Distance hiked today: 35.2 miles / 56.6 km.
The Oregon Challenge: hike the entire state in 14 days, 456 miles. It's one of the unofficial challenges or traditions along the trail that some hikers take on, just for fun. As if hiking 2650 miles wasn't hard enough, we like to up the stakes sometimes 🤣.
To do it, you have to average 32.6 miles/day (52.4 km) for 2 weeks straight. Giggles was planning on doing it, and I initially was definitely not. I thought I'd join in for a couple of big mileage days, see how I felt, and then probably tone it down and never see her again as she sped away. But as soon as I got started, I was invested. Oregon Challenge, here we go.
Since we hadn't hit 33 miles yesterday, we aimed for a big day today. Packed up and hiking by 5:30am, the trail was mostly forested, super hot, and made worse by exposed climbs. But it was pretty, and there were huge fluffy dandelions.
A woodpecker was working away at a dead tree, throwing big chunks of bark onto the trail and almost got me in the head.
It was a long day, but I just had to keep walking, trying not to check too often how far I'd gone. We camped beside a shelter hut which was neat, and had a water pump. I arrived around 8:30pm, quickly made dinner and went to bed. At night my legs ache like they did when I first started doing 20 mile days - now 20 miles is just an afternoon.
Total trail mileage: 1763.3 miles / 2837.1 km
