I'll let you guess what state that's in.
As I stated in my last post, I planned to overnight at the trailhead at Fish Lake on hwy 140. Got there by midnight, stopping only for gas. Slept in the car. Got up first light, wasted no time continuing east on 140 (thought I might stop first at the Fish Lake Resort for coffee and maybe breakfast, but decided I was too early and didn't want to hang around. it was about a ten mile hill (would be uphill if I were to take this route) but it wasn't overly steep, I consider it feasible. At the bottom of the hill, headed north on road 34 along the west side of Upper Klamath Lake. Initially this was along a marshy shore, then cattle grassland. Stopped for a picture of the very red sunrise reflected on the marsh. The pastureland was eerily atmoshperic as well, would have made some good photos, except I had misinterpreted the DeLorme maps (hard to tell want's paved and not) and "misled" by Google's bicycle directions which gave me a route that included dirt roads which I had not taken into account. As a result, I was surprised to find myself already in Fort Klamath when I was still waiting to pass the junction with NFD 3200, and then found that NFD 2300, "Sun Mountain Road" was also dirt. That was part of Google's Bike route "long way around" the east side of Crater Lake Park to the north entrance, which I assumed was less hilly than taking the rim road. But 30 extra miles of dirt on a road bike was out of the question.
So I just took the southeast entrance road into the Park. I passed a firefighter's staging camp on that route, and numerous fire crews on the road. I talked to one of the firemen who was walking around near Annie Falls while I was taking picts there. He said he had just sent his crew yo fight one of the two dozen lightning-ignited fires on the other side of Annie Creek. They had dropped equipment at the site the day before, but the crew had to walk in (climb in... down Annie Creek Gulch and up the other side - I couldn't imagine what route they would have taken across, certainly not where I was standing, at the edge of a 100ft cliff of only slightly hardened ash!)
I continued on to the Mazama Campground & Visitor center store, which seemed to be overrun by PCT hikers. I bought a book on Oregon Geology, and continued on counterclockwise from that southeast junction around the rim road. It bacame evident from the stops I made that it was becoming very smokey - one could barely make out the outline of the rim across the lake. I did get some "useable" images of the Pinnacles area, the features were "nearby", but photo's of the lake overlooks were pretty bad. In from talking with various people I learned that theMt Ashland fire has grown from the small plume of smoke on the Mt Ashland ridge beyond Pilot Rock, when I was viewing it from Hobart Bluff the other day, to 4700 acres.
I decided to abandon the section from hwy 66 to Crater Lake, and just head north as far as needed to escape the smoke.
Actually, the smoke cleared out not that much further north, yet I was by that time in road-trip mode, one of the other weekend tourists. Basically I was still "scouting" the PCT road-crossings, getting a feel for the terrain from a bicyclist's POV (passing lots of bicyclists in fact...) I'll want to get more specific when I have more time (will have to make time soon) but the overall impression of the Cascades in central Oregon is one of a gently rolling plateau punctuated by isolated volcanos, which are easily dodged by the roads, so the climbs are mild.
But now the place is closing. Back later.
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