The North Loop
On the first day, we went to Russian Gulch, where we (my siblings and I) quarreled a lot and saw a giant concrete arch bridge across the gulch. Susan's whole family (Greta, 5, Clem, 10, Ev, 12, Susan and Mike) joined us there. We camped at McKerricher, because Russian Gulch campground was closed.
Next day we went on the Ecological Staircase hike. It had five "steps" of earth. They were each formed by the ocean floor rising, 100,000 years each. The first step was the beach. On the second terrace, or step, was seaside prairie. It was dry, windy and full of seaside daisies, with a beautiful view of the ocean. The third step was small trees, pines and furs. There was a clump of trees twisted by salt winds. We called it the goblin fortress, and it was very fun to climb. I found a nest. We named it Krumholtz (bentwood in German) castle. On the next step was the majestic redwood forest. There was a hollow log we all crawled through and got charcoal mark on the top of our heads. I climbed up about 100 ft of fallen redwood log and ended up at 50 ft off the ground. There were also lots of huckleberries and ferns. The fifth step, which was a wonder, was Pygmy forest. The soil there is so low in nutrients that cypress and spruce an trees that would normally grow up hundreds of feet were only about 6-10 feet. Huckleberry, which normally grows 4-8 feet or so, was no more than 2 or 3 feet tall. Manzanita was it's normal size. We walked back the same way we came and walked about 5 or 6 miles in total. We had been walking slowly, and it took us 3 hours to walk up, we even had lunch on the way. In a rush we were getting back, so we made it just under an hour. All the huckleberries we collected (a quart or so) were made into syrup we ate with crepes for a few days.
We drove through a drive-through redwood tree which was called Chandelier Tree. By the time we got to the Klamath campground it was near midnight. The adults set up tents and we all went on sleeping.
We stayed at Klamath for three days. We collected blackberries and mint. The first day in Klamath (third of the journey) we went to Fern Canyon. It was about 60 or 70 feet deep and seemed like the walls were completely sheer, even a little undercut at the bottom. The walls were carpeted with five-fingered ferns and sword ferns, as well as mosses, algae and lichen. There were little trickles of water running down the sides, and if you looked at them straight up they looked like warp speed from Star Wars. There were many fallen logs, redwood and oak-like, which had grown on the edge of the canyon and fallen. Small streams run through the floor of the canyon, and boards were thrown across in a kind of make-shift bridge. In most cases, there was just a log, which was much more fun to cross.
We saw Roosevelt Elk, which, though it is a herbivore, has canines. We saw a whole flock of females and two solitary males, one with two beautiful antlers, about four feet across tip to tip, at least three feet long each; the other male had only one antler, which stuck awkwardly to the side of his head. It slit at the base, with two 8 or 10-inch fingers.
On the fourth day we went on a four-mile Brown Creek trail in a redwood forest. Clem, Yasha and I hid from adults in a goose-pen in a tree. All that was left of a tree was a stump, 10 ft tall and 6 feet across inside the hole. Then we snuck up on the adults and then all the kids except Greta did it again. When the water ran out we ate redwood sorrel. We had dinner at the Chart Room.
Fifth day we went tide-pooling and saw baby seal and sea lions in Marine Mammal Hospital. Even with that, we drove most of the day and camped at Jedediah Smith park. We camped early, raced (between two families) to set up tents, and went on nature observation trail on the campground. Somebody had hacked a cavity in a redwood tree 10 or 11 feet off the ground, and all the older kids climbed up to it. First time we needed help, but after that we could get up on our own, and also managed to hoist Ephraim up. We collected some huckleberries, but ate them, because there was not enough for syrup or jam.
Next day (day#6) We went to Tolawa Dunes and caught some ants for identification project. They stung us a little, and we were afraid to pull them off because their heads could rip off. We went on a hike to the Summer footbridge (in the winter and spring floods would wash it away, so they take it down) on Smith River. The Smith River was emerald color, shiny, blue-green because it has serpentine dissolved in it. We swam a little, caught frogs, floated in inner tubes, but it was too cold to play in the water much. I slept in Susan's tent.
Day 7: Clem, Ev, Susan and me went dow to the river before dawn to look for mammals, we didn't see any, but we sat on a cliff and watched the sunrise. It was beautiful. We looked at Darlingtonia, native carnivorous plants. {serpentine, sfagnum, details!!!}
Oregon Caves were amazing. They're marble caves. Carbon dioxide gets dissolved in the water. Water turns slightly acidic and eats through the marble. The dissolved calcite re-crystallizes and creates calcite formations. Calcite is clear up to several millimeters, and turns yellowish when thicker. There are so many stalagmites and stalactites and other formations. It 44˚F down there all year round, which is colder when summer and warmer when winter. A man named Elijah Davidson went hunting one day with his dog. His dog smelled something and went off. He loved his dog and followed him. Than, he saw bear tracks in front of his dog trails. He followed them into the crack which turned out to be a cave. He used all four of his matches on the way in. It took him only ten minutes to get in, but he was lost there for hours. When he did get out, his dog was staying out there, wagging his tail and wondering what he was doing there in a scary place with the bear. Since the cave was first discovered, more of the cave was explored, and there are now tours to look at them, with rangers for guides. People found jaguar and grizzly bear bones from many thousands years ago in the cave. We saw a dead moonmilk (a bacterial colony deposit, stromatolite), and calcite icicles forming in the man-made tunnel that was build only 100 or so years ago.
That night in a motel called Super8motel in Yreka, and we washed my hair, which is a big deal, and had bagels for breakfast, which was really nice.
Day #8 After the bagels, we drove to the old copper mine to look for malachite and chrysocolla. First we found bear prints and looked for more. We saw a lot of pumice. Some was grey, some white, reddish or yellowish. Different pieces weighed differently and had different pores. It came from Shasta. Shasta was enormous. It loomed over us. On our first drive we tried every single little road except for the one we needed. All of the sudden, among all this dirt and rubble, a street sign. This street did lead to mine, but that was currently functional and forbade trespassing. Eventually, using sine vague instructions including a broke-down trailer, we found the mine. There were enormous heaps of rubble and pits and cliffs. We were searching and found many blue-green rocks. I plan to have them tumbled some time later. We played around the trailer, but didn't go inside. Found a lot of shotgun and rifle cartridges. We hope the trailer was shot after it was broken. We camped at Siskiyu lake, and it rained a little when we got there. We set up one tent (Susan's), because we were only staying for one night. It took us kids only 8.5 minutes to set it up.
Day#9 Everything we left out out was full of water. Our trapezoid cup had 2 inches of water. When we left campground, we drove past the Siskiyu Dam, which is a rather big waterfall.
It rained all morning, but we drove up Shasta as far as the road would take us, and even if it was 40 F up there, I run out barefoot to feel what it looks like around. It was very foggy, it felt like rain, and I could only see a few yards ahead of me. Shasta, unlike most mountains, has no foothills. It rises straight up from the ground. Nothing nearby is 1/8 as tall as it is. It had whirling, swirling clouds on its top, as if the eruption was going on.
We stopped for lunch at Lower Falls (McCloud). It was a river (Klamath) that run along quite flat until a sudden 10-feet drop in a semi-circle cavity in black volcanic rock. Waterfall was plunging down. There were tall pine and few smaller shrubs, including huckleberries, ferns, manzanita and others I don't know. There was rainbow trout in the river (we saw someone caught a few a foot long and put in a little dents in the rock full of water). There were many people painting the falls. I liked the one who captivated the motion, I almost felt it could spring to life. Another one was very detailed, but had no motion, as if it had been frozen in the ice block, but over the years it melted a little and let the water to ease in a more standstill position. We saw a few Townsend chipmunks, but it turned out that most of what we have seen were golden-mantled ground squirrels. The description said: "Unlike chipmunks, which it vaguely resembles, the golden-mantles don't have striped head". Although the description says "vaguely", they look a lot like chipmunks: they are small, and have striped backs, and they are golden, brown and white, as most chipmunks.
We arrived at Manzanita Lake in Lassen Volcanic Park. We only set up one tent again, ours this time, because the other one was wet.
Day 10 We went on an interpretive trail which talked about different types of dacite, pumice and basalt. Some of the rocks we saw were less than 100 years old. They came from Lassen peak eruption in 1915. Some traveled as far as 4 miles from the peak. We knew that Judith with kids were coming, so we didn't go to Subway cave but returned back to the camp.
Had lunch, went to Subway cave. Subway cave is a lava tube, formed during some previous eruption of Lassen, thousands of years ago. Lava tubes are formed when the outside of the pahoehoe lava flow is cooled and hardens, but hotter lava flows through inside, leaving a lava tube, which is sometime big enough to walk through. It was quite cool down there, 50 degrees maybe, but not as cool as Oregon Caves. We could walk through by ourselves, there was no ranger. It was dark reddish inside. We went through one way and back. It was 5 feet in lowers parts, 15 or 20 in highest places. It is a half-tube in cross-section, because the lover part of the flow froze before it made its way out. In widest places it was 30 feet across. Outside the main part I went exploring and I found a little place there white and gold lichens grew on porous rock, and little water droplets, few millimeters across, hung glittering from the lichens. I felt like the cave was mine, because it looked unexplored and I discovered it. I showed it to everybody, and I explored it a little further with Sasha.
#11 We went on the Manzanita lake trail. There were floating logs with mosses and yellow flowers. Clem and I played that we were gnomes that lived on the logs. It was beautiful, and there were several rivers going out of the lake and maybe one going in.
We went to Bumpass Hell. Kendall Vanhook Bumpass (what a name!) was hoping to make his fortune from minerals in hydrothermal area. He broke through the thin crust of clay, fell in a pit of boiling mud, and cooked his leg to the point when it was unusable forever. The place was called Bumpass Hell because he was the only one injured there. The place was formed when water runs over magma pockets unusually close to the surface. The water heats up, dissolves sulfur, becomes acidic and dissolves volcanic rock, turning it into mud. It smelled like rotten eggs (sulfuric). The area is about a mile across, with boardwalks to prevent people coming to same fate as Bumpass. Bumpass Hell is mostly white, with yellow (sulfur), green (algae and hyperthermal bacteria), and red (iron) tints next to streams. Streams are shiny blue, but mixed with mud and steam, looked muddy with bluish tint. Fumaroles are vents - for steam, mud, water or lava. There was Big Boiler fumarole in Bumpass Hell that steamed up at least 100 feet.
There was a particular mudpit we called "Glurping pot" because it went "glurp, glurp" under ground. Later, we went to Sulfur Works, which is just one mudpot, which looks like it is sitting right on lava. It is about 6 or 7 feet across, nearly circular. The mud is so thick it is impossible to tell how deep it is. It looks like a fountain, In a middle, there is a big jet, 2 or 3 feet tall, sort of like somebody is standing there and throwing mud-colored cloth all around.
When we got back, Elaine, Milo(9) and Gianna(6) were there.
#12 That day we went on a Cinder Cone hike. Two miles trudging volcanic rock, and when another half mile up the volcano. Most of the hike there, piles of volcanic boulders loomed up on the left, and gentler, pine-covered hills rose up on the other side. Cinder cone, living up to its name, is made completely out of cinders - basically volcanic pebbles. Most of them are black and a few are reddish. Imagine - black mount, seven hundred feet tall, with a big crater in the middle, and all of it made of pebbles. Once we got to the top, we went straight down to the crater. It was about 300 feet deep, and in the very middle there was a small pile of rocks brought there by people who got down. From the top, there was a beautiful view. One the one side, a pine forest and mountains beyond it; on the other, painted dunes right under the cone, and big mounds of black and red cracked rock, looking like frozen waves, beaten to bits by hammer. Beyond that, a lake, and a forest, and blue mountains so far they were hardly darker than the sky. Then we run down the mountain. Susan dared us to run all the way down - if we did, she promised us anything we wanted in Starbucks, and if we didn't, we'd help grown-ups with dishwashing after dinner. We actually washed dishes all the time, in Lassen girls did it after breakfast, boys after lunch, and grown-ups at night. It took us half an hour to climb the cone, and only a few minutes to get down.
When we got back, turned out Rafe forgot his camelback under the Cinder Cone, and we run back to get it. By the time we were back, it was dark, and the air smelled good. The moon was huge, and it looked yellow when it was rising. As if it was really made of cheese!
We made fire burn blue and green, and everybody claims they saw purple, but I didn't. We threw "magic fire" fire into it - a mix of some metal salts.
#13 Was sort of the down day of the trip, but I ended up sort of liking it. It starts out looking like good news: We are going to Drakesbad, which is a pool, heated by natural hot springs, and we are going to have lunch there, and swim all day in really hot water. In Lassen, we had no hot water but what we heated on a propane stove, and all nights were below freezing. While we were going there, we had an accident. It didn't look like much: the car we were in hit the car in front of us, and paint cracked on their bumper, and our license plate got bent a bit. It was a little scary - an big jolt, as if we went over a speed bump at 10 miles an hour. First, we had to wait an hour for a ranger. And when it turned out the person in the car ahead was hurt, we had to wait for emergency car to come. And when it turned out it cannot come in twenty minutes, we waited for the helicopter. But, the road cut straight through the forest, and just out of the site of the accident, there was a beautiful meadow, with a stream running through it. Sand in a bottom kept swirling in a weird way, and it kept swirling if you disturbed it with a stick. We missed our reservation at Drakesbad, and ended up going straight to camp.
#14 We set out again to Drakesbad (successfully, this time). We had lunch (because we arrived a little late, and would miss the lunch if we went swimming right away) and we went down to the pool. It looked like the normal pool, because the hot spring was so hot they had to add cold water to it to make it safe, and it was easier to do in a pool. It was hotter than we expected, and there were a lot of swimming noodles. We spent most of the time sitting around in the soup, but at some point gave it a rear property of the meat being humans by actually swimming. I explored a small brook behind the pool and found it had cold water. On the way back I tried to catch some butterflies and run through sprinklers.
We left the park, and after about 2 hours stopped at promised Starbucks, et ad villam movebamus vi magn quinq
Next day we went on the Ecological Staircase hike. It had five "steps" of earth. They were each formed by the ocean floor rising, 100,000 years each. The first step was the beach. On the second terrace, or step, was seaside prairie. It was dry, windy and full of seaside daisies, with a beautiful view of the ocean. The third step was small trees, pines and furs. There was a clump of trees twisted by salt winds. We called it the goblin fortress, and it was very fun to climb. I found a nest. We named it Krumholtz (bentwood in German) castle. On the next step was the majestic redwood forest. There was a hollow log we all crawled through and got charcoal mark on the top of our heads. I climbed up about 100 ft of fallen redwood log and ended up at 50 ft off the ground. There were also lots of huckleberries and ferns. The fifth step, which was a wonder, was Pygmy forest. The soil there is so low in nutrients that cypress and spruce an trees that would normally grow up hundreds of feet were only about 6-10 feet. Huckleberry, which normally grows 4-8 feet or so, was no more than 2 or 3 feet tall. Manzanita was it's normal size. We walked back the same way we came and walked about 5 or 6 miles in total. We had been walking slowly, and it took us 3 hours to walk up, we even had lunch on the way. In a rush we were getting back, so we made it just under an hour. All the huckleberries we collected (a quart or so) were made into syrup we ate with crepes for a few days.
We drove through a drive-through redwood tree which was called Chandelier Tree. By the time we got to the Klamath campground it was near midnight. The adults set up tents and we all went on sleeping.
We stayed at Klamath for three days. We collected blackberries and mint. The first day in Klamath (third of the journey) we went to Fern Canyon. It was about 60 or 70 feet deep and seemed like the walls were completely sheer, even a little undercut at the bottom. The walls were carpeted with five-fingered ferns and sword ferns, as well as mosses, algae and lichen. There were little trickles of water running down the sides, and if you looked at them straight up they looked like warp speed from Star Wars. There were many fallen logs, redwood and oak-like, which had grown on the edge of the canyon and fallen. Small streams run through the floor of the canyon, and boards were thrown across in a kind of make-shift bridge. In most cases, there was just a log, which was much more fun to cross.
We saw Roosevelt Elk, which, though it is a herbivore, has canines. We saw a whole flock of females and two solitary males, one with two beautiful antlers, about four feet across tip to tip, at least three feet long each; the other male had only one antler, which stuck awkwardly to the side of his head. It slit at the base, with two 8 or 10-inch fingers.
On the fourth day we went on a four-mile Brown Creek trail in a redwood forest. Clem, Yasha and I hid from adults in a goose-pen in a tree. All that was left of a tree was a stump, 10 ft tall and 6 feet across inside the hole. Then we snuck up on the adults and then all the kids except Greta did it again. When the water ran out we ate redwood sorrel. We had dinner at the Chart Room.
Fifth day we went tide-pooling and saw baby seal and sea lions in Marine Mammal Hospital. Even with that, we drove most of the day and camped at Jedediah Smith park. We camped early, raced (between two families) to set up tents, and went on nature observation trail on the campground. Somebody had hacked a cavity in a redwood tree 10 or 11 feet off the ground, and all the older kids climbed up to it. First time we needed help, but after that we could get up on our own, and also managed to hoist Ephraim up. We collected some huckleberries, but ate them, because there was not enough for syrup or jam.
Next day (day#6) We went to Tolawa Dunes and caught some ants for identification project. They stung us a little, and we were afraid to pull them off because their heads could rip off. We went on a hike to the Summer footbridge (in the winter and spring floods would wash it away, so they take it down) on Smith River. The Smith River was emerald color, shiny, blue-green because it has serpentine dissolved in it. We swam a little, caught frogs, floated in inner tubes, but it was too cold to play in the water much. I slept in Susan's tent.
Day 7: Clem, Ev, Susan and me went dow to the river before dawn to look for mammals, we didn't see any, but we sat on a cliff and watched the sunrise. It was beautiful. We looked at Darlingtonia, native carnivorous plants. {serpentine, sfagnum, details!!!}
Oregon Caves were amazing. They're marble caves. Carbon dioxide gets dissolved in the water. Water turns slightly acidic and eats through the marble. The dissolved calcite re-crystallizes and creates calcite formations. Calcite is clear up to several millimeters, and turns yellowish when thicker. There are so many stalagmites and stalactites and other formations. It 44˚F down there all year round, which is colder when summer and warmer when winter. A man named Elijah Davidson went hunting one day with his dog. His dog smelled something and went off. He loved his dog and followed him. Than, he saw bear tracks in front of his dog trails. He followed them into the crack which turned out to be a cave. He used all four of his matches on the way in. It took him only ten minutes to get in, but he was lost there for hours. When he did get out, his dog was staying out there, wagging his tail and wondering what he was doing there in a scary place with the bear. Since the cave was first discovered, more of the cave was explored, and there are now tours to look at them, with rangers for guides. People found jaguar and grizzly bear bones from many thousands years ago in the cave. We saw a dead moonmilk (a bacterial colony deposit, stromatolite), and calcite icicles forming in the man-made tunnel that was build only 100 or so years ago.
That night in a motel called Super8motel in Yreka, and we washed my hair, which is a big deal, and had bagels for breakfast, which was really nice.
Day #8 After the bagels, we drove to the old copper mine to look for malachite and chrysocolla. First we found bear prints and looked for more. We saw a lot of pumice. Some was grey, some white, reddish or yellowish. Different pieces weighed differently and had different pores. It came from Shasta. Shasta was enormous. It loomed over us. On our first drive we tried every single little road except for the one we needed. All of the sudden, among all this dirt and rubble, a street sign. This street did lead to mine, but that was currently functional and forbade trespassing. Eventually, using sine vague instructions including a broke-down trailer, we found the mine. There were enormous heaps of rubble and pits and cliffs. We were searching and found many blue-green rocks. I plan to have them tumbled some time later. We played around the trailer, but didn't go inside. Found a lot of shotgun and rifle cartridges. We hope the trailer was shot after it was broken. We camped at Siskiyu lake, and it rained a little when we got there. We set up one tent (Susan's), because we were only staying for one night. It took us kids only 8.5 minutes to set it up.
Day#9 Everything we left out out was full of water. Our trapezoid cup had 2 inches of water. When we left campground, we drove past the Siskiyu Dam, which is a rather big waterfall.
It rained all morning, but we drove up Shasta as far as the road would take us, and even if it was 40 F up there, I run out barefoot to feel what it looks like around. It was very foggy, it felt like rain, and I could only see a few yards ahead of me. Shasta, unlike most mountains, has no foothills. It rises straight up from the ground. Nothing nearby is 1/8 as tall as it is. It had whirling, swirling clouds on its top, as if the eruption was going on.
We stopped for lunch at Lower Falls (McCloud). It was a river (Klamath) that run along quite flat until a sudden 10-feet drop in a semi-circle cavity in black volcanic rock. Waterfall was plunging down. There were tall pine and few smaller shrubs, including huckleberries, ferns, manzanita and others I don't know. There was rainbow trout in the river (we saw someone caught a few a foot long and put in a little dents in the rock full of water). There were many people painting the falls. I liked the one who captivated the motion, I almost felt it could spring to life. Another one was very detailed, but had no motion, as if it had been frozen in the ice block, but over the years it melted a little and let the water to ease in a more standstill position. We saw a few Townsend chipmunks, but it turned out that most of what we have seen were golden-mantled ground squirrels. The description said: "Unlike chipmunks, which it vaguely resembles, the golden-mantles don't have striped head". Although the description says "vaguely", they look a lot like chipmunks: they are small, and have striped backs, and they are golden, brown and white, as most chipmunks.
We arrived at Manzanita Lake in Lassen Volcanic Park. We only set up one tent again, ours this time, because the other one was wet.
Day 10 We went on an interpretive trail which talked about different types of dacite, pumice and basalt. Some of the rocks we saw were less than 100 years old. They came from Lassen peak eruption in 1915. Some traveled as far as 4 miles from the peak. We knew that Judith with kids were coming, so we didn't go to Subway cave but returned back to the camp.
Had lunch, went to Subway cave. Subway cave is a lava tube, formed during some previous eruption of Lassen, thousands of years ago. Lava tubes are formed when the outside of the pahoehoe lava flow is cooled and hardens, but hotter lava flows through inside, leaving a lava tube, which is sometime big enough to walk through. It was quite cool down there, 50 degrees maybe, but not as cool as Oregon Caves. We could walk through by ourselves, there was no ranger. It was dark reddish inside. We went through one way and back. It was 5 feet in lowers parts, 15 or 20 in highest places. It is a half-tube in cross-section, because the lover part of the flow froze before it made its way out. In widest places it was 30 feet across. Outside the main part I went exploring and I found a little place there white and gold lichens grew on porous rock, and little water droplets, few millimeters across, hung glittering from the lichens. I felt like the cave was mine, because it looked unexplored and I discovered it. I showed it to everybody, and I explored it a little further with Sasha.
#11 We went on the Manzanita lake trail. There were floating logs with mosses and yellow flowers. Clem and I played that we were gnomes that lived on the logs. It was beautiful, and there were several rivers going out of the lake and maybe one going in.
We went to Bumpass Hell. Kendall Vanhook Bumpass (what a name!) was hoping to make his fortune from minerals in hydrothermal area. He broke through the thin crust of clay, fell in a pit of boiling mud, and cooked his leg to the point when it was unusable forever. The place was called Bumpass Hell because he was the only one injured there. The place was formed when water runs over magma pockets unusually close to the surface. The water heats up, dissolves sulfur, becomes acidic and dissolves volcanic rock, turning it into mud. It smelled like rotten eggs (sulfuric). The area is about a mile across, with boardwalks to prevent people coming to same fate as Bumpass. Bumpass Hell is mostly white, with yellow (sulfur), green (algae and hyperthermal bacteria), and red (iron) tints next to streams. Streams are shiny blue, but mixed with mud and steam, looked muddy with bluish tint. Fumaroles are vents - for steam, mud, water or lava. There was Big Boiler fumarole in Bumpass Hell that steamed up at least 100 feet.
There was a particular mudpit we called "Glurping pot" because it went "glurp, glurp" under ground. Later, we went to Sulfur Works, which is just one mudpot, which looks like it is sitting right on lava. It is about 6 or 7 feet across, nearly circular. The mud is so thick it is impossible to tell how deep it is. It looks like a fountain, In a middle, there is a big jet, 2 or 3 feet tall, sort of like somebody is standing there and throwing mud-colored cloth all around.
When we got back, Elaine, Milo(9) and Gianna(6) were there.
#12 That day we went on a Cinder Cone hike. Two miles trudging volcanic rock, and when another half mile up the volcano. Most of the hike there, piles of volcanic boulders loomed up on the left, and gentler, pine-covered hills rose up on the other side. Cinder cone, living up to its name, is made completely out of cinders - basically volcanic pebbles. Most of them are black and a few are reddish. Imagine - black mount, seven hundred feet tall, with a big crater in the middle, and all of it made of pebbles. Once we got to the top, we went straight down to the crater. It was about 300 feet deep, and in the very middle there was a small pile of rocks brought there by people who got down. From the top, there was a beautiful view. One the one side, a pine forest and mountains beyond it; on the other, painted dunes right under the cone, and big mounds of black and red cracked rock, looking like frozen waves, beaten to bits by hammer. Beyond that, a lake, and a forest, and blue mountains so far they were hardly darker than the sky. Then we run down the mountain. Susan dared us to run all the way down - if we did, she promised us anything we wanted in Starbucks, and if we didn't, we'd help grown-ups with dishwashing after dinner. We actually washed dishes all the time, in Lassen girls did it after breakfast, boys after lunch, and grown-ups at night. It took us half an hour to climb the cone, and only a few minutes to get down.
When we got back, turned out Rafe forgot his camelback under the Cinder Cone, and we run back to get it. By the time we were back, it was dark, and the air smelled good. The moon was huge, and it looked yellow when it was rising. As if it was really made of cheese!
We made fire burn blue and green, and everybody claims they saw purple, but I didn't. We threw "magic fire" fire into it - a mix of some metal salts.
#13 Was sort of the down day of the trip, but I ended up sort of liking it. It starts out looking like good news: We are going to Drakesbad, which is a pool, heated by natural hot springs, and we are going to have lunch there, and swim all day in really hot water. In Lassen, we had no hot water but what we heated on a propane stove, and all nights were below freezing. While we were going there, we had an accident. It didn't look like much: the car we were in hit the car in front of us, and paint cracked on their bumper, and our license plate got bent a bit. It was a little scary - an big jolt, as if we went over a speed bump at 10 miles an hour. First, we had to wait an hour for a ranger. And when it turned out the person in the car ahead was hurt, we had to wait for emergency car to come. And when it turned out it cannot come in twenty minutes, we waited for the helicopter. But, the road cut straight through the forest, and just out of the site of the accident, there was a beautiful meadow, with a stream running through it. Sand in a bottom kept swirling in a weird way, and it kept swirling if you disturbed it with a stick. We missed our reservation at Drakesbad, and ended up going straight to camp.
#14 We set out again to Drakesbad (successfully, this time). We had lunch (because we arrived a little late, and would miss the lunch if we went swimming right away) and we went down to the pool. It looked like the normal pool, because the hot spring was so hot they had to add cold water to it to make it safe, and it was easier to do in a pool. It was hotter than we expected, and there were a lot of swimming noodles. We spent most of the time sitting around in the soup, but at some point gave it a rear property of the meat being humans by actually swimming. I explored a small brook behind the pool and found it had cold water. On the way back I tried to catch some butterflies and run through sprinklers.
We left the park, and after about 2 hours stopped at promised Starbucks, et ad villam movebamus vi magn quinq