Girls Gone Wildwood

The last 2 years Susan and I have taken a day off of work each month during the summer, so we can sneak off and run the trails around Mt. Hood and the Columbia Gorge while they are not crowded.  We took Thursday off of work last week to kick off the 3rd year of this tradition. It wasn't the best planning on my part considering we ran 24 mile on Sunday and I ran a race Wednesday night, but it beats working and it is always fun to see how far you can push yourself.  We wanted to run 22-24 miles and I really wanted to run the Salmon River Trail. Susan and I have run it a few times, but only a short ~7 miles to the canyon view point and back. There is a 15.7 mile loop that starts on the Salmon River Trail, and goes past the canyon view point up to Devil's Peak Lookout and Hunchback Mountain then back down Green Canyon Way to the Salmon River Trailhead. Luckily the Salmon River Trail continues beyond where you would normally turn for the 15.7 mile loop, so we c...

Susan heading up the PCT to the Timberline lodge A month from our first attempt at running the bucket list run of most MUT runners, the  Grand Canyon R2R2R , we wanted to get in one big run outside of Forest Park to help clam our anxiety, despite having an amazing summer of adventure runs. We decided to take a Friday off of work 2 weeks before running R2R2R to  run around Mt. Hood , which is similar distance and elevation gain as R2R2R2, though very different trails and environment.  A week before our planned circumnavigation of Mt. Hood, we got ~18 inches of snow above 5500 feet on Mt. Hood, which covered a lot of the Timberline trail. So, as with most of our adventure runs this summer I had to come up with a Plan B. Fall! Earlier in the summer when I planned our   Salmon River – Devil’s Lookout – Hunchback Mountain  route, I noticed on the map you could run from Salmon River to the Timberline Lodge. I pulled out the map and calcu...