Another trip that was supposed to be a backpacking trip but it wasn’t. Still it was a great scouting trip and now I know I can camp out there. The only problem of doing this in a single day is, well, that you have to do the whole thing. In this particular case, that translated to 13 miles and almost 3000’ elevation gain, certainly not an easy hike. We started on the Cast creek trail going up on a very dense forest so much that, for a while, we did not get any sun and the temperature was rather cold. After a couple of hours of grueling ascend, we finally got to a clearing with a magnificent view of Mt Hood. This time it looked much better because we got some snow a coupe of days ago. From that point on, we started getting some snow on the trail all the way to the lake. The lake itself is in a basin which shelters it from wind. It was not surprising that the temperature was a bit higher there. The lake itself is really beautiful with a small peninsula in the middle that almost divides it in two. We circled the lake to get to a sunny spot where we stopped for lunch and then continued around to get back on the trail. For our return, instead of doing the same trail, we all decided on the longer route just to complete the loop. I guess nobody was expecting that we would be climbing even more before heading back down. Luckily, for me I guess, we got to a couple of very nice view point near the summit of ZigZag Mountain. The views we got from there was a nice reward for our effort. After that, it was a long descent into the deep forest back to the road and to the cars. A very long hike that ended at sunset, just in time to get dinner.
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