more information, visit ONDA.org/regions/oregon-desert-trail.
Oregon has other long-distance trails, such as the 360-mile Oregon Coast Trail, that include stretches of city hiking. Wherever you go, happy trails!