Day 127: Shelter Cove - Charlton Lake

Date: 12.08.2018 Miles hiked today: 19.8 miles / 31.86 km Total mileage: Mile 1'925.2 It was a cold night and I was wearing all my clothes to keep warm. But the wine helped both to stay warm and to have a good sleep. However, my lower back hurts a lot whenever I moved. I'm looking forward to breakfast which opens at 7am. The coffee here is amazing! It's very chilly in the morning but I cannot see any smoke, just blue sky and once the sun is high enough its nice and warm again. Something is wrong with my backpack frame. One side is twisted. So we decide to repack my back with help of Maria and Parmesan. I skip the backpack liner and pack stuff differently. My pack now is about half the size it was before! how is that possible and how come i only learn this after spending 4 months on trail! The pack now fits much better! Lets see later how it workes out on the trail. We are all lazy this morning and no-one really wants to leave. So we hang around, waiting for the one to say OK let's go now :) shortly before 11am we then manage to hike out of Shelter Cove - Maria aka Sparkles, Apachi and Helther. Parmesan and Duchess left 2 minutes later and got a ride back to the trailhead, rather than walking the 1.5 miles there, lucky them! We want to be in Bend by Wednesday morning and as its only a little more than 70 miles we are not in a hurry at all. I enjoy the day, it's a beautiful day and we can see the sun and only blue sky! Blue sky, not greyish smoke anymore, what an amazing change! I think I didn't realize how much the smoke actually bothered me, but seeing blue sky above me is simply so wonderful. I'm really happy again and I thought that I have the Oregon Blues lately, but that also must have been related with the smoke, hopefully! It's a different hike again. But also landscape wise. We pass so many, absolutely geourgous and clear blue water Lakes. At the first one we stop already, having some lunch and of course a little swim. The water is not even that cold and every now and then you'd see a fish jumping up. There are 3 more lakes of the same type to follow. As we have spent so much time enjoying yourselves at the lake and hiking rather slowly we have to turn the hiking volume up in the later afternoon to reach camp before dark. So we do and finally get there at 7:20pm and what a surprise, next to Parmesan and Duchess (we've never caught up to them all day long), there is also Blue Man and Sausage, how i looove seeing these two again! While everyone is going to bed soon after it gets dark, I'm hoping to see the meteor shower today. So I plan to stay up. Also Helter, Apachi and Darko will stay up for a little while. We all lay down on a tyvek, so we can easily check for shooting stars and I bring a sleeping bag so we don't get cold. It's insane how many stars are out and the darker it gets the more stars appear on the sky. We are quite lucky and I see many shooting starts and three big ones (I would call them meteor showers as they were imense and really bright and big and you could see them a little longer than the small shooting stars). It was simply amazing!  

No one wants to leave! :)

Lunch swim 

What a view!