Oregon Hikers

Yes, welcome! Hiking here, like anywhere else, is just walking. What's different here are: the weather, the seasons in general, the forests, the mountains, and when the snow melts off the trails. Plus a few other details I can't recall at the moment. :D Don't worry though. You'll learn quickly enoug...

My longest hikes have been three weeks a couple of times and two weeks a couple more times. I've had no trouble staying motivated, but I never tried to hike longer daily mileage than I could enjoy, rarely more than 12 miles a day, and after experiencing a calorie deficit on a long hike in my teens, ...

I think as time goes along the percentage of roads leading to trailheads that require AWD and high clearance is only going to increase. That trend seems well-established by now. There are just too many roads and too little money to maintain them. Most National Forests in the PNW have been conductin...

Welcome! Come around any time to ask questions. Our members have a lot of local knowledge and many decades of experience which most of us are quite willing to share.

I've used caches to extend some of my hikes to two or three weeks duration. The sensible way to leave a cache involves setting it up in a place you can drive to, but I should also note that it is illegal to leave caches within the boundary of a wilderness area.

Just spitballing here, but if one were to start at Devil's Lake trailhead instead of McKenzie Pass, then Jerry's loop hike would still be an option (with or without the figure-8 crossing between South and Middle Sister) and the other week could be spent in the lake-rich southwestern area of the Sist...

Under "backpackable" the Field Guide says "no".

I think Retired Jerry tries to get at least one backpack in every month of every year. That's more ambition than I think I can muster, but I admire it!

Quite a few good points have been made against the proposed permit which is ostensibly the subject of this thread. The justification about mitigating negative impacts to an enormous parking lot were properly mocked as ridiculous. Many of the assertions the Forest Service advanced in support of this ...

Just to emphasize what has been said in other replies, in past decades, before snow depth info began to be collected via telemetry from permanent measurement stations, the state government would send all its hydrologists out with long poles to collect snow depth measurements so that dam operators wo...