Written 2018
Day 4
We woke up right at 6 this morning…with the plan of getting out by 6:45. We weren’t too far off! Went took down the tent…cleaned and packed everything else up that wasn’t the night before…and we were off and running by 6:51! Goodbye Broken Arrow Campgrounds!
We ate our pancakes and sausages as we drove over to the Park, and made our way over to the Cleetwood Cove lot to buy our tickets for the Wizard Island boat shuttle by around 7:30. Apparently the boat was out of commission yesterday, and they only got it fixed late in the night. Thankfully, there were spots available, and we were able to buy some tickets for the 8:30 boat ride. It was a 1.1 mile walk down from the lot to the lake. We were again treated to a nice mirrored view of the lake, and were excited to be on Wizard Island after 2 days of taking plenty of pictures of it.
Boat Ride to Wizard Island
We had about 3 hours to explore on Wizard Island, so our plan was to first go up to the summit to check out the crater within the island itself, and then go out to Fumarole Bay to go for a little swim. The hike up to the summit was a little more challenging than I thought it would be. 1.1 miles up…with 760 ft of elevation gain…our legs were probably just tired from the past 3 days though. The terrain was much different from our other hikes…as we had to go through some rocky fields to start off…. but it eventually turned into a more typical trail. The summit was really neat, as we could walk all around the crater to take in views around the lake…which was really cool to see it from this different vantage point. We were also able to walk down into the crater itself which was pretty neat.
Hike up to the Summit
Wizard Island Summit and Crater
After spending a bunch of time up there, we started to make our way down, and over to Fumarole Bay. Now this hike was all rocky fields…and we kind of had to guess as to which way to go. There wasn’t really a clear path…but you could kind of tell which way to go by the way the rocks where laid out. We eventually saw some of the others from the boat scattered in a few different spots down below in the bay, so we found a good spot for ourselves. Nature was calling for the both of us, so we dipped quickly into the pretty cold waters…and made the water levels rise just a tad! I took a quick brisk swim from the shore to a very nearby dock and hung out there for a little…before time was winding down on us, and we needed to make it back to the boat. Overall, I would say Wizard Island was worth checking out and going to!
Fumarole Bay
After the boat took us back to Cleetwood Cove, I decided I wanted to do one last thing there. There was a rock where people were jumping off of into the lake. It wasn’t very high up….maybe 10 ft? so not scary at all… but still pretty cool. So I decided to take the jump, and blew a big kiss to Norina in the air as she took some action photos of me jumping in! And finally…1.1 miles back up to the lot. Again…much more difficult than it really was, as both of our legs were pretty done by this point. But…we eventually made it…had some food up in the parking lot…and said goodbye to Crater Lake as we made our way out of the park.
Rock Jumping Kiss
We were running pretty low on gas at this point… There was a gas station at Mazama Campground, but that was pretty much the opposite direction of where we were going…so I didn’t want to make the trip, and was banking on hope that there would be some other gas station on the way to our first stop on the way home. I tried as much as possible to drive in neutral down hills and gas as lightly as possible. Thankfully, we found a gas station at the Diamond Lake Resort along the way, and was able to feed our tank back up to a safe level!
So our first stop was Toketee Falls, which from pictures looked pretty awesome! And Rachal had just been there a few months back, and gave me a little tip on how to get down to the bottom of the falls. Apparently, there was a hole in a fence you could go through at the top of the viewpoint…and then some ropes to help you get to the bottom. Well, we got to the viewpoint…about a half-mile in…and the falls were nice…decent…but nothing spectacular from where we were. You could tell from the bottom they’d be cool…but where was this hole in the fence? and ropes? we saw the pathway down, but it looked super sketchy. Well, I guess the park probably wasn’t too keen on people going down there, so I guess they fixed up the fence, and took away the ropes…so we unfortunately didn’t make it down. There were some other areas off the path were we could get some fresh water, but unfortunately, not any good waterfall sights.
Toketee Falls
Originally when planning the trip, we were thinking of stopping at a few other falls and hot springs on the way home, but since we spent a lot of time at Crater Lake in the morning, we didn’t really have time, as we were projecting to get home around 9pm now. So we decided to just make one more stop on the way home…and boy was it a good one! It’d been years that I’ve been wanted to check this place out called K&R Drive-inn. A small little drive-inn off of I-5 down south, which apparently had amazing ice cream and milkshakes. I finally had the opportunity to stop by there without going way out of the way…so was taking it! It was around dinner time by the time we got here…and they had real food too. We decided to go with an ice cream cone and milkshake dinner though! 🙂 And we didn’t go wrong! We went with a Salted Caramel milkshake and Wild Blackberry ice cream. The milkshake was to die for…and the ice cream was superb! Anytime I’m on I-5 going past here in the future…I am definitely stopping by!
K&R Drive-Inn
So after ice cream, we actually needed to make one more stop in Salem to gas up again…but that was it! We got home around 9pm, unpacked, and it was a solid day for the birthday girl…and a wonderful trip overall for the 2 of us!
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The Dating Life of Norina and Jonathan 