August 4th, 2022 by Jon
We woke up to another damp morning and it actually felt cold. I threw on my clothes and sweater and began packing and eating. While in Ashland, I helped lift one end of a pool table to get the balls to fall to the end so we could actually play, and I think I pulled a muscle in my back. Unfortunately, this has led to some pretty significant stiffness and pain while hiking, and I woke up today stiffer than I have probably ever been. It’s generally getting better as I rest more often and stretch, but it’s slow, and it’s a stupid injury that shouldn’t have happened.
Once we got hiking, we walked through a hazy forest that smelled a bit of smoke. The trail weaved through pine trees and creek beds before coming out onto a long lava rock area. Trail maintenance crews had piled smaller red rock onto certain areas of the rocks to make a trail so that we didn’t have to rock scramble over the fields of rock. We spent the next 7 miles walking over lava-rock sections and through forested areas, slowly making our way towards the highway. A lot of the time, we also had great views of Mount McLoughlin as we hiked down.
After about 2 hours of hiking, we came to a trail junction where we could walk towards Fish Lake Resort, where we planned to meet our friends for breakfast. But that would have required another 2 miles of hiking to get there, and so we pushed another quarter mile to the road. As we did, we saw a sign for trail magic! We crossed the road and entered a wooded clearing where a guy who hiked last year had set up chairs, coolers, and a table of snacks. We had Costco muffins, oranges, bananas, chips, Coke, and Gatorade. He also wanted everyone to feel free to leave their garbage with him, which is super nice for hikers to be able to get rid of. We spent about an hour there and decided to skip the resort because the highway cars were going by pretty fast, and we saw some people waiting about 40 minutes before getting a hitch. We messaged our friends with our Garmin that we wouldn’t be going into the resort. We also got to see Tits, whom we hadn’t seen after leaving camp yesterday. He had woken up kinda late and didn’t feel super great in the morning. But he still managed to hike a good chunk and only camped about 2 miles behind us last night.
After thanking our trail angel and filling our water bottles with the water he brought, which didn’t need filtering, we headed uphill. We had a long, gentle 4.5-mile ascent along the side of Mount McLoughlin. The trees here were beautiful and very tall. The whole trail was very shaded as a result, and made for very pleasant hiking. I did manage to get stung by something on my leg, though; that was the only annoying thing that happened today. We climbed for about an hour and a half before reaching a campsite at the top, where we stopped to take a break and admire the view of Summit Lake down below us on the other side of the ridge.
Feeling refreshed, we had a pretty flat, easy descent through a more exposed area where the trees were much smaller and didn’t offer the same kind of shade as the ones up on the mountain. The heat here was somewhat intense, but still a solid 20 degrees cooler than the temps we had been hiking in last week. We came to a trail junction that we were shooting for to take a late lunch, but there were kind of a lot of people there, including some who were napping, so we pushed another half mile to a nice shady spot off to the side of the trail and spent an hour eating, resting, and cooling down. We have enough food for this section, but only barely. We definitely need to stay on schedule and get to Crater Lake on Saturday morning because I don’t think either of us will have anything besides maybe 1 bar to eat for lunch. It should be no problem, though; it’s just not what we are used to.
We moved on after lunch and had 3.5 miles to hike to a spring where we could get more water. There wouldn’t be another source for about 10 miles, and we planned to camp in between, so we took about 4 liters to camp and have enough to drink and cook with. The spring came out of a seep in the ground and flowed over a log that was disintegrating so thoroughly that it was difficult to keep small chunks of wood from getting into our water collection bags. The water was very cold, though, and it tasted excellent. We filtered and then pulled our heavy, water-laden packs onto our backs and kept hiking. We had about 5 miles to get to a campsite we had somewhat arbitrarily picked at lunch. It would make for a pretty good day and set us up nicely for a Saturday morning arrival at Crater Lake. The trail was back to older, larger pine trees, though many fallen trees blocked it, and it took some weaving and hopping to get over them. We didn’t have any views as it was basically just walking through a flat forest. Apparently, there are many lakes and ponds in the area, and they have brought the mosquitoes back with a vengeance. I killed about 10 as they hit me while hiking. Apparently, it’s going to get a bit worse before it gets better. It’s still not as bad as the Sierra, though.
I got to the campsite first, and there were about 5 spots on soft, flat ground. I picked a spot in the back, and soon Singsong arrived. We made a tentative plan for the next few days before getting our tent set up and dinner started. As we cooked, Biscuit showed up! They had made it to the road last night and camped there before getting a hitch in this morning. Apparently, the hitch both ways was kind of difficult. But it was nice to catch up, and Missile, Stealth, and Wilco all showed up as well. Wilco kept pushing on because he likes evening miles, and they told us that Rune and Bouge are a few miles back.
After a nice dinner, the mosquitoes got worse, so we escaped to our tent, killed the ones that had gotten in when we did, and called it a night.
