Before we to bed we agreed to sleep in and hike the rim trail.
Breakfast was served at 7am so we slept in until 6:30!
At breakfast we chatted with Boy Scout, a quality manager at a pharma company- his company offers a 10 week sabbatical for every 7 years of employment. He is spending 4 weeks on the PCT, and then 6 weeks with family on various trips.
We sat in the dining hall for a couple hours drinking soooo much coffee and charging our devices. We found out a trolley will take us from the camp ground, up the mountain for 4 miles and drop us off at the rim. We had 45 min to pack everything up and get on the trolley.
We made it with minutes to spare.
Neither of us had been to Crater Lake before so we were excited to get there and see it.
The view was breathtaking from the rim 900 ft above the lake, never had we seen water so blue! It was like a backdrop, unreal. It’s hard to imagine a 12k ft mountain just blew up like that- this is what the inside of a mountain looks like.
7,700 years ago Mt Mazama blew up, it was the largest volcanic eruption in the Cascades going back a million years, and 42 times more violent than the one that decapitated Mt St Helens in 1980. Ash from Mazama’s explosion blanketed the landscape for more than 500k square miles!
The caldera which remained after the event, filled with rain and snow melt becoming the deepest body of water in the US at nearly 2k feet, and one of the bluest in the world. The water is so pure all light is absorbed except blue.
We hiked along the rim for 8 miles, allowing us a new view point of the crater and Wizard Island, the cinder cone which remains near the center of the crater.
When we rejoined the PCT, we set up camp and cooked our dinner of Pad Thai.
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