August 12. Day 103.

Mazama Village to mile 1845.8.

Miles hiked: 11.2 on PCT. 11.7 on the Rim Trail alternate. 0.5 getting from Mazama to the PCT.

I ended up eating part of my breakfast for desert last night and also remembered that I'd forgotten to get wet wipes at the store, so turned off my alarm and slept in until 5:45. I laid in bed building blog posts then packed and got to the store shortly after they opened at 7 then got sort of stuck in the town-vortex, sipping coffee and chatting with hikers and car campers on the picnic tables outside the store. Didn't get hiking until 8:30.

Good habitat for spotting hikers- Mazama Village store.

It was a few miles up to the Rim Village, where there's a little gift shop and cafe and the historic old fancy hotel like most old national parks have. I dillied and rallied in the cafe/store, leafing through books and deciding not to get another coffee and finally just getting a star chart sort of on impulse. I filled my water bottles for the 26 mile dry stretch in the bathroom with another hiker who seemed capable of only saying negative or cynical things about everything and was pretty tedious to be around, then strolled on over to the rim. 

Photos of Crater Lake do not do it justice. My own memory from a couple years ago doesn't do it justice. It is the sort of place one ought to have a long term relationship with, if at all possible. To see it in different lights and different weathers and different seasons. To see how that deepest of blues looks when the surrounding rim-cliffs are bathed in different light. 

It took me something like 3 hours to get the 5 miles around the rim on this popular alternate to the PCT (the official trail skirts around the west side of the lake, below the rim and with no lake views); I was stopping at every little place with a slightly different view, and also got hungry and decided to have a picnic on the rim along a quiet little stretch of trail where nobody passed me the entire time. 

As I rounded the Watchman's Tower, one of the high points on the rim, the big column of smoke from the fire that's just up to the northwest near Diamond Lake came in to view. As I hiked on and the day heated the smoke column grow and a thunder cloud developed on top of it. It was very beautiful in its own awesomely destructive way. and it was really fascinating to watch how the fire developed and grew through the day. I stopped and talked to an NPS fire fighter for a while who was watching from the rim (he's actually part of the Incident Command System, and was watching to figure out what resources need to go where) and learned a bit about fire behavior and what different color smoke means and hear about how this year with the drought even rainforest and fuel-managed forest is burning really easily. 

The trail dropped down off the rim on the northwest side and moved out across the flat forest toward Mt. Thielson. It got a bit monotonous again and my feet were really hurting, I think from too much standing around and walking in my worn out flip flops on the pavements at night. I was also just tired and sleepy; not a 100% day. I double checked the map and realized I really only have 2 nights to get to the next resupply stop, and have fewer miles to hike than I'd thought and have quite a bit extra food. So I concluded the best thing to do would be make camp sooner rather than later and lay in bed and try to eat as much as I could. Since I have so many snack food I won't have to cook a dinner, and if I do t have to cook the. I'll be able to stretch the water I've got enough for some coffee in the morning. I made it just outside the National Park boundary, where the trail crosses hwy 138 then made camp alongside the trail. The sun set fiery orange through the smoke as I chomped on salami, cheese and crackers and cookies and dried fruit and chocolate. 

Birds:

Red-breasted Nuthatch 

Steller's Jay 

Oregon Junco 

Golden-crowned Kinglet 

Northern Flicker 

Hermit Warbler 

Wilson's Warbler 

Chipping Sparrow 

Red-tailed Hawk

Common Raven 

Gull 

Rock Wren

Clark's Nutcracker 

American Robin