June 12 – 13, 2024

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Forests, Fires, and Water

In the morning, we awoke to the traffic behind us positively flying by on the busy, 2-lane, mountain road. It wasn’t a great spot to get ready, so we got onto the road and started driving north. Just outside the town of Truckee, CA, we found a little rest area where we could freshen up and figure out our plan for the day. I had hours to get in, so we found a lovely little hole-in-the-wall coffee shop so I could work while Faith once again explored the town. Over the next few hours, we both got a lot done, me at work and Faith around town. Faith went to the post office to mail some post cards, hit some thrift stores, filled our water jugs, and got some fabric to make a curtain for our rear window. With work done for the day, we hit the road north and took Highway 89 towards Lassen Volcanic National Park. The route is beautiful and sparsely populated. We stopped at Calpine, a small town mostly made of woods, to make lunch and continued on, soon finding ourselves in what used to be green forest. For quite a ways, all the forest around us as far as we could see had been torched to nothing by a recent fire. As we drove through Greenville, there was hardly a green thing to be found, and something looked just wrong about the whole place. It seemed like almost every building was new with a lot of empty lots and a few burned out husks of buildings. I guessed that the conflagration that had destroyed the surrounding forest had also destroyed the town, so I looked it up. In 2022, the Dixie Fire, a wildfire that burnt almost 1 million acres in northern California, destroyed the entire town in just 30 minutes. It was a pretty dismal sight, to say the least.

We continued north and soon found ourselves on the shores of Lake Almanor, a large lake just south of Lassen NP. The waters were clear and cool but not cold, so we took a dip and cleaned off a bit of the last few days’ sweat and dirt before having a dinner of canned soup. At the lake, we got our first views of Lassen Peak, the southernmost volcano in the Cascade Range. It was awesome: not quite as high as Wheeler Peak but with much more prominence. As you might guess, it is in Lassen NP and was one of the two things we wanted to do: climb Lassen and hike through Bumpass Hell, a geothermal area filled with springs and other interesting features. But, that was for another day as the sun was setting and we were ready to get some shut eye. We backtracked a bit to a pull-off tucked away in the woods and quickly fell asleep after a short fight for our lives against the mosquitoes that sneaked into the van while at the lake.

We awoke and headed straight back to the beach. I had good service there, and Faith needed to do some poking around. First things first, we made an excellent breakfast of cranberry-walnut-dark chocolate-protein pancakes then got to our respective tasks. I sat in the van and later on the shore to work while Faith swam, harassed crawdads, sunbathed, caught frogs, looked for treasure (collected garbage), and generally enjoyed a lovely day on the lake. As afternoon approached, our sun shower we filled that morning was hot and ready for use. We showered and thoroughly scrubbed off whatever we missed the night before. Additionally, Faith washed our dirty clothes as were both down to our last fresh pair of underwear then let them dry on a clothesline. Mid-afternoon came, and it was once again time to move on. We finished our drive into Lassen NP and quickly found out that the primary road through the park and both hikes that we wanted to do were closed or snow-covered. This left us a bit perplexed as to what we should do in the park. We decided in the short-term to hike to a nearby waterfall (very pretty) and drive around the park to the east back along Lake Almanor. We found a lovely little rest area on the eastern shore, made dinner, and hit the hay, still unsure of what we would do the next day.

Animals Seen

  • Osprey
  • Bald eagle
  • Crawfish
  • Smallmouth bass
  • Deer
  • Some kind of catfish or bullhead

Stats

  • 1 bag of garbage collected and thrown away
  • ~150 miles of driving
  • 2 swims in the lake
  • 1 shower

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