Lassen Volcanic

Our camping trip at Lassen with my family was really fun. It was nice to just relax with my Dad, Mom, and the 4 youngest of my siblings. I’d forgotten how beautiful Lassen Volcanic National Park is, and the weather cooperated very nicely. The evenings and mornings were cold, but the days were mostly sunny and we even got to swim a bit in the early part of the week. Some momentary sprinkles of rain on several occasions, but nothing to speak of.

We camped at Manzanita Lake, which was the only campground that stayed open all through the week we were there. We caught the very tail end of the season!

On Monday, we drove to Summit Lake where my family has camped most of the other times they’ve been there. It’s a good swimming lake so we did that and took a stroll all the way around, remembering past trips. Here’s my Mom with MA and HN. Aren’t they cute?

On Tuesday we visited Bumpass Hell, which is a wonderful place with a not very attractive name. When I was very young and we visited Lassen for the first time, I did think it was hellish because of the sulphur-smell and it was a very hot, glaring day. But now I love it. The smell is actually enjoyable because it comes with such wonderful visuals – intense shades of turquoise and green, enigmatic gray mudpots and streams… It feels a little like a visit to another planet.

On Wednesday we went rock-climbing near Terrace Lake. It’s almost as if no family camping trip would be complete without a bit of rock-climbing because my Dad used to take us older kids in Yosemite every summer growing up. Now the babies are all grown up and climbing strong. GC, age 16, made it to the very top (more than I was able to do!)

BN had been entertaining the idea, inspired by our various lake visits and star-gazing sessions in the past year, to take a boat out to the middle of a lake at night. Kinda crazy, but it just might work! So BN, GC, HN and I bundled up in our puffy jackets and wore our sandals down to the shore about 9:30. Very carefully we stepped into the inflated raft and pushed off from shore.

The moon had just risen, very close to full, so we didn’t see very many stars. But it was a totally clear night and the moon was so bright that we could see each other clearly.

Manzanita lake was formed recently, only about 350 years ago, and during our daytime rafting we had noticed the “kelp forest” type of plants growing a yard or two down from the surface. There were even a few tree trunks growing up from the murky depths. In the daylight it was pretty creepy, at night even more so!

On Thursday was our biggest excursion – out to Cinder Cone. We had to drive outside the park boundaries and then back in again, over a dirt road. We hiked through a stately forest of similarly-sized trees, with a thick blanket of pine needles and cones. The path was black sand.

Cinder Cone is this amazing huge pile of gravel! It’s quite intimidating, actually, and the climb up the path that spirals around it is quite steep and the gravel is constantly shifting. I was unpleasantly reminded of the South Sister, except black gravel instead of red. I hadn’t been to Cinder Cone before, (though my family had been a few years before) and I was starting to wonder about the hike. Was I almost to the top or only halfway up? It was like a gravel treadmill… two steps forward, one step back. Then I realized I WAS at the top, and wow, it was so worth it!!!

There’s the huge crater at the top, and an amazing view all the way around. The wind was so strong up there that we had to stow our hats and squat down to hold cameras steady. Cinder Cone was the highlight of the trip for me, scenery-wise. Here’s BN and Dad with the kids:

They are standing in front of the Painted Dunes, which you can get a great view of from the top of Cinder Cone. I thought they looked totally surreal, with swirly dots of gray, beige and pink, and the sparse green trees with mid-afternoon shadows… looks like a computer-generated landscape (or, another planet! Lassen is like its own galaxy…) Behind the dunes is the lava field.

On Friday, we took a hike through a lichen-laden forest to the Chaos Crags. Just to look at them, we weren’t up for another day of climbing…

On the hike we discovered a fairly sizable log that was covered in drips of transparent yellow sap.

BN was inspired, once we were back at camp, to collect a bunch more sap (or resin, as we later discovered is the proper term) from around the campground and RC helped him melt it down and embed a yellowjacket. Cruel, you say? Well, the pesky buggers had been our constant mealtime companions all week and we were sick of them.

On Saturday we took it easy and strolled around Manzanita lake in the early afternoon. The sky was full of pillowy clouds but the sun was out and those of us with cameras – 5 out of 8 – couldn’t stop snapping shots of Lassen reflected in the lake. Wow!

All in all it was a wonderful week. Thanks, family, and let’s do it again soon!