Juniper Lake

Once again, the day breaking at 6 am woke us up. Actually, a downpour of rain at 1 am woke me up earlier -- the rain lasted a couple of hours and drenched the world outside. Our cabin has a tin roof, and the patter of rain on the roof kept me awake for quite a while. My windows were open, and the smell of rain drifted in; a delicious and delightful smell. This morning we had just a light breakfast and tea, then got on the road by 7 am. We had a longish driving day planned, off to the eastern extremes of Lassen National Park to see what the wildflower situation was out there.

We drove down to Chester and then north on the road to Juniper Lake, our first destination. As we drove, it started to rain, intermittently quite heavily. The clouds gathered to the point where it looked almost like twilight. This was not looking good for walking amongst the flowers, but we decided to keep on with a car tour just to check out this area that was new to us. We saw few wildflowers, though all the necessary conditions seemed to be present. My conclusion is that we were a week or two too early for this area. We saw lots of herbacious plants in very early stages, and a few with flower buds, but we didn't see any that had gone to seed. My dad found something to enjoy that was quite beyond my ken: the patterns of dirt on the remaining snow mounds, and the resulting shapes caused by differential melting of dirty and clean snow. He forced me to take a picture of him near one of these.

We turned around at Juniper Lake and headed back toward Chester, but we took some side roads (29N42, 29N38, 30N37) to cut over to Warner Valley, avoiding Chester. Then we went north through Warner Valley, through Kelly Camp, and then into the Boiling Springs Lake trailhead parking lot. This entire route was much the same as the Juniper Lake route; we were just too early for wildflowers here. It might be better by our last day here (next Saturday), and we may return. The rain continued without real relief this entire time; we decided a hike up to the Boiling Springs Lake was not advisable. In fact, we'd had enough of this wet, gloomy, cold day -- we decided to zip back to Chester, grab us a hot lunch, and head back to the cabin to relax.

And that's exactly what we did. The soup at the Kopper Kettle Kafe today was turkey noodle, and it was disappointing -- insipid and salty. My BLT with avocado was great, though, and the strawberry-rhubarb pie was even better than it had been on Sunday. After eating, we stopped at the Chester supermarket for some supplies and hightailed it "home". Just before arriving at our cabin, we noticed that the road was nearly completely clear of the abundant cowflops left by the cattle drive -- the rain had nearly washed the road clean. They must have had some downpours here today!