We ended up taking two full zeros in Ashland. It was wonderful seeing my parents and sister. We spent the days wandering the town and eating… and eating… and eating. The town had a lot of charm and it was difficult to leave, but we eventually peeled ourselves away from the comforts of town life and hit the trail.

We weren’t particularly motivated after being spoiled by my family and only made it 16 miles up the trail before taking an unscheduled stop at Green Springs Inn about 2 miles off trail. The people there were ridiculously friendly. We sat down for dinner and enjoyed a free beer (on the house for PCT hikers). There happened to be a live band playing that night outside on the porch. It was wonderful – we stuffed ourselves with burgers, wound up with free slices of pie, and settled in for a night of free camping on their property.

Again, the next day, we were’t feeling super motivated. We got sucked into the Inn’s vortex while waiting for a hitch back to the trail and ended up staying ’till 10am to eat breakfast. We stopped at a lake mid-day and swam, hiked on, and felt like we were making good progress, but at the end of the day we had only made it 19 miles.

We managed to get an earlier start the next day but made yet another unscheduled stop at Fish Lake Resort, where again, the people were ridiculously nice to us. We stuffed ourselves with more food and reluctantly waddled on to avoid getting sucked into staying the night. We were determined to do some serious hiking that day and ended up going some 25 miles, the last 10 being furiously quick.

The hiking so far in Oregon has been incredibly nice. We had to hike over some volcanic rocks just north of Ashland, but over all, it’s been soft dirt and easy climbs and descents (if you can even call them that). Large pine and cedar woods have been shading us most of the way with cooler temperatures.

We’ve made it to Crater Lake and are eager to get up on the rim for some views. We promise our next post will have some pictures of the lake. Our next stop will be Bend, one of the beer capitals of the country… so apologies in advance if our next post is less coherent…