August 14:Indian Heaven, Mosquito Hell

It was a short few miles and we were back at 900 ft. It was up from here. Today would be another 5000ish ft climb day. It was a loooooooooong climb and it felt like it took forever. Luckily the terrain was beautiful and that made up for it. And every so often we popped out of the trees and got some awesome clear views of both Mt. Hood and Mt. Adams.

It was extremely hot, and we were saved by the tree-cover that shaded us and kept the temperature manageable. There were no bugs and we were out of poison oak territory again and I was able to hike in shorts for the first time in a long time. It was great!

Later in the afternoon we were hoping to hike a couple more miles before taking a break, when we popped out of the trees into a campground picnic area. On the picnic table was a small cooler and a white barrel that we thought said "Hiker Trash." We were pumped to see a cooler, and I thought, "Hmmm...creative trail magic...a place for hikers to dump their trash!" It's always nice to shed a little weight. We soon realized that it ACTUALLY said "Hiker Stash" and was full of goodies, which was even better! The guy who supplied the cash as there, and lucky as we were, he had only been there about 5 minutes and just refilled both the cooler and the bucket. And to top it all off, he brought out a bunch of fresh fruit and cookies as well. I had my first Marionberry ever (hybrid of blackberry and rasberry). We sat for 30 minutes or so and had great food and cold gatorades before heading back up the trail.

It was lucky that we stopped when we did, because we took like 10 steps past the road by the campground and it was almost immediately buggy. First it was just tons of flies, but soon it was mosquitos galore. Yep...welcome to Indian Heaven Wilderness- notorious for being mosquito crazy. When Mark hiked through here in '03 he had his craziest mosquitos here. He took a swat at Coach's leg and killed somewhere around 21 mosquitos in one swat! Mosquitos suck, but they do keep you moving forward at a good speed.

We set up the bugnet again, and I quickly found refuge inside for the night at Blue Lake. We all hunkered down inside our tents, escaping the blood-thirsty little buggers as best we could, having conversations from tent to tent until we all passed out, cozy in our sleeping bags.

Total Miles:2214.0
Miles Today:28.3
Camp 109:Indian Heaven, Mosquito Hell

------------------------------
Allow us to help those in need, sell back your spare PocketMail and make some extra pocket money.