Day 115 - Friday, August 20

Tenting on the edge of a lava field (mile 1974.9). Walked 33.3 miles today.

We were up and on trail a little after 6 this morning, passing a ton of lakes and some elk prints in the dirt, but not a whole lot else besides trees.

We've passed lots of southbounders the past few days. One of them, Jess, stopped to chat with Frank about the seemingly high number of redheads (which both of them are) on the trail this year.

By late morning, we got our first views of the day and after a large climb and descent, we got better views of South Sister mountain, part of the Three Sisters.

We started listening to a podcast on trees that Jess recommend (called Completely Arbortrary). Their information was pretty interesting, but they get a little sidetracked in their discussions. Anyway, it gave us something to talk about as we walked along, through an open field.

We stopped for lunch at a creek and heard a few rumbles of thunder in the distance.

We started hiking again and Frank started to have pains in different parts of her foot and lower back. We took it slowly through a meadow with views of North and South Sister.

We entered the Obsidian Limited Entry Area which has tons of beautiful Obsidian in it. We also saw Obsidian Falls which is a waterfall over that rock.  It was gorgeous, but would have been better in the sunlight with the light reflecting off the rocks.

We passed several creeks and hiked through an area of downed trees before reaching the edge of a lava field.

We paralleled the field for about a mile as the sunlight faded.

Finally at 8:30, we reached camp and searched around for a good site. After finally finding one, we set up and got in our tents. I was going to skip dinner, but could tell I would be hungry soon and ate a little before going to bed. We were about 1.7 miles shy of our goal for the day, but we're a manageable distance from Santiam Pass and will get to there in the evening hopefully. Meanwhile, we've managed to do 70 miles in the past two days which we're pretty proud of.