A recovery trip after my previous hike, this was to be a 4 day, 3 night easy circumnavigation of the caldera rim at Newberry Volcanic Monument, inside Deschutes National Forest in Oregon.
Long story short, we arrived a day late and left a day early, but we still had a fun time.
The snow levels were up to about 4 feet at the higher elevations, but not as high on the trail, and it was very dense snow with no postholing.
We started by parking in the overflow lot near the Paulina Lake campsite and boat ramp. We hiked the Crater Rim Trail north, heading gradually up the ridge to the top of the crater. This is a wide and well marked snow machine trail and is graded very easily.
The weather was perfect, and the views of Paulina Lake came sparingly as we climbed, its bright blue water standing out through the trees.
The trees transitioned to open mud flats, partly covered by snow. We followed the snowmobile trail, which was clearly marked by 10 foot high posts.
We returned to the trees, and descended the Newberry Crater Trail down to East Lake.
The beach in front of Cinder Hills Campground is beautiful. The campground is currently closed, and we had the beach all to ourselves. The water was relatively warm too.
We relaxed for an hour or two, then set up camp nearby.
The gentle rain lulled us to sleep, and continued after we woke. Not wanting to get going into the grayness, we had a lazy morning in the tent. But eventually we had to get moving, so packed up the wet tent and started south up the beach.
We patched together a few low trails that run westward near the road. We had wanted to continue high on the rim, on the southern portion of the Crater Rim Trail. Unfortunately Sam forgot her insulin pump controller in the car, so we needed to stay near the road in case something went wrong. Luckily it didn’t, and we hiked on through the rain, getting back to the boat ramp around noon.
