Day 97 (26 August)

Miles 1750.4 to 1773.5. Klum Landing Camp to forest camp.

When we wake up at 5am Trooper has already left camp. Flamin’ Hot didn’t show up during the night. Dario takes his shower this morning as his fancy pasta took longer to cook yesterday and he was too tired. While he‘s in the shower I prepare coffee and breakfast. The antibiotics seems to help, he already feels so much better again. Unfortunately he will not be able to take the full dosage recommended by our friends as we don‘t carry enough pills (stupid lightweight packing! What were we thinking???), but we hope it will be enough.

After breakfast with BigBro and Sasquatch we leave the comfort of the camp and get back on trail. We make good time, the skies are still blue, the temperature is so perfect, the colors of the sky, of the pine trees, flowers and bushes are so beautiful. We are mostly hiking in forest today and can stay nice and cool even when it gets really hot during the day. And we pick huckleberries! Huge amounts of them. They are like little blueberries and taste delicious!

We take our lunch at a small cabin with a water pump where we meet BigBro and Sasquatch who are just about to leave again. There are tons of wasps and it‘s quite difficult to pump the water out as the wasp swarm is centered around the pump. I am really freaked by this but luckily Dario has the nerves and gets us the water.

Then in the afternoon we suddenly enter large and impressive looking lava rock fields and can see volcanoes in the background. And then are back in the woods again. Which are replaced by yet another lava rock field. This goes on all afternoon. Up and down. Walking on lava rocks can be quite exhausting and not exactly very soothing for the feet and rather damaging for the shoes. But each time we get out of the woods and onto these fields we are rewarded with amazing views. This is how we imagined Oregon to look like. Lush green forests and interesting, beautiful and tall volcanoes rising in the middle of nowhere. It does have a reputation of being a long green monotonous tunnel, but so far we find it very pretty and diverse enough.

We know that BigBro and the others hitched out to Fish Lake. We are currently in a dry section without a water source for almost 20 miles and also considered to get out in Fish Lake to at least refill our water bottles, but luckily rumors are true and there is actually a water cache being maintained by an awesome trail angel right next to the highway leading to Fish Lake. We decide to save some time and just keep hiking rather than hitching out even though we really crave a burger and pie for dinner!

We don‘t make it much further though and set up camp after 23 miles. My shoulders really hurt today and after dinner Dario gives me a strong back massage while we watch the movie „Meru“ on my phone. We actually downloaded quite a few series and movies on Netflix to have something to watch in the warmth of our tent on these cool evenings (as we don’t have cell reception for data streaming most of the time). This has turned out to be a great idea and each night we look forward to getting into our sleeping bags and have dinner while watching a movie or documentary.