July 25, 2016 - Nice to sleep in even though I still woke up at 6am, but was able to go back to sleep until a little after 7am.
I was hoping that since my ankle pain went away towards the end of yesterday then it would be good today. Didn’t have any real problems packing up gear before heading over to breakfast. I decided to skip the restaurant breakfast and go with donuts, cinnamon roll and milk from the store, 1500 calories.
I figured my ankle was good enough to continue hiking so I began the 4.5 miles up to Crater Lake Rim. To get back to the PCT I had to take the Annie Creek Trail, that’s when the pain came back, wasn’t as bad as yesterday but still kind of painful. That’s when I decided to hang out at the Rim Village and figure out if it was time to have someone look at my ankle, was worried maybe a stress fracture. I even thought about calling Mike’s parents and have them come pick me up and take a few days off trail but I didn’t want to inconvenience them like that.
I got lunch from the lodge then hung out by the village all afternoon waiting to hear back from my brother of what I should do, I gave him all my symptoms. Only took about 5 hours but heard back and he said I was fine to keep hiking and didn’t sound like a stress fracture and gave me an exercise to do to help.
Soon as I was about to leave a hiker showed up, a guy I’ve seen off and on since Kennedy Meadows. So we decided to hike the rim together and camp about 10 miles down trail.
It was such a cool hike along the rim, that lake is just so blue that it almost looks fake. I did have some pain still but kind of got better towards the end of the day’s hike. I did have a hard time keeping up with the other guy, seemed to hurt more on the downhill. We did end up camping together but we were unsure if we were camping legally or not, we thought we were at an official campsite but it was hard to tell.
I’m hoping that I will be close to pain free soon. I would hate to have to end my hike this close to the end.
