A decade of highs and lows

As the column begins, an update on my adventurous last 10 years

My “hiker’s tan” after a 20-mile day on the Pacific Crest Trail in the High Sierra, July 2014.

A DECADE AGO, on December 6, 2013, I bid farewell to my colleagues at The Register-Guard and walked into a rare Willamette Valley snowstorm—and the unknown. Since working a part-time sports job at The R-G while attending the University of Oregon in the 1970s, I had dreamed of working at the paper. And saying goodbye after 25 years—the last 14 as a general columnist—was not easy.

But at 59 I felt as if I’d written every column I could write—and pined for adventure, which can only take wings if, at first, you take a risk. Let go. Trust.

I got adventure. Big-time. In fact, the ten years since leaving The R-G represented the most adventurous decade of my life: Beyond a Trump-inspired spiritual reboot, I experienced the highest of highs (standing atop 14,505-foot Mt. Whitney) and the lowest of lows (losing a mother who’d inspired me deeply).

As I begin this new weekly Substack column—and this one will be nearly twice as long as most because I need to catch you up on a decade of “missing time”—I do so with a sense that there’s an unwritten contract between us: you’re making an investment of time and money in me, and I’m making an investment of honesty and vulnerability in you.

Heart, Humor & Hope will be a personal column. I expect to bare my soul at times, share some warts amid the wisdom, all with a caveat: This is only one man’s perspective, opinion, and analysis. I have no lock on truth. My life isn’t any more meaningful than yours. I’m just the guy at the keyboard—with the privilege of having willing readers. (Thank you, subscribers, for coming along for the ride!)

So, in the interest of personal backfill, four themes that defined the decade since I left The R-G:

1.     Finishing my Pacific Crest Trail quest

On August 10, 2022, I reached Canada to conclude a 2,650-mile, 11-year journey. It took my brother-in-law Dr. Glenn Petersen and me 17 sections to hike from Mexico to Canada. We spent 148 nights on the trail. Traveled 17,701 miles just getting to and from trailheads. And hiked 180 extra miles to get off-trail supplies, dodge wildfires and re-find trail that we’d lost.

I had a brush with death in the rainy High Sierra (near-hypothermia, 2014) and Glenn a close call in the San Gabriel Mountains (heat exhaustion, 2021).

We crossed crystal-clear streams, watched two sunrises from atop the highest point in the continental U.S. (Whitney, 2014 and 2021), slept beneath star-spangled skies and hiked as dawn’s early light awakened pitch-black forests. We saw the eyes of a mountain lion staring at us in the darkness. And on a handful of occasions, were graced by “Trail Magic” whereby total strangers guided us, fed us, and drove us to and from trailheads.

No such moment was more poignant than one in 2019 when, after getting to the bottom of the most diabolical downhill stretch of the PCT, Mt. San Jacinto’s Fuller Ridge southeast of LA, I saw my barber friend from Eugene, Geoff Tyson, standing in front of our parched carcasses. It was ninety degrees and he was holding two strawberry lemonades and a sack of carnitas street tacos. As chronicled in my book, Seven Summers (And a Few Bummers), he’d driven a thousand miles to take us to dinner in Palm Springs.

Geoff Tyson, PCT hiker and Trail Angel extraordinaire.

Impact of the trip: The PCT blistered my feet, broadened my world—four of ten hikers come from outside the U.S.—and bathed me in God’s magnificent, high-mountain beauty.

2.     Losing my mother

After my father’s death in 1996, two things drew my mother, Marolyn, and me closer: the advent of email, which gave us a fast, simple way to communicate, and a sailboat, At Last, that my dad knew how to rig but we, for the most part, did not. The quandary was simple: figure it out or quit sailing. Together, over the years, we figured it out and spent many a summer sunset scarfing down Subway sandwiches, even as I managed to lose three anchors to Fern Ridge Lake in the process. (Knots apparently aren’t my strong suit.)

Mom loved a good adventure; she was, for example, part of an all-woman sailboat crew in the Caribbean in the 1980s. But her favorite sail of the year was the annual “Jungle Cruise” in which her five great-grandchildren gathered for a sails-down, centerboard-up plying of Coyote Creek, which twists north from Highway 126 into Fern Ridge. Mom was 92 on her last such trip.

Mom sailing in the Caribbean on an all-female crew.