Beyond Medical Springs (and into the wilderness)
We passed right through Medical Springs, Oregon before realizing that there was a town. Its really just an intersection. Twenty miles east of Union, this is where we turned off the pavement. We entered at night so we missed the scenery, but not the washboard on the roads. We drove about 20 miles to the campground where Neil, Nora and I would meet Susan, Eric, and Jax, Susan’s dog.
After a cold night in the campground, we woke to start the packing for real. We were going to be away from civilization for five nights and six days; we needed a serious amount of peanut M&Ms.
We hit the trail at the crack of 2:30 pm, after a couple false starts, some last minute beers, and lunch. We made our way almost three miles before clapsing in the first suitably flat spot with evidence of a previous fire pit. We knew that our next day would be our hardest with a 3000 ft elevation gain and nine miles. We would have to get our an earlier start.
With bad feet, hamstings, knees, backs, heads, necks, and paws, we put our heads down and climbed for most of the day, stopping frequently for chocolate, sesame-cheese sticks, carrots, salami, dog food, and various other unmentionable foods. But it was all worth it. We topped Horton Pass, 8400+ feet, at about 5 pm and headed down the last mile to Upper Lake.
We walked into our camp site with the swagger of a cowboy who just got laid. Yes, we had the finest damn site this side of the Horton Pass. We decided to stay there for an extra night and recover, while enjoying the Lakes Basin without our packs.
Next, we woke to breakfast and coffee while looking at the granite peaks in the center of the Wallowas. To the west, we saw the East Lostine valley, four miles long with the East Fork of the Lostine River taking its sweet time through the valley’s grassy meadows. To the south, Upper Lake received the runoff from the last of winter’s snow melting off a 500 foot wall of granite scree and boulders.
We headed out to explore the Lakes Basin and climb Glacier Pass to Glacier Lake, described as the “second most beautiful lake in Oregon after Crater.” (Ah, guide books: what would life be like without them?) But by lunch, Neil was predicting that we only had 20 minutes of sun left before the dark gray clouds would cover it. He was wrong: we only had 15 minutes before the clouds arrived to stay for a while.
We continued our climb to the top of Glacier Pass, though. When we arrived, the wind was blowing a steady 30 mph and throwing the rain at us in various sizes and forms. It was sometime around then that Neil reminded me about closing the rain flap on our tent. I had forgotten to close my side of the tent. We were about 3 miles from there and there was nothing that I could do but hope that it was not raining as hard there.
I got lucky. We got back to camp to discover that the rain was only just beginning there. I changed, put on all of my gear and went out to pump water at the lake’s edge. I got wet. But there was hot tea and a tarp back at the camp. We ate and played lair’s dice in the fading light.
We woke the next day to clear blue skies and ice on the tent. The time had come to leave the best little campsite this side of Horton Pass. We climbed slowly out of the valley over the next pass—I cannot remember the name. We had an easy day. We only hiked three miles to the next lake and most of it was down. There, our camp site luck held out and we managed to find the mother of all campsites: Firehenge.
It was at Firehenge that we discovered the amazing power of Hink Pink, a game of random rhymes and their ridiculous made up definitions. We would be haunted by the uncontrollable urge to call out “Hink Pink!” every few miles on the trail.
It was also at Firehenge where we formulated our BrillantPlan™. We would walk out early on our last day and stop at the first place we saw that had burgers and shakes. As luck would have it: we found Gravy Dave’s in Union. Damn good burgers and shakes.
Eric posted a bunch of his photos here.
