Pacific Crest Trail

Timberline Lodge

Day 108

Didn’t sleep well last night. Some hobbyist fishermen were camping nearby, played music, and judging by their language and loud exclamations also got quite drunk. This was until well after midnight. Not just hiker midnight also past the real midnight. Thinking about bears have caused more sleeping problems than this, though. With some dread I put on my dirty hiking clothes with sweat that hadn’t dried out over night. They soon did, though. I had breakfast a bit later right by the lake, to not disturb the other hikers, who slept in.

An hour or so into hiking there was a short side trail leading to “Little Crater Lake”. It was cool, but not really a lake nor located in a crater. Instead it was a particularly strong spring that had washed out a forty five feet deep pond and had crystal clear water. Some hours went by hiking and it got warm, though not as badly as yesterday. An opening in the trees suddenly revealed Mount Hood, or rather the base of it, as the smoke had somewhat returned and it completely obscured the summit.

After lunch I finally decided to give my new shoes a second chance. I inspected them quite thoroughly but couldn’t pinpoint what was making one of them hurt the back of my foot, but I put some padding under the spot. That seemed to work well. A bit later there was trail magic by two young parents and their son. The man, Derek, had recently broken his knee in a car accident and that had set their own hiking plans on hiking hold. In the background I heard the mom, whose name eluded me, saying to theor son that he couldn’t have another juice as he already had had one and because he hadn’t walked two thousand miles to get here. Ha ha. Derek was involved in the PCT Days planning and had liked hiking since he hiked in Oregon’s Blue Mountains when he was young. There were no other hikers there and they might have been a bit unlucky with hitting a dry spot in hikers. I just had a Capri Sonne and hiked on after thanking them as I felt like being done early today.

At a road crossing someone had made a “yeti danger”-indicator. It was at low, which I found reaffirming. Dealing with a high fire danger and a high danger of meeting a malevolent Nepalese mythological creature at the same time would simply have been too much to handle.

Hiking was mostly easy though warm. After about twenty miles I got to a bit of a steeper ascent above the timber line. It felt like walking up a giant sand dune, so it took a bit longer than expected. It was a short stretch today, though so I got to my desired camp spot a bit after five pm. It was a smallish cluster of trees behind nothing else than Timberline Lodge! Timberline Lodge is a historic wooden building probably best known from the movie “The Shining” where it is the facade of “Overlook Hotel”. I hope I don’t end up with an axe in my back while sleeping :-). In the background was Mount Hood, which now was completely visible because we had gotten closer or because the smoke had lifted a bit. I had a cold shower in the port-a-potty equivalent of a shower located in the furthest end of the furthest away parking lot for us hikers to use. It was nice, or rather, it was nice afterwards. The wind had unfortunately picked up quite a bit in the evening and had blown a lot of fine sand and dirt into my tent which got on everything and it was making a lot of noise. Fingers crossed that it will die down a bit in the evening. A lot of other hikers were camping at the same spot including Noname and Pops, who came in a bit later, as we were all planing on attending the supposedly very good breakfast buffet at the lodge tomorrow morning.

This days miles: 2076-2097

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