DAY 125: HAIL HELL

miles: 28

Not a lot of photos today but a whole lot of story.

The day started off with a light rain, ample lightning, and a heavy amount of thunder. The skies turned black as early as 7:00am and we were moving quickly in order to get some miles in before the skies opened up.

The trail literally meandered through countless lava fields this morning and surprisingly, the path was quite nice. It was flat!

The black clouds came closer and soon enveloped us. I cannot describe the hell that broke loose today. Many hikers got caught in the same storm, but we were just a day before hitting Crater Lake.

Today was the second worst day on the trail, second only to that dreadful night and day on the Mojave Desert when we got sandblasted.

The lightning was fierce, rapid and nonstop! We ran to find cover and eventually settled on a cluster of short trees off to the side of the trail. As we each huddled under individual trees, we  sat motionless, in awe of the cacophony of sounds coming form the sky: lightning and thunder rumbles in rapid fire succession. This was no ordinary thunder sound. This was a reverberating metallic, alien sounds to my ears, probably because of the proximity? I have never heard thunder claps so closely before and I am beginning to believe they sound different up close. It was deafening.

Then the temperature dropped.

Then the hail started.

Then the hail turned to marble-sized hail and I became increasingly anxious.

Eventually we started shivering and realized that the hail piling up beside us was only going to get deeper and we should probably just keep moving before hypothermia set in. So we did just that: took action and resumed walking before we got too cold, despite the hazardous weather conditions.

As we hiked, we went up in elevation, which meant we started to see larger sized hail AND more of it. The hail suddenly stopped falling from the sky, but was up to 6 inches thick on the ground. Not being cold enough for it to freeze and become solid (or relatively solid, like snow) it turned to slush and quickly turned the trail into a rushing river of pure ice water.

The options were to either walk through the river of ice water (up to our ankles at points) or avoid the ice water by destroying the plant life on either side of the trail, which is both bad for the trail AND bad for you because it is difficult and a tripping hazard. I was bounding through/over tall bushes and rolling my ankles in order to avoid the rushing river of hail. Not only is the water freezing cold, it is deceptive in that you don't know how deep it is. Also - cold water kills my already throbbing feet.

I turned to Ben, "This is my hell."

The only thing to do was to keep moving forward. We had 10 more miles to go before dark and we had to do them. The miles would not walk themselves and we needed water AND to get to Crater Lake the following day. If we gave in and camped prematurely, we would not make it to Crater Lake until 2 days later, which, after what we had just been through, seemed too far away.

We were determined to go the distance we had set out for ourselves that morning.

The temperature had dropped significantly and we were absolutely freezing. So cold, in fact, that I worried one of us was going to go into hypothermic mode. I kept an eye on Ben and we made sure to hike together and check in on one another during the 3 hours we trudged through the water troughs. Up on a ridge, where the hail had hardened slightly, just after we left our hiding spot, we noticed fresh (and I mean FRESH) bear tracks running perpendicular to the trail. That bear had literally JUST crossed the path. Thoroughly alarmed, I moved on.

Eventually we passed a series of tents in the forest, completely out of place. Ben yelled, "Hiker trash!" and we got a few grunts. A few heads pop out and it is Shady Acres, Sierra Bum, Ash and Apache. They were smart and took shelter when the storm hit. At that instant I felt like an idiot for having trudged through the freezing storm, but later I was glad we pushed through it.

Eventually the lightning stopped and there was a lull in the weather. This happened at the right time and allowed us to get up and over a very exposed, high elevation section of trail.

Found camp, and peace at a junction, just were we had intended on camping. There were a few other section hikers there and they even had a real fire!

Once in the tent, I realized that this particular night was going to be a bit like snow camping.  The hail was lingering around on the ground and now that dusk was upon us, it was clear that it wasn't going to melt until tomorrow. This kept temperatures unbearably low all night. I went to bed wearing all of my layers...

Hopefully tomorrow brings sun so we can dry out.