I have an idea for Friday’s post, but in the meantime, some pics and stories of a corner of California I’d never seen.
We started in Oregon at Crater Lake, but we got there later than planned. We pulled up to the rim Friday afternoon and it was just as stunning as I remembered:
But the next morning we woke up to a steady drizzle and lots of people. Wet crowds out and about as Summer’s Saturdays dwindle. We took an early wander along the rim, watched the fog consume the basin, and then we bailed — Lava Beds was just a few hours away!
Lava Beds National Monument is in Modoc County in the upper right corner of California, and there’s not much there there. The campground was another 10 miles past nowhere; oogling the alien volcanic landscape JFran had to pump the brakes right after we entered for a mule deer momma and her baby bounding across the road.
Leaving the crowd at Crater Lake, I was worried about finding a place to sleep, but Lava Beds was quiet and calm and we had our pick of sites in a cozy campground with a view.
It poured that night, but it was clear in the morning and while we waited for the visitor center to open (needed a bump hat to protect my bald head), we checked out the training cave with lights inside and this bigger one next door.
Enter the mouth of the cave and it drops straight down. Turn off your light and it’s pitch black. In the dark, your other senses light up and you notice how it’s oddly cool, damp and fragrant, and how screwed you’d be if your light went out.
There are over 700 lava caves in the park; we tried on eight: Mushpot, Indian Well, Sentinel, Big Painted, Symbol Bridge, Golden Dome, Sunshine and Skull.
A mile off the road were caves with Indian Pictographs:
Skull cave was our last and the biggest. Down multiple steep flights of stairs, traversing three stacked lava tubes, you find a frozen ice floor at the bottom where lots of skeletons — both animal and human — have been found:
Cave recovery spot by the side of a cinder cone where the sky went on forever:
Lava Beds has stark history to go with the landscape. The Modoc War played out here 150 years ago, where 50 Indians held off 500 US Army troops for nearly 6 months — hiding out in the lava caves and trenches they knew so well. Eventually outgunned, the leaders were executed and the rest of the tribe was sent far away from their home to reservations in Oregon and Oklahoma.
80 years ago, adjacent Tule Lake was the site of the largest Japanese Internment camp, holding over 18,000 Japanese Americans through WWII. Tule Lake is off at the far end of that picture. We didn’t make it to that side of the park.
Had to get home; next morning we left at the crack — 10/10 would go back.
Keep up the travels! I'm living vicariously through you.
Looks like you are getting a lot of use out of the snidermobile!