I'm in Oregon and happy to be traveling to a new climbing destination.
Looks like it's going to be a beautiful day.
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Hi. This is Evan from Within Hiking Distance and I'm at the Devils Lake/South Sister Trailhead.
We'll be summiting South Sister and today I'm with Lisa who is one of the mountain school instructors from earlier this year.
Nice to be with you Lisa.
Thank you.
And it's been really hot and smoky here
so it looks like we got a little bit of a window and we'll just see on our way up how things go.
South Sister is located in Central Oregon just 33 minutes outside of Bend.
To the summit, it is 11.6 miles round trip and has 4,900 feet of elevation gain.
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The trail starts off going through a dense hemlock forest.
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At about 1.5 miles into the trail we popped out of the forest
and started to get our first good views of South Sister.
To the right of us we saw Broken Top in a distance which stands at 9,177 feet.
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So we've hiked 3.5 miles in so far, which is just over 1,500 feet.
It's nice to have some shade right now we've been exposed in the sun for a bit.
But getting there. It's a beautiful day.
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We were able to see a small lava dome in a distance called Little Broken Top
and it has elevation of 6,982 feet.
Hiking under crushed lava rock as we went up the side of the mountain gave us quite a workout.
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We're at 8,000 feet. Just over 4.3 miles.
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So it's 9:00AM, we just came up onto a ridge.
We've gone up 3,300 feet, 4.9 miles so far.
You can see behind me it's a small lake and up above is the summit to South Sister.
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We took a quick break near Cirque Lake and proceeded up to the summit.
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The trail follows a ridge to the left of the Lewis Glacier.
The trail gets relatively steep and has loose rock debris until you reach the crater rim.
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Once on the crater rim it's possible to walk to the summit on the other side.
So we just hiked up to the rim of South Sister.
Not quite to the summit yet.
We just came up walking along the ridge which was pretty tough.
There's a lot of crushed lava rock along the way that made the footing a little uneasy.
But we're getting some great views.
Glad the smoke held off.
And it's beautiful up here.
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So just walking along the crater rim right now.
The summit the South Sister is just on the opposite side.
So we're just walking along until we get there.
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Just hiked to the summit of the South Sister. Oregon's third highest peak.
It's at 10,358 feet
and there's great views.
Yeah, we got lucky the smoke cleared and it's an excellent day out here.
From the summit, there are amazing views of the landscape in every direction.
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It's easy to see the Middle and North Sisters while hiking around the crater rim.
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Teardrop Pool is considered Oregon's highest lake.
We made our way back down to mountain to the parking lot and had great views along the way.
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So we just finished up the hike to South Sister. We had a great time and great views.
Lisa, what did you think of the hike?
It was awesome. We had great window weather as far as the smoke clearing out.
Beautiful views in every direction lots of mountains to see.
Lots of chaw, so had to empty our shoes out lots. But yeah, overall I'd give it an 8 out of 10.
Sounds good. All right.
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