Hikers...sort of

We travel together because we love being together.  In general we love to do the same activities and are on the same page about most things. Except two.  I don't mean like someone likes kale and someone else likes pizza, I'm talking big ideas here.  Life altering ideas.

One of us likes to hold and study and become one with the map. One of us likes to push a button and go wherever Siri tells her to go.

But the other difference is huge. And it rears its ugly head every time we set foot in a National Park. Hiking. One of us loves to hike, and sings a little chipper song while she's doing it. The other person is me. Once I'm hiking, I'm eight years old, wondering if I might invent time travel right that second. Considering what might happen if I hurtled my body down the hill.  Begging the universe to try teleportation on me right that instant.  But...I love adventure, and I want to see it all. And so I hike.  I complain, but I hike.

And with that, our Crater Lake adventure begins.

We parked above Cleetwood Cove and hiked down to the water. That's not really a hike -- it's more of trying to keep yourself from running because it's so steep. From Cleetwood Cove we took a boat tour of the lake. This is a must. The views from the rim are stunning, but from within the crater they are...indescribable. The water is so blue, and looking at the crater walls from below is magnificent.

The boat drops you off at Wizard Island which is a cinder cone volcano that formed after Mount Mazama blew. I would imagine this is a geologist's dream. When you get off the boat, you are immediately scrambling over volcanic rock, and as you go up the trail, the rock changes dramatically with elevation.  We had lunch with some very aggressive chipmunks (don't feed the wildlife!) and then started the hike up to the summit.

I'm not usually prone to being wary of heights. Possibly small spaces, but not heights. This, however, freaked me out. The trail was so skinny, and so steep. It seemed so easy to just tumble down the side. The nice ranger person was pretty sure I wasn't going to slide down the hill, but he's not really familiar with me.  He'd probably say that people don't fall off bleachers or in kickball games. Little does he know...

The other thing weighing on my mind (other than tumbling to my death while hiking) was that we weren't going to make it.  You are given three hours to explore Wizard Island, and then you have to be back at the dock. As we started getting closer to the top, I was getting hysterical that we'd been climbing for so long and that we wouldn't even be able to see the top.  I think that hysteria gave me the energy for the final push up the summit.

It was...wow.  It was actually hard to really focus on the last 100 yards of the trail because it became just a breathless view. From the top you have an amazing 360 degree view of the lake. This is a must do. It's dirty and long and I hated every minute, but it was worth it.

The thing we love about National Parks is that they are wondrous. They contain parts of the natural world that you don't see in your everyday life. We love that they are protected, and that we live in a place where these places are held above as special.  We also are always staggered by history of those that have come before us in exploration and recreation, be it people we have known or revered in history.

And so we sit in our pajamas eating pizza in our hotel room, fully satisfied with our day. We are dirty, swollen, in dire need of ibuprofen, exhausted and pretty happy.  I don't know if I will be able to get out of bed tomorrow, but that is a problem for another day.