I came back to Oregon because, for me, it's home. I found the best me out here. I've had bad things happen to me everywhere I've lived, but Oregon was the one place where the good always outweighed the bad. Aside from just getting a quality education in high-level geometry, one of my hopes in going to Stony Brook was that the quality of a degree from Stony Brook's math grad programme (and maybe some recommendation from a couple of their stellar profs) would give me a little more leverage in getting a math job in Oregon. The degree thing didn't work out, but I still wanted to be back out here.
Anyway, I got an apartment out here. After driving solo across the country with all my belongings packed in a vehicle for the second time in less than a year...and after the approximately year-and-a-half ordeal I went through....I needed a healthy dose of relaxation. A lot of that meant stay-cation in the apartment. But I definitely had to do some real Oregon Wilderness hiking. I kept all of my Wilderness maps (and some of my trail guide books written by William Sullivan). So I took a few days to do a couple of smaller hikes I was familiar with, and one big hike that was new to me.. First I went to Tenas Lakes for an over-nighter, then I stopped at Canyon Creek Meadows for a day hike. I capped the trip off with a 3-day/2-night trip out to Table Lake in the Mt. Jefferson Wilderness. All said and done, I think I hiked about 40-ish miles and got a solid 5K+ feet of elevation gain over the entire vacation. And I saw some amazing stuff. So I took pictures. Here's some slide shows, broken up into albums based on location. Some photos have captions at the bottom, if you're looking for narration/info.
Album 1: Tenas Lakes/Scott Mt (Mt Washington Wilderness)
**For what it's worth, I didn't outright "fail out" of Stony Brook. But a C average isn't enough to stay in the programme. You have to have a 3.0 cumulative to be able to register for classes AND keep student loans. Without student loans, it was impossible for me to keep going there. And I wouldn't have been able to get a 3.0 cumulative even w/ all A's by the end of the Fall '22 semester, which was my deadline for my probationary period.
Additional albums added! I did a 2nd trip, this time out to Three Sisters wilderness for a multi-day trip, using Green Lakes Basin as a base camp.
Days 1 & 2 (Hike to campsite, Green Lakes Basin, Moraine Lake, South Sister):