20240806 Crater Lake to Bend (mile 2002)

One of the things people are most often curious about the trail is where we get our water from.

There are a variety of different ways you can make the water found in lakes, streams, puddles and ponds drinkable. These range from filters and purification tables, to good old fashioned boiling. The most popular by far is the Sawyer Squeeze, a no-frills filter making impressive claims (99.99999% effective against bacteria and protozoa, lifetime warrantee). In contrast the least popular gadget by far were the UV sterilization pens, which we saw only once when someone approached us to borrow some water because they had broken theirs. However, all of these methods require a decent quantity of dirty water to get started, and finding the water can prove difficult.

Thankfully, like many aspects of thru-hiking, technology has made this task easier. Along the majority of the trail the modern miracle of the FarOut app means that the location and status of perhaps 75% of the often ephemeral water source are documented. This proves a literal lifesaver, and is especially welcome at the start of the trail, when most hikers have less of a firm idea about how much water they need to bring over what distance to not die and not exhaust themselves carrying the weight of extra fluid. As such, the user comments are invaluable:

"Good flow" - HikerJohn765, 1 day ago

"Gushing" - RedMouse99, 2 days ago

"Sweet cold agua. 1L/s" - RomeoRomeo_, 4 days ago

All of the above are fantastic things to read when you are a mile away from the next source and running low on delicious liquid water.

Less promising would be a week-old "barely a trickle, don't count on it!" comment.

That would suggest that it is time to buckle up and ration what you've got until whenever the next source is - something we had our fair share of experience of as well.

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Back in Oregon and approaching Crater Lake, Grace (Lady Pilgrim), Big Shrimpin' and myself (Ranch) had been in information gathering mode, talking to anyone and everyone about what to do and where to go. A complex of fires north of Crater Lake had closed the trail in at least three places, and the suggested skip seemed to be 80 miles north to Shelter Cover and picking up the trail again near Odell Lake.

It was far from unanimous that this was the right thing to do, however. Many of those who had made it this far by early August had managed to avoid the fires in NorCal, and there were a fair few who had managed to keep a continuous footpath all the way from Mexico. Alternate routes had been mapped out, using side trails and forest service roads, and even walking for miles along highways, in order for individuals to push through the smoke and keep their footpath intact.

Fortunately for us, a hiker named Shaggy had offered us a lift up to Shelter Cove the previous night at the Mazama Campground. Shaggy had recently got off trail due to a foot injury and had been spending the past few days ferrying hikers around the fires. We had agreed to meet him the following morning to drive up around the fires to Odell Lake.

The Mazama Campground, where we stayed, was raucous enough. A couple of dozen hikers had been crammed into a small copse of trees at the back of the campground, far from the paying customers in their RVs and campervans. We arrived early, when it was still relatively quiet, and set about cleaning ourselves and our belongings as best we could. It had been an ashy, dirty hike into Mazama Village through an heavily burnt area, and I locked myself in the shower block with a detergent pod and a plastic bag in which I tried to agitate and rinse my clothes as best I could.

That afternoon a man with a Hulk Hogan moustache turned up with a grill in the back of his pickup and informed us that he was doing trail magic and that we'd better be hungry because he had 50 hotdogs that needed eating. By now the tiny wooded area had filled with hikers and spiderwebs of guys and makeshift clotheslines crisscrossed the darkening trees. The air was thick with the smell of grilled meat and musty laundry. On a wonky picnic bench we sat and drank beers from the store and ate the dogs and laughed loudly about the earlier miles, and listened intently to the stories from the elder hikers who all seemed to be vets from the AT, none of whom knew one another but all of whom had that shared frame of reference bonding them that I could already feel solidifying with those we had hiked with this summer.

And not just those we had hiked with, but also those we had not hiked with but who had themselves hiked it.

Wandering off to piss I reflected, again, as I had done numerous times already, what an incredible thing it is to do a long hike like this. Out for months and months while the world at home carries on, and to tap into that strange culture of thru-hiking. The trail angels and hitchhiking and characters you meet, the places you go, and the people who welcome you - all of which was going on long before you got there, and which will carry on long after you have gone.

It's a beautiful thing to experience, I thought, misty eyed, as I stumbled into a low branch on my way to the glowing lights of the toilet block.

Shaggy gave us a ride the next day. It was hot, even with the AC up in the car, and when we got to the tiny Shelter Cove resort the air was thick with smoke. Looking out over Odell Lake I could barely see the mountains on the opposite shore. We sat out the worst of the heat there and got our packs ready to go, having cobbled together a pretty poor resupply from gas stations and fishing tackle store along the way.

While there Clifford showed up, an enormous man with a loping lurching stride, and a cap that was so manky and torn up it had ceased to resemble anything at all other than a collection of holes held together with pure hiker filth. He had taken the road to get here, and what's more we had only beaten him by an hour (and we had driven 80 of the miles!).

While he went off to find a tent site by the lake, we readied ourselves to go. It was 4pm and the worst of the heat was over, but the smoke was as bad as ever. The mountains on the other side of the lake had totally disappeared and neither Grace nor Shrimpin' were thrilled to be heading out - but I was determined that we get some miles in before dark.

We made camp that night by a pleasant lake and watched the dark orange sun set over a hazy ridge. Nearby there were crazy deer yelling strange hoarse cries, and grace swears that she was woken in the night by one clomping and chomping next to her side of the tent, before ripping a violent woodland fart. This boded poorly, but fortunately in the morning both the smoke and the deer were nowhere to be seen.

The day further improved upon reaching a dirty road when hand-printed signs indicated that trail magic was near - hot dogs again! Sitting on a camp chair and drinking a lemonade felt good, and I had to remind myself that we were barely 24hrs back on trail after doing barely any miles the day before.

We had also been warned that the next seven miles comprised some of the most intense burn area to be found anywhere on the PCT this year.

The worst of the ashtray section lasted about five miles. For two hours I walked through that barren landscape. The burn was so absolute that much of the wood had simply disappeared, and rather than picking our way through treacherous blowdowns we found the path wide open for us. It was unique, in that the monochrome landscape was not even dotted with the new life of wildflowers, yellow and pink flourishes among the brown and black, either because the burn had been so bad or so recent that nothing could now live in that desolation. When we did reach the green of some only-partially-burned and perhaps-still-living forest, it was a close and huddled scene set against an orange sky.

We camped by a small lake and Shrimpin' waded in up to the waist after boldly insisting that he would swim, like the descendant of some freshwater mermen appeasing his ancestors to bring life back to the forest. He immediately sunk calf-deep in the freezing silt and swiftly backed out.

That night we had brief rain, and the rain returned again slowly throughout the morning. By the afternoon we were wet, and glad to be reaching the resort at Elk Lake where it was rumoured that large pizzas and beers were to be had.

The rumours proved true, and not only this but also live country music, and hordes of normal people excited to hear our stories buy us drinks. I held court at pop-up bar and drank several blood orange IPAs from Bend's Boneyard Brewery, an ale so finely crafted that I forgot briefly my aching limbs and soaking, chafing pants.

We camped in the woods behind the resort, in a small area behind the chalets and glamping options for the muggles, and the pizza, almost as large as its $27 price tag, kept me fed through the night and well into the following afternoon.

The next morning Shrimpin' left us. He had dropped his brick-sized sack of snus somewhere (the Scandinavian nicotine pouches had him in a chokehold) and he needed to hitch into Bend immediately before he became a danger to those around him. We bade him farewell and agreed to meet up again in a few days.

All morning I struggled up a cantankerous hill feeling the effects of those delicious beers weighing on my mind and body. My soul, too, was yearning again for another place. A home and a bed, where a hangover was merely an excuse to write off any Sunday plans, rather than a serious handicap for the day's mileage. Being an international athlete had not felt this hard since NorCal.

But as we marched on into the afternoon, alone for the first time in what felt like months but was surely only a week, I watched the miles disappear behind us with reassuring regularity. The Snickers Duos I had liberally packed out from Shelter Cove coursed through my veins like pure diesel and I smiled at how far we had really come since that dusty day at the USA/Mexico border. Around us the forests fell away and the big conical shapes of the Sisters mountain range started to become clear. The freshness of the air had lifted the weight of all that rain, and when we encountered a group of hardy women leading horses downstate we chatted happily for a while and felt like normal people again.

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It was a couple of days later, on a particularly dry stretch south of Highway 20, that we came the closest to completely running out of water anywhere on trail.

We were due to meet Shrimpin' the next day in Bend, and with budget constraints lurking in the background of most conversations we were keen to arrive early (to maximise our time in town, without needing to book a room for a second night). It had been a day of hard hiking through increasingly dry and rocky lava fields. Water sources were scarce, and that had meant carrying greater volumes of the stuff, and both Grace and I were in souring moods.

The worst of the heat was just starting to fade as we picked our way through a shoe-shredding laceration of volcanic rock, when, to our delight, we found a cooler box with lemonades and root beers, still somewhat cold, swimming in the melted ice that must have been dumped in there hours earlier in the day. Trail magic! I sat on the cool box as we drank, and I relished the pure joy and overstimulation before heading out for the final miles of the day.

Half a mile down the road was a water cache, maintained by trail angels, which we had calculated would just about get us through the remaining five miles before the next available camp site. FarOut comments suggested it was going to be a real killer, at least as bad as the lava fields we had just been through, and consequently the sodas had felt like some kind of cosmic justice, a reward for the pain yet to come.

But when we made it to the marker for the water cache, the cache was nowhere to be seen.

This posed a significant issue. With five miles to go we would need at least a litre each, and more to overnight. Maintaining a brisk pace of 2.5mi/hr can mean anything from 0.5-1litre per hour depending on the hear of the day. We knew that the next few miles would be slow over the rock, and it had already been a hot afternoon. We were not well hydrated, and had both been rationing our water for several miles already. After frustratedly combing the area for any sign of a large water tank, not something one usually struggled to spot, we accepted defeat.

Resigned to our fate, we trudged back to the cool box, and sullenly poured out the yellowish water from the bottom of the box into our water bottles.

The miles were hard, and it stayed hot - the black rock radiating heat like a furnace - but we made it through, and despite only having less than a litre each to get us to camp and sleep through the night (we ate tortillas for dinner that night) the water turned out to be more than enough.*

*It is incredible how sustaining even a small amount of water can be, when you have had to double-dose it with chlorine tablets in addition to filtering (for fear of all the filthy hiker hands than had reached down into it for lemonades throughout the day). Almost anything, up to and including dehydration, seems more appealing than that.

As soon as the ground was soft enough to lie down on without puncturing an organ we laid out our mats and fell asleep. Putting up the tent was out of the question. The next day at dawn we rose up and marched on in search of a pond or anything even slightly more palatable to drink than the cooler water. FarOut comments had suggested that there was trail magic to be had around eight miles into the day, and so I practically ran the distance and arrived well before 10am to a very professional set-up. This included a multitude of camping chairs, hammocks, and freshly grilled burgers from a couple calling themselves Goddess Rhonda and Magic Mike. They gave Grace and I beers and food and told a group of seven or so hikers about their experiences at Burning Man back in their crazy youth. Mike, a straight-looking no nonsense bloke with a crew cut and aviators explained that his preferred outfit was thigh-high leather boots and a tutu.

When we finally roused ourselves to go it was not far to the road. We hitched a ride with a South African expat to Sisters, a strange town home to not much apart from some dodgy museums, and from there to Bend with a couple of troublemakers called Katie and Betsy.

Katie and Betsy, the Ab Fab of the American West, of course loved us and insisted on taking us to Trader Joe's, where they bought us chocolates and beer, and drove us straight to the Hostel where Shrimpin' was waiting for us. We listened to their stories all the way; Katie was down from Montana to visit her old pal, and to do some market research on local bakeries ahead of opening her own business ('Stud Muffin'). Betsy was a ditsy mushroom forager, forever offering unsolicited driving advice to the belligerent Katie. They had backpacked through Europe together in their youth, and you could tell.

"If you kids need anything at all call me - I'm around all day tomorrow, we'll drive around and check out the farmers market!"

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In the hostel (the oldest brick building in Bend!) Shrimpin' was nowhere to be found and so we checked in to the last available private room with the young desk clerk, who I assume was incredibly stoned. When we did eventually make it into the room, we closed the door behind us and breathed the sigh of relief that sometimes only comes from having four walls and a door between you and the rest of the world.

It had been a long week, and with one very close call with the missing water cache. It is a truism on the trail that you shouldn't depend on the kindness and generosity of others, but having experienced trail magic not once or twice but three times in recent days it felt so normal. It was humbling then to be reminded by the missing water cache just how difficult it is to go it alone, and how challenging the trail would have been back before the modern infrastructure of trail angels came into being.

If anything though we felt more resilient than ever. The cooler box water had not killed us, and we had made it another step closer to Canada. With barely a week until the Trail Days event on the Washington border, the exciting prospect of meeting up with old friends from earlier in the trail loomed over us. We set about washing our rancid gear and showering, and headed out into Bend to see what there was to eat.