Yesterday morning I went online and purchased my Pamelia Lake permit. There are a limited amount of permits available, but I suppose that if all twenty day use permit holders bring the maximum number of people you’re looking at a crowd of 160 people. It looks like there is also a single permit for a group of 9-12 people. I think that the overnight permits are subtracted from the day use allotment. In any case, at this time of year it’s not bad. I saw that six other permits were reserved for today, but I only saw three people.

Pamelia Lake was really small. The water level was as low as I’ve ever seen it. Of course you can take that with a grain of salt since my sample size is two visits. However, due to the conditions this year I feel confident that the water level is much lower than normal. And a big for instance would be looking at you from over the tree line. Mount Jefferson is looking mighty bald. I only saw two small patches of ice. That surprised me since I was pretty sure that I saw more when I was looking at the north face from the Olallie Lake area a couple of days ago. I was looking directly into the sun at the time.

Although I knew I wasn’t going to have time to hike to Hunt’s Cove, I was expecting to hike a lot farther than I did last time. Ha Ha (Clinton Dix). That last part was unnecessary, but since I was typing “Ha Ha”, my mind naturally completed the rest. Just in case you don’t know, that’s the name of an NFL safety. But back to your regularly scheduled programming. The laughter is because it’s quite obvious that there was no way that I was going to be able to hike through the lovely forest next to a creek without stopping to enjoy the scenery as well as spend a whole lot of time taking pictures.