Day Four: 07/05/2016

Day Four: 07/05/2016

Location: Uracca Mesa

Destination: Crater Lake via Bear Cave Camps

On Tuesday morning, we got up around 5:15 and hiked up to a peak on Uracca mesa and watched the sunrise from the rocks. This was one of the coolest experiences of the entire trip. Definitely worth getting up early for it. You could see mountain ranges in the distance that were miles away. After we hiked back to camp, we ate breakfast then packed up camp ready to set on our journey for that day. We hiked from Uracca over to a camp called Bear caves (no unfortunately we did not see any bears) and had lunch at a campsite there. During lunch, our ranger Alex gave us a concert on his Ukulele and we all fell asleep and made up for getting up early that morning. This was probably my favorite lunch that we had.

Flag Ceremony before Campfire Program at Crater Lake

After lunch we hiked the rest of the way to Crater Lake and arrived there in the mid afternoon. We got there just in time to participate in the Program at the camp. The theme of that camp was a logging company and so for the program, we got to climb spar poles. We used leather belts, and gaffs which were these ankle devices that were strapped to our legs that had spikes on the end. This was pretty fun until you got to the top of the pole where it was only about 5-6 inches in diameter and was swaying a lot. When we finished with this, we went back to camp and set up our camp and started dinner. After dinner we attended a campfire program and stayed for the "after Concert" which was really fun. At that point we were exhausted from being up almost 18 long hours that day and so we went to bed pretty early. 

*** Reflection**

Waking up early for the sunrise was especially worth the effort, and sacrifice. Not only seeing the sunrise but also the view from a nearby peak was pretty cool. We could also see base camp from that peak and that kind of dawned on us that we hadn't seen our families in a couple days. It was pretty easy to get caught up in the adventure and excitement of the wilderness. At this point in the trip, the days seemed to almost fly by which was sad because looking back I wish I could have spent more time with them.