TBA
Lassen Volcanic National Park
Lassen Peak and Lassen Volcanic National park: 600 miles from Los Angeles, roughly 10 hours there and 8.5 hours back over Memorial Day weekend. It's a long drive.
The plan to leave at 12:30pm and arrive by 10:30pm got shot to pieces at 10am, when I found about fifty people in line at the car rental place. Oops. Add in general running around, we finally left Torrance at 2ish and Santa Clarita at... 2:45ish? Ended up arriving about 12:30am and pitching the tents in the dark. As we expected-- the dark, that is. Frances' Sierra Designs tent proved its extra value as it was setup in about 5 minutes, which is very important in the dark!
Next morning was my first taste of what Frances deems camping food (yum), and then off to Butte Lake to hike the Cinder Cone and explore the Fantastic Lava Beds. The Cinder Cone was very steep, but short and not all that bad, as it's over in only a couple hundred feet of vertical gain. The view at the top was well worth the hike, especially of Mt. Lassen, the Fantastic Lava Beds below it, and the Painted Dunes. We thought about hiking further out to Horseshow Lake or Hat Lake, but for once, sanity stopped us. We stopped by a lava tunnel on the way back instead, which was actually pretty cool. Difficult to photograph, so no real good pictures from that.
Splashed around Manzanita Lake after we got back. For some reason, the fact that it's a lake didn't register on anyone's mind, and the swimsuits we packed stayed packed. Oops. Not that you would want to do much swimming in murky 56 degree F water, but the thought had crossed our minds the day before! Dinner was steak, mashed potatos, canned veggies, and then s'mores for dessert. Very tasty.
Sunday's early start for the people ambitious enough to do Lassen Peak never materialized, some people who shall remain anonymous decided to do an elaborate breakfast of breakfast burritos (hint: it wasn't us!). Patrick, Wyatt, Daisy, Paul, Ken, and I headed over to Lassen Peak and its 5' of snow after breakfast, where the nearly constant grade up 2000' of vertical gain over 2.2 miles was to be the day's fun. I don't know about the rest of the group, but Patrick and I have done similar or worse many times before-- it was the fact that 75% of the trail was snow covered, in many cases with deep snow, that made things interesting. Seeing ground squirrels all the way up to the 10,457' peak was surprising, since there's no trees that high, and almost all the water is in the form of snow.
The view at the top was incredible, although if you skipped the rock scramble up the last 50' vertical gain, the view was almost as good. The caldera is a half mile in diameter, which is hard to take in as far as size goes til you get up to the top and look at it. You can only imagine how large the blast was...
After Ken made himself a quick lunch at the peak, and both Ken and Daisy had their lovely dealings with altitude sickness, we finally got sufficiently envious of all the skiers and snowboarders, and about half of us slid down the last sizeable slope down to the parking lot. That almost made the whole hike worth it by itself. =D 3 hours up and 3 hours down was the finally tally, it's probably doable in 2 hours up and 2 hours down pretty easily in the future, even with snow, and if you're willing to slide down... *grins*
Back at Manzanita Lake, the girls had done their hike around a lake, and everyone was back and ready for dinner. Shortribs, the last steak, baked potatos, hot dogs, tons of food, as usual. And s'mores, of course!
The night ended with far too much fire, as Paul bought four boxes of wood, and we ended up building a fire hot enough to melt glass. That didn't help the next morning, though, as temperatures at night dropped from the low-40s on Saturday morning to the low-30s by Monday morning. Hearing Delia say she was nice and warm because she was wearing 5 layers, including 3 hoodies, was worth a grin or two. Frances and I each had brand new +20F and +15F sleeping bags respectively, so we didn't need to look like a bundled up snowman to be warm. hehehehe. =D
The drive back wasn't nearly as bad; 8.5 hours including dropping Kelly off and a stop at Togo's for lunch. Unloading the minivan was an adventure too.
Friday/Saturday AM: driving up!
Saturday: Butte Lake: Cinder Cone, Fantastic Lava Beds, Painted Dunes; Lava Tunnel; Manzanita Lake
Saturday PM: burnt marshmellows
Sunday: Lassen Peak, 10,457'
Sunday evening/Monday morning: building a big fire
