PCT 2018 Day 79, July 10, Tuesday
Start mile 1810.2, campsites
End mile 1837.2, campsites
Miles walked: 27.0
I walk quickly to Mazama Village and arrive at 8:30AM to pick up my food box, but the staff says I need to wait until 9, so I go over to the restaurant for a well-deserved breakfast. But there is a line waiting, and breakfast takes a while, too late to do laundry and hike to my campsite after seeing Crater Lake. See, the park service restricts where hikers can camp within the park, and I looked ahead to the few camping sites available.
Back to the camp store I get my food box and repack to my food bag. Magic Bean, Viking, Phelps, Spacejam, and I hang out at the Mazama picnic tables, snacking and doing prep.
I struggled with Xanterra’s paid wifi, so slow that I could barely download any podcasts. (Xanterra is the concessionaire for most of the large national parks.)
Viking shows off his 40 pound pack. 
After a few more miles of steep climb up to the rim trail, the view makes the minor hassles of the morning irrelevant. 
Crater Lake is in a caldera, an old exploded and collapsed volcano. The stunning blue is real, not merely an artifact of photography. The water clarity is 143 feet, said to be a world record. The maximum distance across the lake is 6 miles. 
You can see reflections of clouds in the water. 
Wizard’s Island is a cinder cone within the caldera. 
Down below, a tourist boat moves past. We are really up high on the rim. 
Magic Bean and I stop at a campsite 8 miles within the park boundary, with mosquitos getting too bad to enjoy walking further. Viking and several section hikers are already there. Magic Bean models her long netting poncho, which she uses for cowboy camping. 
In the afternoon the trail crosses talus fields of loose flat rocks, and the forest cover opens for some views. 
I meet Foodie, who was last seen at Burney Falls. We walked and chatted for a while along a large burn. 
Also seen today is Magic Bean, Viking, and Nicki. Foodie and Nicki and I are at the same exposed windy campsite, where skeeters do not dare to fly.
The understory is grass and fern, and a large variety of low-light plants unfamiliar to me. The bright-green moss on trees is not as common now as a pale-green beard-like moss, that quite covers some old trees.
The slopes of mountains are gentle in this region, and the rocky cliffs of northern California are gone. Water tastes funny, like silt, so perhaps my filter needs additional cleaning. In the afternoon I get to Brown Mountain, and a series of crossings of lava rock talus, on path that is packed dirt over stone, easy to walk on. 
Several dozen of these short talus crossings to the next stand of trees make for an interesting walk. 
Here is a tree with three different kinds of moss mixed together. 
Smoke, and sometimes the smell of wood-smoke, are still here to remind us of the wildfire to the south. 
The mosquitos are fierce by 6PM. This is a dry area with few water sources, so why so many of these hungry critters? A look at the map gives the answer. The trail may have much water close at hand, but several lakes, large and small, are nearby.