Lassen

From Wikipedia – Lassen Peak, the largest lava dome volcano in the world, is joined by all three other types of volcanoes in this park: shield, cinder cone, and composite. Though Lassen itself last erupted in 1915, most of the rest of the park is continuously active. Numerous hydrothermal features, including fumaroles, boiling pools, and bubbling mud pots, are heated by molten rock from beneath the peak.

• Established: 8/9/1916
• Annual Visitors: 499,435
• Size: 106,589 acres

4/28/21   Lassen NP – On the way

We left Fort Klamath and headed south on Volcanic Legacy Scenic Byway towards our stop for the next two nights in Red Bluff, CA. We will visit Lassen National Park tomorrow morning.

In our travels south, we stopped at Howards Bay on Upper Klamath Lake, OR. The largest body of water (by service) in Oregon at roughly 25 miles long and 8 miles wide, only an average depth of 14 feet, covering 61,000+ acres, according to Wikipedia. We wanted to see some of the many birds we heard migrate to the lake’s marshes and shallow waters in the spring. I had such an amazing time taking pictures of eagles, egrets, pelicans, ducks and more. I also saw a kestrel that escaped my camera. Gary and I enjoyed the lake, marshes and fields right along the Scenic Byway but Rangeley was not pleased he needed to stay in the van!  Despite the lack of quality of some of the shots, I wanted to share the variety of bird species I was able to capture.

The next stop we had planned all along was to drive up to Mount Shasta’s Bunny Flat where both Gary and I have hiked some years ago. Gary has climbed Shasta with a guide on two occasions, being able to summit once. Rangeley loved the snow and we relished the crazy warm weather. It was roughly 60 degrees at Bunny Flat and 75 in Mount Shasta City. When we pulled into the hotel in Red Bluff, CA it was 88 degrees. What a tremendously different day than yesterday at Crater Lake and 35 degrees!

04/29/2021 Lassen Volcanic National Park

We awakened early (ok, I got up earlier than normal). Gary and Rangeley were already playing outside by 6:15AM, as usual. But after a quick shower, coffee and the hotel’s “complimentary” hot breakfast (yay, they are coming back after being shut down due to COVID), we headed to Lassen. We wanted to get up there before, well, anyone else : ) It was a little over an hour away. It turned out we arrived right at 9am when the Kohm Yah-mah-nee Visitor Center, at the southwest entrance, opened. The only other cars in the parking lot were a camper that spent the night there and a young lady from Maine, just about to head out on her road bicycle.

Lassen’s National Park Service Winter/Spring newsletter calls days like today “blue bird” days. When, in between snow falls, the sky is blue, the sun is out and, today, it was in the 60’s at the 6,700-foot-high visitor center. Lassen usually gets about 30 feet of snow in the winter and the snow can linger up at the visitor center until June.

There is a road that one can take from the southeast entrance up to the northwest corner of the park, but the passage is not plowed all the way through yet, so it is closed to vehicles. On a good note…any road that is free of snow but not yet passable by car, is free game for people heading out on foot to go skiing, bicyclists, hikers/walkers and…dogs on lead! We “legally” ducked under the “Road Closed” sign and traversed a mile up the road to Sulphur Works, a hydrothermal area with a couple of steaming fumaroles. In layman’s terms, a hole in the earth that spouts, in this case, boiling mud and a strong rotten egg (Sulphur) odor. We experienced these before at Yellowstone and there are more dramatic ones throughout Lassen VNP but we could not access them due to the park not being fully open and we are unable to snow shoe or ski with the dog up into the back county.

As you can see in the photos, we still had a fabulous time walking up the 400 vertical in 1.5 mile, one way stroll, up the Lassen Volcanic National Park Highway that was closed to public traffic. There were work crews that passed us with large graders, snow plow equipment and the like, twice, but other than those trucks driven by park employees and a couple of people also walking up or down the road, we had this section of park to ourselves!

I took a great shot of a blue jay in flight and was in awe, and a bit concerned, about the 5 circling vultures over my head at one point, but managed to capture the thermal floating birds with some beauty.

We stopped at From the Hearth Kitchen and Pies, a restaurant right in old town Red Bluff at about 1pm for lunch. I had an ahi tuna BLT with kale salad and Gary had a Jamaican Jerk chicken sandwich with fries. They were very good! We enjoyed a long conversation with a couple from Oregon visiting the area for a vintage trailer gathering. All the campers at the Durango RV Park, including theirs, were built between 1940 and the 1960’s. They restore theirs themselves and own four. The gentleman was telling us that the iron workers of WWII moved to making metal recreational campers/trailers after the war. You learn something every day!

Red Bluff is notably updated. In our travels we see a lot of rundown towns that look like they have not done anything to their historic buildings since 1950. Red Bluff has a clean, “I care about my business and this town” look to it. It could be the mayor or the local residents that take the renovations, painting and take pride in their town, either way, it was a pleasant experience to drive through. They even have a 2005 built metal clock tower replica (see picture) erected where the 1886 Cole and Kimball Building suffered irreparable fire damage in 1984. What is now called the Cole and Kimball Plaza where the clock tower stands, has been left open to the public in honor of the town’s historic downtown’s tragedy.

We’ve been asked by our family about the COVID standards that we experience around the US as we travel. Usually we answer that almost all travelers, locals and employees are wearing masks indoors. We were surprised to see a large portion of people in Red Bluff being lackadaisical about the mask wearing. Honestly, it’s refreshing to see smiling faces! We have had our vaccinations and are keeping a reasonable distance from those not wearing masks. This is the first town, this trip, where it’s noticeable that businesses are not requiring patrons to wear face coverings…and we’re in California! BTW – California has the lowest rate of new COVID cases in the lower 48 right now.

We spent the afternoon working on this post, doing laundry, an oil change and car wash of our rental van and enjoying a hot cookie the Holiday Inn Express hands out at 5pm. We are ready to hit the pavement again tomorrow. We head to Yosemite.