Day 93 – Saturday, July 12

I’m currently in Shasta City in the very north end of California and things are going great on the trail! This past Thursday I broke my personal best hiking day.  I hiked 34.5 miles in a single day with an 1,800 foot climb at the end!

Shortly after leaving Chester,  I entered Lassen Volcanic National Park where I visited Terminal Geyser and Boiling Lake. It’s a pretty cool thermal area especially considering I was nowhere close to Yellowstone.

Part of the trail I went over this past week is an area called Hat Creek Rim. This section of the trail brought back memories of the Mojave Desert days in Southern California. It’s a stretch which is very hot (99 degrees when I went across) exposed, dry and waterless for 33.4 miles. Thank goodness Cache 22 and the Wild Bird Cache were fully loaded with water! Those caches made it much easier to cross. I could see and hiked towards Mt. Shasta for four days. If you look hard enough in the Hat Creek Rim photo below, you can see Mt. Shasta from about 100 miles out. The snow on it looks more like a cloud and the mountain itself blends in with the sky since it was such a hot and hazy day.

The trail passes through Burney Falls State Park on the way north to Mt. Shasta.

After living in California now for the past three months, I’m planning to take my backpack and move on to Oregon here soon. 🙂