Day 17

We had some really nasty thunderstorms last night. The lightning and thunder seemed to be really close to us, and there were some torrential downpours. When I woke up in the morning, I went outside to see how the tarp I had hung had performed. It actually worked pretty well. Most of the water followed the tarp “downhill”, and landed beyond the sides of the tent. I noticed a small white pile in the corner where I had directed the bulk of the water and walked over to take a closer look. It turn out to be a pile of ice, made up of hundreds of ice pellets, the size of a very large pea … apparently, the storm was packing some hail in addition to the rain!

We got our gear together, loaded the car and headed out for what was to be a long travel day. The plan was to travel from Mount Rainier to Crater Lake National Park, stopping at Mount St. Helens along the way. We spent about an hour and a half at Mount St. Helens. It is absolutely amazing to see first-hand the destruction from the 1980 eruption, and this after 33 years have gone by! Unfortunately, there were a lot of clouds in the area, so we didn't get to see really great views of the mountain.

After leaving Mount St. Helens, we traveled the rest of the way to Crater Lake National Park. It was a long drive! We finally arrived at about 7:30 in the evening, got our camp set up fairly quickly, and made dinner. It's pretty cold here tonight, in fact, these are probably the coldest temperatures we've experienced so far on this trip. A few days before we left, I had gone to BJ's Wholesale Club to buy some food items we were going to need. When I was there, they had some Coleman light-weight fleece sleeping bags on clearance for $9.99 each. I decided to buy a couple of them, figuring for $10 bucks, how could you go wrong? As it has turned out, that was about the best $20 bucks I've spent in a long time. These fleece bags have been amazing for us … they've been great on the warm nights we've had, and on the cold nights, we've been using them as liners in our regular bags. We'll really need them tonight in that role!

Tomorrow, we're going to spend the day sight-seeing Crater Lake. From what we saw on our way in, it should be a pretty awesome day.

Unfortunately, we don't have internet access here, as expected, so this blog post will have to wait until Monday, when we leave Crater Lake National Park and drive to Redwoods National Park in California.