Girls Gone Wildwood

For our December adventure run, we opted for snowshoes instead of running shoes. I gave Susan 2 options: Tilly Jane or Barlow Pass . She asked which route was harder, I said Tilly Jane, so that is what we did.  Tilly Jane Tilly Jane is an old A-frame hut that was built in the late 1930’s by the Civilian Conservation Corp, to support Mt. Hood climbing parties. The cabin can sleep 20 people and now can be rented on  recreation.gov . It is about 2.7 mile (one way) and 1900' elevation gain hike from the trailhead, you also have the option to continue on to Cloud Cap Inn . The route is challenging as a short day hike, but add snow and snowshoes and you have quite a workout.     Unfortunately the trail didn't have as much snow as we would have liked and we ended up carrying our snowshoes half the way up.  As we got closer to the top we did need our snowshoes and  definitely  needed them on the way down because of all the icy pa...

The top of Firelane 1 For our last long run of the year we decided to incorporate the  Wy'east Wolfpack's Fun on 1 challenge.  The TL;DR is you need to do an out and back on Firelane 1, post some evidence on social media and profit (possibly win a prize).   Since running up and down Firelane isn't hard enough, I decided we needed to run to Pittock first and end with a little climb up Alder. All in all not a bad route to end a fabulous year of trail running.  The bottom of Firelane 1 Route :  Wildwood/53rd - Pittock: 5.45 Pittock - Wild Cherry: 4.53 Wild Cherry - Leif: .56 Leif -  Firelane 1  2.7 (down) Firelane 1- St Helens Rd.: 1.43 (all the way up) FL 1 - to gate: 2.29 FL 1 - Leif: .78 Leif - Alder: 1.54 Alder - WW: .84 WW - 53rd/car: .22 total: 20.34 

After 15 drenched miles, we donned our festive hats Our friends at Wy'east Wolfpack have been hosting a Santa Hat run in Northwest Portland for the last 5 years and for some reason or the other we have had to miss it. Since we missed it again this year, we decided to do it the following weekend on our own after our long run in Forest Park.  Early edgeworthia-- what season is it?!? We parked our cars at Wallace Park, the start of the Santa Hat route, and had my husband dropped us off at the Birch trailhead on NW 53rd. We zigzagged our way through Forest Park for 15 miles in the pouring rain. We exited the park at the Thurman trailhead and to be honest running another 6 miles on the pavement in the rain did not excited me. But as soon as we got to my car and changed into our Santa / Christmas gear my Grinch attitude went away.   Photo opp at Jamison Square It was hard not to smile while running with a dog in an elf hat. The amount of people we passed tha...

It's that time of year again! With our birthdays only 6 days apart, there's no better way to celebrate than running our website-namesake trail from one end to the other, for a grand total of about 30 1/4 miles. With Thanksgiving so late this year and our long runs not really cutting it, distance-wise, we postponed til Friday, 13 December for a lucky day-off adventure. And we were rewarded with surprisingly good weather, few people on the trail, and a great day spent together with our favorite Dog Gone Wild, Cedar! This year's start: Newberry (thanks, John, for dropping us off!) Cedar enjoying trail freedom Bright mushrooms Our first time on the new bridge over Burnside St Cedar is a free elf, Harry Potter! Fancy, new-to-us Wildwood signs marking road crossings in the southern section And that's a wrap-- ending at the zoo