We woke this morning just in time to catch a pretty sunrise peeking over the crater rim. The shot is not brilliant because we couldn’t remove the flyscreens from our window, but you get the picture.
Just before 8.30 we left Rim Village at 0 degrees C (brrr!) and started heading down…down…down the mountain. My ears popped several times on the way down and that set a pattern for the day, by the time we hot the hotel this evening my ears had been through at least two more popping sessions.
Around an hour south of Crater Lake we crossed the border into our last state for the trip California and shortly afterwards passed through the little town of Weed ( which trades on it’s name a bit for cheeky advertsing and shops)
While we were still in Oregon, we started to see glimpses of Mt Shasta on the horizon. Mt Shasta is the second highest of the Cascade Range volcanic peaks ( after Mt Rainier) and she had kindly decided to stay”out” for us today. There are 5 glaciers on the mountain top but we thought that there was a fresh dusting of snow on the peaks. When w estopped at the overlook to take some photos we chatted breifly to a firefighter who had stopped there with his truck. he said they’ve been kept very, very busy this season.
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| Mt Shasta |
Shortly after rounding the bottom of the moountain we turned off the interstate and headed eastward, for the 90 mile journey from there to the entrance of Lassen Volcanic National Park. Lassen is one of the less well known parks in the system but it had quite a few visitors today. Lassen Peak last erupted in 1915 so it’s a very recent volcano and the park features many of the same sights we’d seen already on our trip through the volcanic Northwest. Lava flows, sulphur springs, boiling mud pots and steam spewing from fumaroles.
The peak itself shows clear signs of where half of it had been blown away in the latest eruption and there were several pretty lakes scattered around the mountain, but they weren’t looking their best under the grey skies. We stopped in at the visitor centre for a coffee to keep us going for the last hours drive of the day, back down…down…down another mountain to Red Bluff.
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| Lassen Peak |
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| Lake Helen, and Lassen Peak under cloud |
Easy dinner tonight at the local Applebees Bar & Grill, but another superfast service where we were only half way through our appetizer nachos when our main courses arrived. Not to worry, we just treated the nachos as a side salad!