July 20
This morning, the plan was to drive to Crater Lake, camp there and drop me off in the morning at the trail, but I got a desperate Garmin message from Lava, who is hiking southbound and was in Washington. She was sick, really really sick and was 20 miles to the nearest trailhead and could I please pick her up on a forest road somewhere.
I posted on the Washington trail angels group asking if anyone could pick her up and I’d be happy to relay messages over Garmin, but nobody responded. We were going to drive to Crater Lake anyway but we took a detour to go get lava.
She didn’t have all the FarOut layers downloaded on her app, but when I looked at the maps to see if there was anywhere closer to where she was, I saw that there was a trailhead near a road that was only 3 miles away from where she was. She’d have to take a side trail to the campground. I could see the trail details on Alltrails, and there were two trails down to the lake and I told her to take Nannie Ridge trail. It would be about 9 miles for her to hike down.
We drove about 3 hours to the trail, which was on the way south (sort of). I stopped on the way to pick up some saltines, Pedialyte and some medicine on the way and brought some masks, hand sanitizer, soap, wipes just in case – I didn’t want to get norovirus right as I was heading back on the trail!
Lava looked to be in rough rough shape. When we picked her up, she said she had thrown up on pretty much all her stuff and she just needed to get to a town to wash all her things and recover. We drove her to Trout Lake which was on the way South so even though it was out of the way at least it was sort of in the right direction to where we were going.
Because of the detour to Trout Lake, we didn’t make it all the way to Crater Lake so we camped at a campsite about 2 hours from where I wanted to be dropped off.
Marble slept in my tent with me, and it would be the last time I saw her for another 2 months or so. I’m glad I bought the z-packs tent that fits two people, or rather, one person and a dog.
If you are enjoying this blog you can subscribe here to get email updates! If you are really enjoying the blog, please buy me a coffee and help me on my PCT journey! ☀️
