I woke up before sunrise and watched it happen over the lake while the water birds dashed back and forth in front of it. Owl and Phoenix woke up while I was sitting there, so I packed up my bed and put the living room back together while Phoenix drove straight into making coffee for the both of us.
I was the only one planning to hike out that day–they had the cabin for another night. But, with my clothes clean and a new fuel canister purchased, I had no excuse to weigh against that urge to get moving, the idea that the clear weather couldn’t last forever. And the forecast indicated the next week would be quite nice. Furthermore, I knew I was going to lose some time in the near future because the package I had sent to Mazama Village had been sent home, so I would need to get off the trail to resupply.
But I had a great excuse to stick around through the morning: I had some blog posts to upload. Oh, and Firefly had an enormous buffet breakfast planned.
I mean a huge breakfast. A pan full of scrambled eggs, a plate piled with bacon, a dozen enormous pancakes, biscuits, fruit, etc. And Firefly basically put it all together herself from the tiny grocery store we’d visited the day before. Kudos and much gratitude.
I couldn’t get a reliable cell signal from the cabin, so once I had my things packed up, I spent two hours going back and forth to the end of the dock trying to get pictures to upload to my blog. It turned out the uploads were failing not due to lack of internet but due to a runaway process on my server stealing all the RAM, but I didn’t figure that out until later.
Anyway, posts scheduled, I plugged my phone in and got some Oreos and chips and root beer from the camp store as my junk lunch to give me that get-back-to-the-trail energy. Owl had been there using the store wifi (which I had found slow and unreliable) and then went off to take photos of salmon in one of the inlets to the lake. I went to take off all my extra cold weather clothing and down to my minimal sunny hiking clothes. By the time I had changed, he was back with the photos, so I got to give him a final farewell. I promised he would catch up with me soon.
I backtracked up the trail I’d come in on a bit, then took a different trail that would intercept the PCT a bit south of where I left it after visiting the edges of a couple of medium sized lakes. It was a solid three miles before I finally connected back up again, which felt like forever because there was nothing but identical forest most of the way until I got to the lakes.
It got more interesting once I was back on the PCT because it climbed up onto the side of a ridge with frequent views. By sunset I had come to my intended campsite, a little area under a patch of trees with some decent views. It wasn’t a big day of hiking, but a nero works as well as a full day of hiking to burn off that restless energy that builds up sitting in town.
Total distance: 8 miles
