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Lassen Volcanic National Park

This morning we headed out of camp fairly early to drive up to Lassen Volcanic National Park. There was a layer of fog still on the water which made for some good pictures.

Miraculously, I remembered to call my father for Father's Day while I still had cell phone coverage. I'm usually out in the woods somewhere with really weak coverage. Before getting to the Park, I took a slight detour to take Abbey on a hike since she can't go on the trails in the National Parks. This has me a bit perturbed since horses are allowed on trails, but I better not get started on that subject. I won't let Abbey get started either. Anyways, we hiked part of the Pacific Crest Trail which is supposed to go from Canada to Mexico, but it has a number of breaks in between. I'm sure the section we hiked (2 miles out and back) isn't one of the more significant stretches of the PCT, but it was fine for us and got Abbey out for a bit. On the way back she was a maniac. I thought for sure she smelled a bear or something, but we never saw anything. So we then drove to a remote entrance to Lassen Volcanic National Park. Most people have never heard of this park in northern California, but from what I've seen so far it is pretty cool. The Lassen volcano last blew in 1914, but before Mt. St. Helens it was the last eruption in the contiguous US. I've never been to Yellowstone, so my perspective probably isn't the best, but the geothermal springs, boiling lakes, mud pots and steaming fumaroles were very cool (actually they were quite hot and smelled like rotten eggs.) I saw Boiling Lake which was like this turquoise green color and you could actually see it bubbling ...
... and I saw Devil's Kitchen which had a lot of steam coming out of holes in the ground and the streams were steaming as well.
Technically, there aren't any geysers, but it's still a cool park. And I've only seen one small part of it so far. Tomorrow I'm going to drive around to one of the main entrances and check out a place called Bumpass Hell. With a name like that I've gotta go see it. Poor Abbey will be relegated to the RV once again.

Tonight I am boondocking it in Lassen National Forest. Boondocking, for the uninitiated, just means I am camping outside of a campground or RV park with no hookups at all. Most of the time in the campgrounds I don't have hookups so I figure why pay for the campground. Plus I finally found a good place to do it. Haven't had a chance in a while.

Boiling Lake

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This page contains a single entry from the blog posted on June 19, 2005 1:44 PM.

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