Clackamas River Run

Today we decided that Sunday looked the best for a mission to Mt Hood national park so we decided to hunt out a new run that Jesse hadn't done before. Jesse bought a book called "60 trails within 60 miles of Portland" which was an excellent find. It was broken into all sort of sections including running. So we looked up a run we could do. We found one up the Clackamas river which looked pretty good. One of the criteria was that it was not too hilly to give my legs a break. We got there with no problems and set out. For some reason we decided not to take bags today which was a bit foolish. It turned out that it was a bit more hilly than we anticipated so my calves were up to their old tricks but we pushed on. I'm pretty sure they are just fatigued so I don't think I'm doing any real damage. Just gotta man up. It was a really nice place except that you could often spot the highway on the other side of the Clackamas river. We ran on and came across a tree that spanned the river (pretty amazing that it got wedged there):

It looked pretty crossable so Jesse gave it a go:

Just kidding, we decided that the river looked pretty hungry and death would probably be compulsory in an attempt. Afterwards there was a bit of a river crossing (which was funny because at the start of the run we were being little baby girls about crossing a boggy puddle):

We were enjoying ourselves so much that the kms just slipped away until we were just shy of 10km where we found some cool misty waterfalls:

Then a guy that had passed us while we were taking photos came running back. We stopped for a yarn and he reminded us that we only had a bit over an hour of daylight left. This was the only day we hadn't taken bags running (which would have had headlamps in them) and this was the largest run we had undertaken to date! There was only one thing to be done: huss back! So huss we did. The hills were absolutely excruciating and frustrating, I was totally fine on the flat and down hill so made up a lot of time there by sprinting. I think we made it back in pretty close to half the time it had taken us to get out. Good times.

Back at the hotel we wondered why it was so cold until we realised that the cleaners had left the balcony door open. This was hilarious because the probably thought it smelt bad. Which it did because we had 4 day old running clothes in there (the Hotel doesn't have a laundry). Later in the evening we did some investigation for our impending hood mission.