The day after Diana Coogle turned 79, her thoughts were on the future. The author and nature lover, who lived off of the grid in southern Oregon’s Applegate Valley for almost half of her life, vowed to hike 800 miles on 80 different trails by her 80th birthday on July 20, 2024.
After summiting mountains, sloshing through streams and walking in wildflower meadows, she would then party at a Jacksonville restaurant with the adventurous friends who joined her on parts of the journey. At a Champagne brunch, the self-described hippie with a string of academic degrees would break from her wholesome food diet and celebrate by eating cake made with sugar.
Her ambitious physical quest relied on her good health and traits she’s cultivated over her life: unwavering determination, discipline and persistence.
Foot surgery waylaid her progress for two months. But she persevered. She has had a lifetime of aiming for bold goals and advancing evenly while stopping to smell the wildflowers.
Raised in Atlanta, Coogle earned a scholarship to Cambridge University and after returning from the U.K, she joined communes on the West Coast, built a one-room cabin in Oregon’s Siskiyou Mountains, homeschooled her son, published books, organized a nature festival. And last year, she no longer had to go to the public library for internet service. She was hooked up and ready to explore.
Coogle mapped out her plans and if her spreadsheet was correct, she would enjoy four seasons hiking Oregon and Northern California trails, as few as four miles and as many as 12 miles in a day with breaks in between.
She reached her self-imposed 800-mile goal a month early, on June 24. “And I kept going,” she said, raising her hands in victory.
A 10-day backpacking trip on the Rogue River National Recreation Trail, from Grave Creek to Illahe Lodge and back, in May earned her 80 miles. Skinny-dips in cool, clear creeks were one of her rewards. She also splurged on a massage each time she completed 80 miles.
“The numbers were cute,” Coogle said. “And the challenge had many advantages: I would be doing something I love — hiking — in places of great beauty. I would be working my body, keeping it healthy and strong, and, as a bonus, I could hike with friends. This was a challenge that promised social, soul and body fulfillment. And it sounded like fun.”
On her 80th birthday, she celebrated quietly with family at her home above the Applegate River on forested land once owned by a commune.
The next day, she hiked in the Jacksonville Woodlands with her son, Ela Lamblin, neighbor William della Santina, and Traci Esslinger, a Southern Californian Coogle met in September backpacking in northeastern Oregon’s Wallowa Mountains.
Around 11 a.m., as planned, they walked into the garden restaurant at the Jacksonville Inn, where Coogle was greeted by friends applauding and robustly belting out the “Happy Birthday” song.
Coogle then stood in front of a printed timeline of her year of hikes. She pointed to the end of the graphic and announced the total: 868 miles.
Counterculture living
Diana Coogle grew up on six acres of Georgia woodland with her parents and four siblings. When she was 15, the family embarked on an 8,000-mile roundtrip in an Oldsmobile station wagon to Alaska’s wilderness.
Coogle sees nature as her spirituality and inspiration. Before constructing her cabin up a twisting dirt road in Oregon, she wandered.
In 1969, she and then partner Dan Lamblin joined a commune in California’s Santa Cruz Mountains. The couple moved to the Great Smoky Mountains where their son, Ela Lamblin, was born and then the family returned to the West to live in a converted barn in Oregon’s Applegate Valley.
Ela Lamblin, 52, shares his mother’s wide smile and appreciation of simple pleasures. He was 2 when Coogle and Dan Lamblin decided to live separately, eight miles apart, and she built a simple cabin with a loft under a 12-foot-tall ceiling and skylights.
Diana and Ela didn’t have a car, telephone or any electricity for lights or refrigeration. Firewood was needed for heat, kerosene for illumination and propane was used to bake bread and carob brownies on a small cookstove. They joked that the cabin was so drafty no one worried about the fuels’ impact on the indoor air quality.
What they did have was “an endless forest to play in, wild animals and birds at our doorstep,” a deck to reach out and pick an apple with a view of Humpy Mountain and “time that was our own,” Coogle wrote in her 2001 memoir, “Living with All My Senses: 25 years of Life on the Mountain.”
She lived in her off-grid cabin from 1974 to 2010, until at age 66, she moved into a 900-square-foot house her son designed for her on her land. Most of the lumber was milled from trees on her property. The best feature of this home? “Electricity,” said Coogle.
Improvising
Lamblin, an artist and musician who lives on Vashon Island in Washington’s Puget Sound, said, “While it’s easy for most people to recognize the persistence of spirit that it takes to live in the mountains without electricity, raise a child and hike 800 miles your 80th year, it’s the creativity with which my mom does these things that is more subtle and hard to know.”
He spoke of Coogle’s way of improvising a homestead with little knowledge of building practices, innovating organic food recipes and earning a Ph.D. when she was in her late 60s. He praised her gift for translating her natural science knowledge into eloquent prose as she did in “Fire from the Dragon’s Tongue: Essays about Living with Nature in the Siskiyou Mountains,” a 1998 finalist for an Oregon Book Award.
His mother, he said, personifies a consistent creative approach to living, learning and teaching.
Coogle earned a bachelor’s degree from Vanderbilt University in Tennessee in 1966, a master’s degree from the University of Cambridge in England in 1968 as a Marshall Scholar, and, in 2012, a doctorate in English literature from the University of Oregon in Eugene. She taught at Rogue Community College in Grants Pass and the University of Oregon.
But first, she was her son’s teacher. Lamblin was homeschooled until the sixth grade and for three of those years, Coogle also taught a handful of other children at an alternative school in Williams, a tiny, unincorporated community between Grants Pass and Medford in the Applegate Valley.
Lamblin said his mother made up games to teach language and writing, and created new methods of presenting math and analyzing classic literature. She was willing to go to any length to impress upon her students that education was of primary importance. “And if she had to throw the chalk, glare indignantly or repeat herself 1,000 times, so be it,” he recalled.
He said that his mother continues to uphold a high standard of accomplishment and attention to detail that has defined her life. “None of us go on forever,” he said, “but for now, I’m certain that there are more lofty achievements marked by persistence and creativity that she has yet to accomplish.”
In her mountain paradise, Coogle has written and directed children’s plays, self-produced theater productions and contributed essays to the Applegater community newsmagazine.
In March, at the 2024 Northwest Anthropology Conference in Portland, she explained how hippies influenced American food. In June, she expanded on the subject to an audience at the Talent Historical Society and on Jefferson Public Radio, an NPR station where she has been a regular commentator.
In 2023, before her home was outfitted with internet access, Coogle volunteered her creative energy and organizing skills to help the nonprofit conservation group, the Siskiyou Crest Coalition, put on a free art, science and culture festival. The three-day Celebrate the Siskiyou Crest event attracted several hundred people to musician Steve Miller’s former residence and studio in Williams, now operated as Pacifica: A Garden in the Siskiyous venue.
Coogle said presenters and displays explained the Siskiyou Crest’s biodiversity, recreation trails and natural beauty that inspire artists and poets while also being economically important to the valley’s wineries and other businesses.
“My sister Sharon, who came from Georgia to be at the festival, told me, ‘Now I understand why you love this place so much,’” Coogle wrote in dianacoogle.blogspot.com.
Coogle and her sister were also together when Coogle reached the 800th mile. The spot: The Schreckfeld-Grosse Scheidegg trail in the Swiss Alps.
Hiking Mount Elijah
On July 10, Coogle disappeared in a meadow in the Rogue River-Siskiyou National Forest where pink checkermallow and cow parsnips’ white blossoms, among other vigorous vegetation, towered over the 5-foot-tall trekker. She heard pollinators buzzing among columbine, Oregon sunshine and horse mint, and bushwacked through puddles where resting blue and orange butterflies would suddenly fly into the air like confetti.
Steadily, she moved along the Sturgis Fork-Mount Elijah Trail that extends to the Oregon Caves National Monument. She described the path as pushing her upward, through forests to clear views of the Siskiyou Crest’s Red Buttes, Grayback Mountain and Preston Peak.
The top of Mount Elijah, rocky as it is, was also a jumble of wildflowers. Flashy pink penstemon dominate in early July, among firecracker flowers, stonecrop, pussy paws and owl’s clover. “If you know where to look for it, you can also find a cobwebby paintbrush, short, stubby, yellow, unusual,” she said.
Coogle, who researched Old English poetry for her doctoral dissertation, associates poems with scenery and seasons. She recites from memory contemporary works such as “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud” by William Wordsworth and “Dust of Snow” by Robert Frost.
Gerard Manley Hopkins’ sonnet “No worst, there is none” came to mind when she was forcing herself to take another step on a hot afternoon up the steep, rocky trail over Suicide Pass in Northern California’s Trinity Alps Wilderness Area.
“There is something satisfying in working so hard,” she later said.
She posted in her blog that she doesn’t huff and puff. “I measure my energy carefully and climb hills still breathing through my nose,” she wrote. She said doctors have proclaimed her heart strong and she felt confident she could meet her 800-mile goal since she wasn’t without experience. “I have been hiking for years,” she wrote.
After her birthday party, she declared her year “great fun.”
She said if she were to offer advice, it would be to set aspirational goals and do what you can to meet them. The training for planned challenges will help you meet unexpected situations that come in life.
“Do what you enjoy most,” she said. “Keep your body healthy and strong as long as you can, and, always engage with the natural world. Give it your love.”
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