Mt. Lassen

The morning sun woke us from our sleep of recovery, at about 5:30 am. We had nothing around for breakfast except dried fruit and nuts, so we ate a few handfuls of that and washed it down with a cup of tea. By 6:30 we were on the road, headed for the south entrance to Mt. Lassen National Park...

Nobody was at the guard post when we got there (at just after 7 am), so we self registered using my fathers "Golden Age Passport", which gives our vehicle free admission. As we drove the first few miles into the park, we saw a few flowers, but not very many. Some hellebore plants were just poking up through the mud, which means that the snow melted only a few days before. There were a few shooting stars in wet spots, some western bleeding hearts generally nearby, some very nice crimson Indian paintbrush, and a couple of yellow flowering plants that we don't know. But in general the flowers were sparse, and except for a couple of places I'll mention later, it continued this way all day. The weather could hardly have been better -- clear skies, temperatures in the 60s and 70s...

Not far into the park is a place where an old sulphur works used to mine the sulphur brought to the surface by the boiling springs, steam vents, and boiling mudpots that surround it. Right alongside the road is a very entertaining boiling mudpot, roughly five feet in diameter. The boiling mud surface is out of sight, but not out of hearing -- loud noises emanated from it constantly, sound much like some giant beast was struggling mightly to escape. Every thirty seconds or so, some blobs of boiling hot mud would come flying out of the mudpot into sight, landing on the surrounding soil and building up a rim around the mudpot as it dries. Every few minutes a particularly large blob came flying out -- including, one time, a blob containing roughly a cubic foot of gloppy hot mud. And sometimes these blobs would be thrown extra far -- on the sidewalk that is closest to this mudpot, you can see the dried residue from many such past splats. The smell from the mudpots and the more common steamvents is an evil, sulphurous conconction; so intense that it almost seems to have a physical texture.

After leaving the sulphur works, we took a very leisurely drive up to the summit, enjoying the spectacular scenery, the snow, the frozen lakes with blue ice, and the crazy people who were just starting the climb to Lassen Peak (almost 2,000 feet above the trailhead). The Bumpass Hell trail was closed; many feet of snow remain on it. Then we continued on to the King's Creek trailhead, where many years ago Debbie and I enjoyed a beautiful hike. We actually couldn't make the entire drive to the trailhead; snow blocked the road. But we did get down to the bridge over the creek, and that area was quite pretty. There were pussywillows in seed right near the bridge, dwarf mountain laurel in bloom in the meadow, and quite a few shooting stars. I found two blue hyacinths right at the water's edge, just past prime. We walked a loop around a section of creek, perhaps a half mile in all, with the whole way through an area full of springtime life and vigor. There was a large Ponderosa pine, about five feet in diameter, that had fallen across the creek to make a good bridge -- I didn't want to walk through that ice cold water! The water itself was as clear as lead crystal; not full of milt at all as snowmelt runoff often is.

Then we continued our drive, traveling counter-clockwise around Mt. Lassen until we got to the western entrance. The entire north side of the mountain is quite different than the south side -- much drier, and subjected to eruption effects within the past 100 years. About the only interesting thing we ran into on this portion of our trip was the red flower stalk of a fungus -- very weird looking, and quite common. We turned around just outside the western entrance and zoomed it back to the eastern-most part of the summit road, and stopped at the trailhead for the Chain of Lakes trail. We walked this about a half mile to the first lake (Summit Lake), and just goofed around on the shore there, relaxing. This was a quite a beautiful spot; a small lake (perhaps a quarter mile in diameter), wind blowing straight toward us making gentle wavelets that crashed in front of us, flowers and greenery all around the lake, and very peaceful. We watched a chipmunk gathering dried grasses just ten feet or so from us; he was very obviously not intimidated by us. One interesting thing we saw along this trail was a number of dead and decomposing Ponderosa pines. Some (but not all of them) decompose in a peculiarly regular fashion, leaving cubic chunks of dry wood as the detritus. These cubes were roughly a quarter inch to a half inch on a side, and far more regular in shape and size than you'd expect from the results of decomposition. We don't even have any speculations about how this might happen. By the end of this walk, my father was stumbly tired, so we called a halt to walks for the day...

We headed back down to the south entrance, and down until we got to about 6,000 feet of altitude. At that point there was a nice dirt road heading westward and down, and we decided to try it, to see of we could find any more concentrated wildflowers. We failed on that objective, but we did run into something Debbie and I saw once, years ago, in the Sawtooth Mountains of Idaho: a muddy section of the dirt road that was attracting large numbers of butterflies and moths. I speculate that they are there for some mineral in the water, but that is purely speculation.

Finally we were done for the day, and we headed downhill and southeast to the town of Chester, on Lake Almanor. Here we stocked up at a real grocery store, where I was helped by some very friendly locals -- reminded me of the folks at home in Jamul and Lawson Valley. After I got my supplies, I asked a couple of employees where they'd go in town to get a nice meal. One of them said "Susanville" (30 miles or so to the east) and the other said "Red Bluff" (50 miles to the west). This was not encouraging. So we ended up cruising the main drag in Chester, scoping out all the eateries. There were only about three that were open, and one of them had four cars in front of it (the others had either one or none) -- so we chose it. The Kopper Kettle Kafe turned out to be a good choice -- we had a decent ham-and-bean soup and a great BLT with avocado; the only sour note was the potato salad, which was the standard odd-tasting stuff you'd find in a typical grocery store deli section. But the biggest and best surprise was dessert: an honest-to-goodness old-fashioned strawberry-rhubarb pie, tart, fruity, and none of that friggin' cornstarch-thickened sugar sauce. The crust was delicious, too. You could have knocked me over with a feather. The owner is a woman from somewhere in southeast Asia (judging just from her appearance), assisted by her high-school aged daughter Sonya. Both of them were a delight; attentive, good-humored, lots of genuine smiles and joshing. We enjoyed their company as much as we enjoyed the food...

And now we've journeyed back to our cabin in Mill Creek. My dad is taking a shower as I write this, and I believe he'll go straight to bed, as he's quite tired. I'm going to stay up for a little while to review and process the photos I took today, and hopefully I'll be able to post some of them with this screed...