June 19, 2016

Despite camping in a bone dry stretch we still woke up soaked in dew on the chill morning air. Breaking camp happened quickly and we set out to knock out as much of the dry stretch as we could before it got hot.

We met two nobos, Gecko and Flume, at the base of the rim and swapped details about trail conditions before climbing up to the rim. The view was pretty amazing: we looked down into the volcanically-shaped valley below the rim with Mt Shasta off to one side and Mt Lassen off to the other.

The trail followed right along the edge of the completely exposed rim the whole day without anything noteworthy to add. We met two northbound section hikers from Texas at the Cache 22 water cache. Then another two thru hikers, Silver and Savor, at a communications tower. And then three more nobo guys immediately after. Quite the social day for us.

After a lunch break in the shade of a brief pine stretch we headed back out into the heat along the rim. Something in my right shin had tightened up during lunch and I began feeling sharp worrying pains as we reached our first downhill. Scared of my injury on the AT I stopped to tape and wrap everything from my ankle to my knee that might have been responsible before continuing on, slowly.

We reached Subway Cave, the end of the dry stretch, late afternoon and took a nice break there to rehydrate and eat. Before continuing on to find camping we did the short loop trail through Subway Cave. It was formed by a lava flow way back when and had quite a few visible signs of its formation along its length. Quite a cool detour after spending all day looking at Lassen.

Camping was more sparse than we had expected and we ended up in yet another small bowl formed by an air bubble popping in cooling lava. Even this "prime" spot was covered in brush but we managed to find clear enough spaces to set up in.