Waldo Lake camping trip, Aug 29th

After taking a bit of time off from hiking, I was in need of some outdoor time. Also, since I did not spend a lot of time with Shia, it was time to something she could enjoy as well. Instead of planning something myself, I saw that Laurie had planned for that weekend a camping trip to Waldo Lake. She was actually going to be there for 5 days into the weekend so I decided to crash in Friday night and stay until Sunday. The other reason to go was to do a large mountain bike loop around the lake. Waldo Lake, located in the central cascades in Oregon, shares a lot of similarities with Crater Lake. It’s the second deepest lake after Crater and as Crater, doesn’t have a lot of organic material in it. That makes its waters extremely clear which can take a rich blue color on clear days. Unfortunately, I didn’t get a lot of that, as it rained most of the time I was there. On Saturday, after a rich breakfast under the tarp, Heye, Kim and I took our bikes with the intention of doing the whole loop. We started from our campground in Shadow Bay going north. The first part of the ride was thru dense forest with no views of the lake until you reach the north shore where there’s another campground. Kim decided to turn around at that point as she was a bit tired and it was raining. Heye and I decided to continue I bit further. The trail on the north side of the lake was completely different as it goes next to the lake and traverses an area that was burned many years ago. The views of the lake were pretty impressive despite the fact that it was raining and there was a lot of fog. We continued a bit further until we got to the northwest corner of the lake. At that point, it was pretty much the same distance continuing with the loop or turning around to go back, so we decided then to just continue and do the complete 22 mile loop. The rest of the trail turned to be much harder than the first section as it went thru multiple ups and downs, tight turns, rocks and roots and scree slopes. All that mixed with the non-stopping rain made it a good challenge that took most of the day to complete. That night, back at camp, we had to take “measures” to wake up free of pain on Sunday. Fortunately Sunday was a bit drier than Saturday so I went with Laurie and Shia on a short canoe ride. After that, I took Shia out for a short walk to the shore so she could jump in the water and play for a while as I enjoyed the little bit of sun we got.