September 7, 2016 Mile 1836.7-1841.2 plus Crater Lake Rim Trail 12.5 Miles I had trouble sleeping last night because my sleeping bag wasn’t keeping me warm enough. It could be that the nights are just getting colder, but I’m hopeful that we’re just in a cold air sink. That’s not the sort of thing I ever would have thought about before, but I’ve definitely noticed how terrain affects a campsite: cold air runs downhill at night, so a chilly wet breeze flows like a river through the bottoms of valleys. Meadows collect dew, and my tent and sleeping bag collect condensation. The very tops of mountain ridges often lead to windy nights. The warmest places to camp are usually up the side of a valley, below the wind but above the cold air, with a tree above to collect condensation. The Mazama Village campground is a man-made meadow, a manicured lawn subdivided by asphalt. It also happens to lie downhill from the enormous crater of Crater Lake, which expels tons of water vapor. It wasn’t the coldest night I’ve ever had, but it’s definitely in the top ten. I slept so poorly last night that I decide to sleep in a little this morning. We get up around 7:30, probably the latest I’ve slept in months, and head over to breakfast. Next, we go to the village store to resupply. There are several hikers outside, some of them drinking beer even though it’s only 9am. I can’t really see a reason why not. One of them lights a pipe and I catch the cloying scent of pot. It’s recently legal in Oregon, but Crater Lake is a national park so we’re under federal jurisdiction. I’ve heard of a couple hikers getting tickets here for being a little too free with their pipes and joints. Roadside and I collect supplies and beer and join the hikers at the picnic tables out front. A park ranger is talking to the guy who had the pot pipe, but it’s tucked away somewhere and the conversation appears friendly. It’s good to see so many northbound hikers here; it makes me feel like I’m not as far behind schedule. We sit and enjoy each other’s company for a while, with nowhere in particular to be. Bubble boy, Puma, and Snooze Button are here—their hitch from Fish Lake Lodge cut about 40 miles of trail, but Roadside and I have already caught up. I can’t help but admit that feels good. The trolley to the rim comes by, and a few hikers get on. Several of us stick around. Roadside and I are still debating whether to hike the 4-mile uphill or to take the trolley. We’re on a side trail (so we’ve already decided not to be purists), all the other hikers are taking the trolley, and we’re both on our second beer—I know how this is going to turn out. When the next trolley comes by a half hour later, we get on, along with seven other thru-hikers. I immediately feel bad for the family that’s on here with us. Sitting in a confined space with a group of smelly thru-hikers is not a fate I would wish on anyone. The trolley drops us off close to the rim, and the hikers scatter. Roadside and I stick together and walk over with our packs to see the view. A thru-hiker is accustomed to big, expansive scenery. Walking ridges nearly every day, we get to see for miles in every direction. But the scope and scale of Crater Lake is astounding. Precipitous walls surround the lake, framing a mass of water so intensely blue that it almost hurts to look at. The light is electric, buzzing like neon. Details on the opposite walls of the crater come across in crystalline resolution and provide bold, almost painful relief to the uniform mass of impossible color. Roadside and I stare, speechless. It draws me in. These walls, this lake, are mythical. They make me want to throw myself over, consummate with oblivion and transmigrate into godhood. This is an entry to the underworld, the smoking remnant of Dante’s mountain of Purgatory exploded outward from the pits of hell. This doesn’t belong in the humdrum world we work and live in. It’s moments like this that make the whole hike seem larger than life. All in all, it’s just walking. There’s nothing particularly glamorous about putting one foot in front of the other. But the sheer persistence of it, of just keeping at this slow, straightforward task, allows me to string together a series of moments like this one. I also know, from the hurried pace and short attention spans of the tourists around me, that there’s something different in the experience for us hikers. It’s not that we’re special, we’re just immersed in the experience in a way that someone who drove in cannot be. To them, Crater lake is a special vacation from their lives, and they still have the memories of yesterday and the worries of tomorrow on their mind. Someone can tell them to be present all they want, but the flow of daily anxieties is still there like white noise in the background. The lake of the mind still has ripples from all the churning. For me and the other thru-hikers, this is the very nature of our lives right now. Yesterday, my chief concerns were my physical body, the terrain, and the weather. Tomorrow, it will be the same. The sky, the view, the temperature, the feel of the air—these don’t take any effort for me to notice, because they are what I’ve practiced noticing for months. The churning in my mind is settled and I am completely here. I can’t help but believe that the same would be true for anyone who had walked here over several months. I wonder if this is how nomads experience life, or if there are different anxieties from traveling with a group. Perhaps it has more to do with solitude than travel. When we finally leave the rim, it’s more from a feeling that we should be doing something than from any feeling that we have finished absorbing the view. Hikers hike, and that’s what we need to do if we’re ever going to get to Canada. But first, lunch. We get sandwiches at the cafe and I write a postcard to my adopted brother for his upcoming birthday. We make one last stop for the luxury of flushing toilets and running water, and then we’re off, around the rim trail. It’s sandy and filled with steep ups and downs, but we’re rested and we move fast. We stop for pictures several times, trying to capture the feeling of this breathtaking view, but failing every time. Around one turn, we pass a schoolbus pulled over in a turnout. It’s decorated with longhorns on the front and beaded garlands along the windows. Nearby, a man with long bushy hair and a brown and grey beard is playing the guitar. A woman plays the flute facing the lake and dances between phrases. I pause to enjoy the music and the weirdness of it all; somewhere along this hike I’ve realized that I tend to avoid unusual and unpredictable situations, and I’m trying to stay more open to those. Unpredictability is the nature of the world, and many of my favorite experiences have come out of chance encounters. I don’t want to close myself off to the strange synchronicities that are available to me. Besides that, people similar to me will have similar paradigms. If I really want a fuller understanding of the world, I need to seek out different paradigms, which means interacting with different types of people. The man sees me listening and comes over to talk to me. The woman keeps dancing and twirling and playing her flute. “Love the music!” I tell him “Thanks man. This is a magical place. You can just feel the energy!” I’m not generally the type to talk about energies, but I feel something like that. “Yeah, it’s beautiful here,” I say. Roadside catches up a minute later, and the man tells us about a place near here that was sacred to Native Americans. “We camped there for three days,” he says. “My wife was channeling spirits.” Normally this would be too strange for me, but I decide to suspend my skepticism. We listen as he tells us that she was speaking in tongues and communicating with the dead, and the spirits told them to come up here. He has no self-consciousness as he tells us this. Some people learn to play the guitar, some people are good with numbers, some people channel spirits. I half-expect Roadside to be smirking or skeptical, but he looks sincere in his interest. The man wishes us happy travels, and we continue on our way around the rim. On the north side of the lake, the rim trail ends and rejoins the PCT. I check my map while I wait at the junction for Roadside. The barren area to the northeast is called the Pumice Desert. I pick up a fist-sized rock. It’s surprisingly light, like styrofoam. I chuck it just for fun, and it curves in the wind. This is a strange world we live in. We hike downhill and enter a bizarre forest, like something from an alien planet. The trees are uniformly baseball-bat skinny and telephone-pole tall, with no needles or branches until five feet from the top. They are spread out at a great distance, with large expanses of beige pumice gravel in between, and virtually no shade anywhere, but despite a long line of sight, the forest goes far enough in all directions that it is impossible to see beyond the trees. There is something unsettling about it. I imagine a hiker—myself, of course—walking into the midst of it and getting terribly turned around, left to wander endlessly through a desolate nowhere.
We hike through it for over an hour, and I search the trees for signs of differences. There are individual knobs and scarring, but nothing I can see that could be used to navigate or judge forward progress. I’m just beginning to wonder if it will ever end when the trail turns slightly and I can see beyond it to an open meadow. We cross the meadow and enter a different type of forest, with normal, earthly pine trees. We find a nice-looking campsite and decide to stop a little earlier than normal. We enjoy a leisurely dinner, talk about the guitar player and his wife, do a little reading, and go to bed shortly after sundown, before it’s fully dark.
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Nick is a teacher, writer, and amateur adventurer. Archives
June 2020
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