Sunrise at Lava Beds animation
Sunrise at Lava Beds animation
We headed out to Lava Beds National Monument on a Friday afternoon and ran into some serious traffic getting out of the bay area. After that, it was smooth sailing. It was the night before a full moon and we got to see Mt. Shasta in beautiful moonlight as we drove.
We stopped at the 
Golden Eagle Motel
at the corner of First and Main in Dorris, a small town (the hotel
was remarkably nice and cheap, and best of all, it didn't have room
13). The next morning, we headed off to the Lava Beds. Lava Beds is
primarily a place where you see and do things, as opposed to simply
hike.
Our first stop was 
Captain
Jack's Stronghold. Captain Jack, or more accurately, Kientpoos,
was the leader of the Modoc Indians who rebelled against the White
settlers who wanted them moved to a reservation. For a period of five
months, a band of less than 60 Modocs males and their families took
refuge in strange clefts and crevices, and behind jagged boulders
created by lava flows and managed to hold off an army that was 20
times their strength. As the trail guide goes: "walk this trail and
you will see how it was possible, but walk it with reverence. The
cultural identity of an entire people was lost here.... so settlers
could graze a few cows."
We then stopped off the Vistor Center to get maps and headed back
to Schochin Butte, which presented some excellent views, including 
one of
Mt. Shasta in the distance. We met a cool forest ranger in the
Fire Lookout as we climbed up the 0.7 miles trail to reach an altitude
of 5253 feet. The weather was beautiful and the views were extremely
clear, marred only on one side by 
an agricultural
burn .
After waking up a rattlesnake and 
admiring some
wildlife , we then stopped at 
Mammoth
Crater and drove off from the park, south, to 
Glass
Mountain (along USFS Route 97). Glass Mountain is a mountain that
is made up of black Obsidian rock presumably created by the
distinctive cooling of molten lava (the quartz sand or silicon dioxide
component) mixed with some oxide (for Window glass, it's soda (sodium
oxide) and lime (calcium oxide)). We cut our feet on the sharp glass
as we overlooked the trail and climbed over the glass rocks. The
landscape was quite unearthly.
We then headed back to probably the most famous attraction in Lava
Beds: 
the
caves (tubes) created by lava flow. We walked along the Cave Loop
Road stopping to explore cave after cave, as 
flocks of birds
above us headed south for winter (order in chaos). After
we saw a few, we had gotten tired of it: basically 
you climb into
this hole, 
walk around for
a bit, and 
climb
out. It's fun, especially in certain caves like the ice caves, but
it gets tiring real soon.
We drove over to Klamath Falls for dinner at this excellent Mongolian Barbecue restaurant (where the chefs and waitresses were amazed at the amount of hot food I could eat) and went back to Dorris for the night.
We woke up early the next day to catch the sunrise, which was an
amazing experience. Driving along 
Tule Lake
was 
eerie because of
the fog and I unfortunately and sadly managed to 
kill a couple of
birds along the way that were flying around on the road. The sun rose to a
full
moon and the ambient sounds of birds waking up and chirping and cows
mooing in the distance (check out the the GIF-based animation of the
sunrise). The views were crisp and sharp and I got some amazing
footage of the sun rise (which comes up really fast). We then headed
back to Dorris for an excellent breakfast at this really cool place
with an Australian waitress (!) and started making our way home. This
time, we drove through the Trinity and Whiskeytown Units of the
Whiskeytown-Shasta-Trinity National Recreation Area, stopping off at
Trinity and Whiskeytown lakes (and doing a fair bit of off-roading and
getting some beautiful views of Trinity Lake) before reaching
home.
Welcome to our
cave...