Day 4
Another cold night! I am starting to think that I did not buy the right quilt. The 20 degree down quilt versus
my new 30 degree synthetic from Enlightened Equipment is looking like the choice I should have made.
I had unloaded a few items with Dutch's sister the previous day that I am also starting to regret, like a thick fleece sweater and umbrella. The weather report had indicated higher temps but the grey, overcast sky that greeted us early that morning did not seem to say "warm day ahead!".
Normally, Dutch and I like to pack up and get on the trail for a hour or so before eating, just so we can warm up, but because I had spent so much of the night shivering, I was famished. Dutch headed out and I stayed to gulp down some granola and put some trail mix calories in my belly before I felt ready to walk.
The first 30 minutes of any hiking day are always the hardest, in my opinion. You are cold, sore from the previous day's exertions, and the food has not yet kicked in to get your blood sugar levels elevated. Add in the grim clouds and entering another large burn area and I was in a crummy mood, which was not ideal because today and the next day were supposed to be the crux of the entire trip: hiking through geologically recent lava flows and through the Three Sisters wilderness area. I had been looking forward to it all year.
Within minutes of starting, I left the southern forested slope of Mt Washington and emerged into the burn zone between it and Belknap Crater, and headed towards the huge lava flow area that surrounds the cone.
Approaching Belknap Crater
Start of the lava flows
I met up with Dutch just at the edge of the lava, where he had stopped to eat. We debated making coffee but we did not have a lot of water left and we had a good distance to go before the next place where we could get some, so it was decided to conserve. Just as we were preparing to move on and climb up Belknap, it started to sprinkle and the wind picked up. We both put on raingear and got moving. Thus began a long and fairly miserable day of cold wind and rain.
There would be little photographic evidence of the day as it was so wet so consistently so that I took the camera out for pictures only very rarely.
Walking through the Belknap flow, I just amazed was at the tortured land and the how the trail was crafted to traverse it. You could be walking next to a huge hump of porous stone and a couple yards later you would
encounter a 30 foot deep pit with a lone pine tree growing in the middle. Sadly, I saw but a small prortion of this landscape with the mists and fog blowing across it. The trail was also quite treacherous, with the surface consisting of fist-sized rounded lava chunks that rolled around dangerously with each step. I was definitely glad to have hiking poles.
A morning of slow walking through this terrain and we finally reached Hwy 242 at about 11am. The rain had trailed off to a light misting but it was still cold. It was decided that we needed a hot meal to recharge from the morning so we made up another meal of Mac and Cheese with spam with most of our remaining water as we only had another four miles to go before the next place to get water. We huddled around the stove, eating directly from the pot, and watched as three thru-hikers got dropped off. They had hitched into Sisters for resupply and hitched back to the trail. We chatted for a few minutes, bid each other good luck, and proceeded to cross the highway and back into more lava flow. It was at this point that I noticed my shins were starting to feel tight and sore from all the rolling on uneven and unstable surfaces.
Leaving_lava_flow_at_Hwy242
Fairly soon, we finished the Belknap flow and moved in the blessed protection of forest, heading towards South Matthieu Lake. While we were in the forest, we could hear the wind picking up and blowing the top of the trees. When we arrived at the lake, we got the full force of the wind and the rain blown by it. I would have loved to get back in the forest but we were completely out of water so we spent 20 frigid minutes going back and forth between a copse of trees and the lake, using a pot to fill up the dirty water bag to filter into our clean bottles. The lake surface was driven hard by the wind, which stirred up quite a bit of sediment close to the edge. Had I not had a pre-filter on my filtration system, it would have completely clogged my Sawyer filter. As it was, we had to wash sediment out of the pre-filter a couple times just keep the water flow going.
The rest of the afternoon was a combination of forest and lava flow, constantly experienced with rain and wind.
The day culminated at the top of Opie Dildock pass. The rain had briefly stopped and we got few brief moments of the sun trying to shine though the clouds, giving a odd glow to all the red pumice and grey volcanic stone around us. I wish I had taken a picture looking down the pass because from on top, it looked crazy steep. Going down, I came to appreciate how steep it was as my ankles were continuing to hurt with the slick, uneven surface and the grade of the trail.
We entered the Obsidian restricted wilderness area and topped up water at Obsidian creek.
Obsidian Limited Entry Sign
Obsidian boulder
At 6pm, we were tapped. The cold and wet had forced our breaks to be short, lasting only long enough to gulp down food to replenish calories before chill set in and drove us onward. We stopped at PCT-1970, where there was a user trail down to a copse of trees and camping spot that we could shelter under. We helped each other set up tents quickly in the rain, cooked another hot meal of dehydrated rice and chicken, had a couple shots of dark rum, and then headed off to a long night in our tents. My ankles were extremely tender at this point and my morale was at an all-time low.
Logging time (hr:min): 10:04
Moving time (hr:min): 6:35
Distance travelled: 19.1 miles
Average moving speed: 2.9 mph
Minimum altitude: 5192 ft
Maximum altitude: 6835 ft
Altitude gain: 3336 ft
