Mile 1774 to 1822 – Lake of the Woods to Crater Lake (July 3 to 13)

Ashley and I woke in our palatial campsite by the shores of beautiful Lake of the Woods, and wandered down to the shore where we had watched the sunset behind Mt. McLoughlin. That 9,500 cinder cone just looked like so much fun so we set a goal to scramble to the summit, from this point by the shore to the top before the next sundown, covering all the ground by foot!

On the way out from the Sunset campground, we swung back by the Lake of the Woods resort where we had decided to do a full breakfast and leverage the WiFi once more. And 3 cups of coffee – wow was each bite or sip just absolute paradise! It was late morning when we finally tore ourselves away from civilization and continued northbound. We walked the trail along the Northeast shore of the Lake and mapped out our plan to cross the busy highway and walk up a nicely graded dirt road (Fourmile Lake road) to the Mt. McLoughlin trailhead. The traffic was light and 9 out of 10 cars that came by were incredibly thoughtful (more ancillary PCT magic), slowing down and giving us a wide berth so we didn’t have a cloud of dust in our face. The trailhead was just a mile from reconnecting with the main PCT. As we ducked back into the thicker forest, along came the clouds of mosquitos as forecast. With the volcano summit still in play, we decided to get our tent set up just 1/4 mile north of the McLoughlin trail. the 8 minutes it took us to assemble the tent reminded us of the mosquito clouds that would be with us. It was about 4pm by the time we had the camp set and Ashley had a moment nursing bites through the Deet and protection, including the aggro mossies who flew in under the head net and then executed their bite before being smashed inside the need and splattering blood everywhere.

But, she dug deep and we left some of our gear behind, but brough all of our remaining food to mitigate any small critter attacks on our tent. We decided to get as high as we could by 6pm and then pause for dinner wherever we were on the shoulder of the mountain. The trail was supposedly 3 miles and 3,000 feet up one way, but really was more like 3.5 miles and 3,500 vertical feet. The first 2 miles were pretty flat which meant it was going to be a steep finale. Not all that different really from Aasgard pass back near home which we’d done just a week earlier. We made 8,600 feet by 6pm and enjoyed that beautiful sundown dinner nearly mosquito free above the trees! We knew completing the summit would mean a descent in the dark so I asked Ashley if we should give it a go. I said: how about we try to get to 9,000 feet and enjoy the view? So we did that, but then could see the summit, just a LITTLE but further. So of course, we had to go for it. The trail was in the setting sun’s shadow and reaching the 9,500 summit was pure glory with the sun setting on the other side. Needless to say, once we made it we were not in a hurry, basking in glory of a mountain I was essentially totally ignorant of just a few days earlier!

As we started to head down, I confidently said ‘we have two good working headlamps, so let’s get off the rocky section by last light and we’ll be good to go! I do lots of night hiking in general, but my PCT experiences have been less than ideal after or before light. And it came to pass again… It turns out Ashley didn’t double check her head lamp batteries (and we passed by a little store earlier today, and wouldn’t see another one for 50 trail miles). I had replaced my headlamp with a rechargeable and it was all charged and ready to go, but her lamp was totally dead. Once we realized this, we stepped up the pace trying to balance beating the dark with not getting hurt. We squeezed out last light to get mostly out of the rocky section and back into the forest. But it was still a fairly uneven trail even through the forest and after trying to share my light with Ashley’s feet, I just handed over my headlamp and followed closely behind her, using my iPhone light to fill in gaps. Not enjoyable at the moment, but once we made it back to the tent, it just made the day’s adventure and side quest all that much better! We were also totally out of water with the next reliable water source about 8 miles ahead on the trail. When we stumbled through the mosquito cloud and into our tent at 11pm, that was a problem for the next day… There were 4 other tents gathered near ours and I’m sure they wondered what was going on as we stumbled through. Especially because we decided to pass on the shortcut through the forest in the last stretch after seeing two wideset eyes when we aimed our one working lamp that way. When we finally put head to tiny pillow, we heard some animal rustling about. I chose the path of putting in my headphones in on noise-cancelling and going with ‘ignorance is bliss’ and relying on the fact that the bears in the area aren’t known to invade tents with people actively in them.