Pacific Crest Trail - Day 151 - Three Sisters Wilderness

Start: Mile 1932.1 - Irish Lake
End: Mile 1960.3 - Sisters Mirror Lake

Our tour of Oregon’s volcanic wildernesses continues. To this point, I had only ever seen the Three Sisters and surrounding peaks like Broken Top and Three Fingered Jack from Bend, Oregon quite a ways away to the East. It’s exciting to see what this next stretch has in store.

This succinctly captures Oregon politics.

Brahma Lake

This long legged beauty was putting on a show at Jezebel Lake.

I’m pretty sure Oregon is a portal to the upside-down.

Sometimes smearing your greasy fingers on your camera lens can be a good thing.

These little guys are called Canada Jays. They’re way less annoying and aggressive than the assorted blue variations.

Elder berries. We met an older couple back in Hyatt Lake who were heading out to collect Elder berries. Maybe they felt obliged?

I will eat (just about) anything on trail but draw the line at bright red things I‘m not familiar with.

We’re heading north, apparently in the opposite direction of money.

The Pacific Crest Trail took a heading East towards Elk Lake Resort before heading North towards the Three Sisters. We were good on food and decided that skipping one or two of the lake resorts in Oregon wouldn’t kill us, so we took the Red Hill Trail which, according to the map (LOL) was the hypotenuse of a right triangle that would save us a few miles.

While it probably was technically a shortcut by distance, the Red Hill Trail was overgrown (with huckleberries!) and relatively poorly maintained compared to the PCT so we didn’t save much/any time or energy on our detour.

The mosquitos through the last few miles of the day were bloodthirsty. We replaced the inner bug net of the tent before Oregon expecting a lot of bug pressure that hasn’t materialized except for this particular stretch.

Pretty and pretty scary skies. The smoke was blowing in from the Flat fire outside of Sisters Oregon a few dozen miles away. We found some cell service to make sure it wasn’t a new fire and reassured a number of hikers we encountered that the fire was a safe distance away (even if the smoke wasn’t).