The Oxbow Loop Biscuit Incident (A Completely Normal Hiking Story)

Oxbow Loop Trail (North Bend, WA)

Distance: 1.8 mi (Round Trip)

Elevation Gain: 56 ft.

Highest Elevation: 920 ft.

Dogs: Allowed

Difficulty: Easy

Oxbow Loop Trail is one of those rare hikes that gives you an unreasonable amount of beauty for very little effort. It is an easy, roughly 1.8-mile loop with only about 56 feet of elevation gain, but it still manages to serve up lake views, river views, mountain views, and that lush Snoqualmie rainforest feeling that makes parts of the Pacific Northwest seem slightly overqualified.

The first time we went, on New Year’s Eve 2025, that easy payoff was exactly what we needed. We were in the thick of the most emotionally inconvenient week possible, waiting through the last miserable stretch before my scheduled cancer surgery, and the goal was simple: get out, move around, breathe some cold air, and let the trail do what trails are supposed to do. I went with Allison, Archer, Ember, and Shadow, and for a little while it really did feel like the day was working. The hike was gentle, the scenery kept changing just enough to keep everyone interested, and it had that rare combination of being short enough to feel manageable while still looking like a real adventure. The trail passes through the Middle Fork Snoqualmie River valley, where you get calm water, mountain views, and the kind of forest canopy that makes everything feel a little more settled than it did five minutes earlier.

Then came the biscuits.

We stopped at South Fork after the hike, and I had a few bites of one of those magical biscuits we had had before, the kind that makes you feel briefly, foolishly sure that the world is a generous place. It was not a dramatic eating experience. I did not inhale it. I did not destroy an entire basket in a single act. I had several bites, enjoyed them properly, and filed the experience away under satisfaction. That is important, because the biscuit did not feel like a mistake at the time…

A couple of hours later I felt bloated, which was annoying but not alarming, and then over the next couple of days that annoyance turned into much worse pain and fever. Then urgent care. CT scan. Ruptured appendix. Emergency surgery immediately. And this was happening four days before the scheduled melanoma and lymph node surgery I was already bracing for. The timing was so awful it almost felt scripted. The biscuit, in hindsight, had not been magical at all. It had been the opening scene of a medical disaster.

By April 22, 2026, the second time I went to hike Oxbow, I had been back through enough recovery

and enough life to be able to laugh at the absurdity of it, which is probably the only reason this whole story is now a blog post instead of just a long, deeply rude memory. That second hike was me, Archer, Grandma Tanya who was visiting from Arkansas, and Shadow. This time we did not stop at South Fork. This decision was later discussed, acknowledged, and treated with the proper level of respect. The joke was simple and very satisfying: I did not get biscuits that time, and I also did not get appendicitis. A historic improvement.

The trail itself was just as good the second time, maybe even better because I was not carrying a fresh stack of medical dread into it. Grandma Tanya was blown away by how much different scenery Oxbow packs into such a short, easy loop. That is the thing about this trail. It is not hard, it is not long, and it does not pretend to be something it is not. It just keeps handing you one beautiful view after another, like it cannot help itself. There are river views, lake views, mountain views, and enough forest to make you feel like you have traveled farther than you have.

Archer, meanwhile, spent part of the hike doing what he apparently does best, which is throwing rocks into the river with the confidence of someone who has spent years perfecting the art. He has a very serious approach to rock throwing, and I mean that in the highest possible way. Shadow kept up as usual, Grandma Tanya kept taking in the scenery, and I kept having that quiet, slightly stunned surreal feeling that comes after surviving something awful and then returning to the same place to find it still beautiful, still ordinary, still there.

That was the real payoff this time. Not just the trail, and not just the joke about the biscuits, but the fact that the second visit to Oxbow was not haunted by the first one. The same place that once sat beside fear and bad timing and surgery became, in April, just a place. A remarkable little trail full of mountains, river water, and forest, shared with some of my most important people. Which is probably the best kind of redemption a hike can offer.

And for the record, I still think the biscuits are suspicious.

Somewhere along the way, the pace changed. I don’t think there was an exact moment we decided to stop writing here, it definitely wasn’t a conscious decision or effort. There wasn’t a last post where it all got wrapped up neatly. I think we just missed one, then another, and eventually it was easier, as some things in life are, to discontinue it all together. If you used to read this blog back in its heyday you probably remember a version of us who measured hikes in miles and elevation and whether or not it felt like something worth writing about. Back when 20 mile hike weekends were normal and the Jaxx could run circles around us in the snow until he puked and then keep going after a 30 minute break.

Jaxx isn’t that dog anymore. He went from Mr. miles to missing the couch and crashing constantly, barely willing to be dragged around for a quarter mile to do his business and sleeping ~20 hours a day. Now at the dog park, he waits at the gate. Not to go in but to leave. His preferred dog park now is the couch. His two favorite times of day are 6a and 7p when he gets his meds on a peanut butter spoon, and that’s life.

Shadow is a robust 10 year old gentleman and still very much his same old self. He’s everybody’s friend and raring to go. He’s not sure what’s up with Jaxx but is good about giving him his old man space, at least most of the time.

Things are different on our end too. A successful hike now means snacks, diapers and K-pop Demon Hunters music ready to go in the car. The days of the 30-45 minute whirlwind last minute gear gathering to get two hungover adults out the door and on the trail are well in the rearview and now mobilizing the whole crew takes around 1.5 hrs if we are going as fast as possible. 

Archer, who is almost six, is obsessed with Ross Lake Dam and how he can “still remember that big dam we went to.” It’s been almost a year, and he uses it as proof of how good his memory is, usually right after forgetting some other major life event that we have to remind him about. Yesterday he said Ross Lake Dam is the first thing he thinks of every morning when he wakes up.

Ember at two is still just along for the ride. Twenty six pounds, closer to thirty two with the pack carrier, which makes even our shorter, Archer ability hikes, feel like enough for whatever adult is carrying her. And there will be no mistaking of ownership when she is around and proclaims, “this is MINE!” multiple times. She also currently really likes to tell us how much she likes tartar sauce.

On a recent hike along the Middle Fork Snoqualmie River Trail, on one of those misty, rainy PNW days with wet moss and ferns everywhere, I mentioned to Katie how hiking in those conditions, in that kind of scenery and foliage, still feels exotic and magical to me even after all these years of being here off and on. She feels the same way, and she, Allison and I stood there for a minute just kind of acknowledging how meaningful it is to be able to live in a place that makes us feel like this. That part hasn’t changed.

A lot of other things have, though. Not in a way that fits neatly into a recap post. More like the kind of changes that would take ten years of posts to actually tell.

Since the last time I wrote here, Allison became Dr. Allison, we got married, started a family, kept our dog family, moved from Nevada all over the rest of the country and ended up back in Washington. I finally got the help I needed and got my mental health and related issues under control, and kept them there. We also lost several people who were really important to us.

Very recently, I had a cancer scare. Melanoma, lymph node removal, waiting to find out which way it was going to go. I ended up, after surgery, with a clean bill of health.

After that, I finally got a tattoo I had been thinking about for a long time. A phoenix across the left forearm. I will tell people that I had been planning it for around seven years, tied to trying to get my life back on track, which is true. But it also feels tied to everything else. The kind of thing you finally do after enough time has passed and enough has happened that you can see the shape of it a little more clearly.

That situation has me feeling more introspective, which likely brought me back here. Physically, we’re not exactly where we were last time we posted after the PCT, we were in the best shape we had ever been in our lives and probably ever will be. Now, between Godbaby and Manbaby, our trail names, here’s a partial list of things that affect our ability to hike at least a bit: heavy kids, iron, B complex and D deficiencies, right hip issues, knee issues, hallux rigidus, can’t see the trail without glasses syndrome, and more.

If we could just transplant our brains into robot bodies, a lot of that would probably sort itself out. Until then, if you imagine Winston Churchill giving a speech about continuing to hike persistently in the face of all of it until we physically can’t anymore, that’s basically where we’re at. We thought about coming back here a few times over the years. It always felt like we needed a reason worth breaking the silence for.

But the truth is, most of what I miss about this space isn’t the big stuff.

It’s the small details. The slightly pointless ones. The things that don’t really belong anywhere else but in a journal or blog.

So we’re not going to try to catch you up on everything.

I think we’ll just start here. And maybe, here and there, you’ll see some actual hiking posts again too!