Orting

And so it gives me some solace.

And I have some of her left over to scatter on my sister's grave in Orting.

So this is taking a black turn.

But no, it's a good way to...

Gig Harbor, I'm not sure.

I think the town that we started the retreat on is called Orting, Orting, Washington.

And we start the first part of the retreat, which is a seven-mile hike They call it a hike, but it's basically a long walk along a bike path.

It's a very flat bike path.

So the story there is that I have a colleague, Pat Pringle, who lives in Washington and was a professor at Centralia College.

And he's a geologist and had been out driving the area and noticed that there were excavations happening in the Puyallup River Valley in this town of Orting.

where there were new housing going in and saw that as our sites being excavated for the houses, that the trees were being exposed and that these trees were buried in Lahar material.

And so he was able to go get his chainsaw and sample these trees.

I'm so grateful for the people that would kind of pull me along.

And Foothills Trail, riding from Orting to Buckley, all that way, seemed like an impossible distance early on.

And, and a woman who was older than I wa- it, it ... long ...

I won't tell you how I got to know her, but she called me and she said, "I hear you're looking for somebody to ride from Orting to Buckley with." [laughs] And I said, "Yeah, that'd be nice." You ...

And so she said, "Okay, you meet me in Orting, and my husband always starts in Puyallup, and then he'll join us, and we can go to Buckley and have lunch." So I'm grateful for all the people that helped.

And I got to know Bob Myrick, led tons of rides, and one day he said to me, "Why don't ...

We're planning," and he listed people that were going, "a ride, a, a ba- a bikepacking ride." And I s- [laughs] I dragged my feet.