THE 1 MPH HIKING CLUB

Have you ever been somewhere outdoors so captivating that you forgot, however briefly, about everything else? When you were truly in the moment? Wilderness can do that to you.

This year, I spent a lot of time in the wilderness forests of Oregon, with my friend, Neil, who has a personal connection to these places.

We call ourselves The 1 mph Hiking Club, though our pace can barely be called hiking. More like sauntering, allowing time for swapping questions, taking photos, telling stories, and being surprised.

“I don't like either the word or the thing. People ought to saunter in the mountains - not 'hike!' Do you know the origin of that word saunter? It's a beautiful word. Away back in the Middle Ages people used to go on pilgrimages to the Holy Land, and when people in the villages through which they passed asked where they were going they would reply, 'A la sainte terre,' 'To the Holy Land.' And so they became known as sainte-terre-ers or saunterers. Now these mountains are our Holy Land, and we ought to saunter through them reverently, not 'hike' through them.” – John Muir

A flock of gray jays bombs me and Neil, raucous as a band of bored teenagers. A brilliant flame on the forest floor, appropriately called Orange Peel Fungus, catches our eye. There, fresh elk tracks!

But it’s the big trees that entrance us. Like the ents of Tolkien’s Middle-earth, these elders of the wilderness forest speak to us of a world unmarked by civilization. We marvel at their beauty, their tenacity to survive centuries of change to their homes. What have they seen? What secrets do they know?

Mature forests that escaped logging and fire are dominated by these behemoths, here in the mountains of western Oregon, where we live. Over and over, Neil and I stop to touch trees that are, as he describes, “a whole nother class of ancient.” As each new giant stops us, we gawk upward, make wild guesses of its height, its age, rub its bark, try to grasp its silent essence, shake our heads, and move on. Some trees are so huge that we quickly run out of adjectives, reverting, simply, to pointing: “That’s a big tree.”

The more big trees, the more our questions, and the slower our pace. When did fire last burn here? From our guide books, we learn that the oldest trees – wider than we are tall – are probably “only” 700 years old, since most every forest in Oregon burned at least once since then. Neil and I speculate, argue about forest secrets, like why various kinds of trees are common here, but not there. Is it from differences in elevation, moisture, past fires? 

And why did a cougar poop on this particular spot on the trail? That monotonous hooting high in the hemlocks – is it a Northern Saw-whet Owl or Northern Pygmy-Owl? Always, we’re left struggling to understand how things got to be the way they are. The closer we peer into the wilderness, and for each question we answer, the more questions we have. And the more surprises.

One morning, a dozen miles inland from the ocean, the forest was cloaked in fog. Sunbeams cut through the thick canopy of branches, reaching 200 feet over us. Each of the trees’ countless, needle-covered boughs was tipped with a drop of water. Then, at just the right angle, a single drop high above caught the sun like a crystal, and burned as a rainbow-colored diamond.

“You’re hallucinating,” Neil scoffed, when I tried to describe the apparition. I wanted to show him, but apparently, it required a unique set of angles – eyeball to droplet to sun. You had to have your head in exactly the right place to experience the miracle. Move a few inches one way or the other, and the fiery visage vanished. Fortunately, a ways down the trail, we both hit that magical geometry again, and an otherwise indistinguishable drop of dew on a hemlock boughlet high in the forest, caught a sunbeam from 93 million miles away, and froze us in our tracks. When you find yourself in exactly the right place at exactly the right time, is that merely luck?

These wild, virgin paradises are now protected from logging, in no small measure, because of Neil. He was the attorney who took on the U.S. government, 35 years ago, filing lawsuits to save the last uncut, old-growth forests in Oregon. Long story, short, his success helped lead to passage of the 1984 Wilderness Acts. Those federal laws set aside or expanded 31 wilderness areas in Oregon (175 new wilderness areas, nationally).

Neil wrote a moving, intensely personal account of that history, which might make you cry. It did me. (Wilderness, Luck & Love: A Memoir and a Tribute – https://repository.law.umich.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1077&context=mjeal)

He and I count ourselves fortunate to have crossed paths again. We worked together as environmentalists back East in the ‘90s. Last summer, I discovered he had retired and moved to Eugene, near my home. Now, we hike together.

Which brings me to Neil’s bucket list, and The 1 mph Hiking Club. Neil wants to hike in all 31 of the Oregon wildernesses that he helped preserve. That is a grand goal.

I’m just tagging along on the easier hikes, happy for the chance to see, up close, supremely beautiful places. So far, we’ve made it together to six on his list (Drift Creek, Waldo Lake, Diamond Peak, Boulder Creek, Cummins Creek, and Menagerie Wilderness Areas), plus another three wildernesses lacking that official designation (Gate Creek, Gwynn Creek, and China Loop Trails).

Typically, we’ll hike seven or eight miles, round-trip, which at our 1 mph pace, means we can be far from the car when shadows deepen and the sun drops behind the mountains. That’s when we pick up our speed, our gliding footfalls muffled by damp conifer needles that blanket the trail. It’s the spooky time of day, when we hope to see a mountain lion.  So far, no luck.

Each wilderness is different. Low-elevation coastal rain forests drip with lichens and moss. The biggest Douglas-firs take your breath away. Their bark is deeply furrowed with age, the ground littered with their cones. Its Latin name, which I learned in college nearly a half-century ago, still rolls off my tongue like a melody: Pseudotsuga menziesii. The biggest are the tallest trees in the world, once reaching over 400 feet, taller even than the biggest redwoods. One in Washington lived for 1,385 years.

East of the Coast Range, the Cascade Mountain wildernesses that we visited are higher in elevation and not quite as soggy. In Boulder Creek Wilderness, there is an expansive area called Pine Bench. It’s a grove of centuries-old Ponderosa Pines, which grow ramrod straight, their bark covered with golden-orange flakes of bark that look like pieces from a jigsaw puzzle. Frequent fires have kept understory cleared, sculpting a landscape from Hansel and Gretel. 

Vistas open from meadows and fire-cleared areas of these trails, to the volcanic peaks of the high Cascades: Mt. Jefferson, Mt. Washington, Three-Fingered Jack, Diamond Peak, the Sisters – the highest topping 12,000 feet, most capped by glacial ice. How much time until they erupt again?

“It’s humbling, being in an area like this that has endured so long,” says Neil. “We’re a blink of the eye.”

Like those Middle Ages saunterers, we are pilgrims in Holy Lands, where wilderness quiets our minds, sharpens our attention, puts us in the moment, and connects us with the Universe. We marvel, in reverence, at our blessings.

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