Lakes and Water Caches

The Morning of the 7th of August I woke in my tent in the hiker campground in Crater Lake National Park and it was cold. My tent was covered in frost. Still I had miles to do so I pulled on my puffy coat and found my beanie which I hadn’t used in weeks and even dug out my gloves. It was still dark as I packed up dreaming of the warm sunlight I hoped was coming. Uphill was up as well and freezing cold. He refuses to hike in his puffy ,trying to keep it pristine for town and camp, and he had put all his cold weather gear in a box and mailed it forward to lighten his load back in California and the post office had lost it so he didn’t have any cold weather gear other than his puffy. So he was cold. We set out around 5 and headed back towards the trail. Uphill told me his hands were freezing so I told him to put his extra pair of socks on them and he did. After that he was doing better and we hiked from the alternate back to he PCT and followed it for a bit to where we had to take a side trail yet again. The new official trail goes through a burned area and misses basically the whole park and never gets near the lake but the side trail climbs up and joins the Crater Lake Rim trail and follows the edge of the lake for miles before dropping back down and rejoining the PCT. I wasn’t going to Crater Lake National Park and not seeing the Lake so I was taking the alternate. Uphill decided he would as well. Up we climbed over 2000 feet in a couple of miles, where we hit the rim trail on a sidewalk in the village and got our first view. The lake was a deep deep blue, and in a volcanic crater with cliffs on every side. A small volcano and island floated to one side. As the sun rose and lit the cliffs the lake glimmered in its beams. A beautiful sight. It used to be a 12000 plus foot tall volcano that exploded and left a huge crater now the lake is one of the 5 deepest in the world. 1,949 feet deep in fact.