After leaving Feather creek, I did a big climb to leave the valley and soon entered Lassen national park. The area in general is very volcanic and I took a short side trip to see the Terminal Geyser.
There was a lot of steam and some noise but I didn’t see any water spouting up. I also didn’t wait around too long for a real eruption.
Most of the 20 miles that I hiked through in the park were actually wooded and the ground was littered with pine needles. However, there were a lot of down trees which made the going slow at times. Some of the blowdowns were easy to step over, but others required really climbing over or walking around. A few time it was difficult to find the trail on the other side.
Even though I had it tough, I could tell from the fresh cut trees that the park service had cleared a lot of trees from the trail already and I was glad for that.
After going through the blowdowns for a while I came to a section of forest that was entirely burned. I thought it would be awful to go through, but there were no down trees, the wind picked up and it was down hill so I started to fly.
I also got some great views of Mt. Lassen, which you can barely see in the picture above. I didn’t go near it, but it still had a lot of snow and I got to see the north and east sides which I had never seen before.
I came across a section hiker going my direction who wanted to talk, but I had a deadline: I wanted to get to Old Station Resort before their store closed at 7 pm and I didn’t have much time to spare so I flew past him and kept going.
In a while, I stopped at a river to refill water and I found Seven in his tent. We chatted for a few minutes and I explained my plans for the next few days. He said he would join me, so he broke camp while I washed my legs in the river then we pushed on to Old Station.
We got to the store at 7:15, just after they closed. However, the owner was still there and he let us in as long as we could pay cash. I got an ice cream sandwich and cold drinks because I needed the extra water bottles for the next day. It was really nice of them to accommodate us so and we thanked them a lot.
It was pretty late by that time so Seven and I hiked just a mile more and set up camp for the night.