Day 113

Mile 1732 to 1764, 32 miles

Cost: camped, free

KC and I said goodbye to Teflon as she has 6 days to get to Crater Lake to meet family but KC and I only have 4 days of food. Hopefully we’ll meet up again in a few weeks.

There were even more new faces on trail today, Gemstone, Captain Crunch, Simba, Giggles, Private Square…

Oregon grape?

  
  
Yesterday there was a sign on the trail asking hikers not to camp in nearby meadows to help a butterfly called the Mardon Skipper which is endangered. Today when I was taking a photo of a butterfly I noticed there was a smaller moth-like bug on the same thistle and it turns out it’s the Mardon skipper:

The small one is the Mardon Skipper

Mardon Skipper

  
KC and I noticed there was a hut coming up called Brown mountain shelter with a water pump and picnic table. We loved the sound of eating dinner at a picnic table and thought it could also be a great place to stay the night… Everyone else on the trail had the same idea! There were so many hikers there when we arrived and no room to sit at the picnic table so we ate dinner on the ground (like every night!), filled up our water bottles with the pump, signed the trail register inside the hut and decided to hike on another 3 miles in the dark to find a quieter campsite.

I felt good considering we had already walked 29 miles and thought I could keep going on all night, but then we hit lava fields in the dark and my terrible headlamp just wasn’t good enough to light up all the rocks… I tripped a lot and wanted it to be over!

  

Dundee caught up to us on the trail and we all reached a campsite around 10pm… A 32 mile day 🙂