I normally don’t bother keeping any kind of journal for my shorter trips; but I felt that this one was interesting enough to merit a write-up. Over a very busy long weekend, I conducted a razzia through the national parks and monuments of northern California and southern Oregon. I had planned to travel with one of my cousins – but when her grandmother tragically passed away just before the time of departure, I was left to do the trip solo. And so…
5-12-17
I spent the night in a Redding motel so cheaply constructed that the floor rattled whenever someone passed by in the corridor. Needless to say, I didn’t sleep especially well. Bounced out of bed in the morning by a fellow guest walking down the hall, I drove bleary-eyed through a long series of pine forests and plunging mountain valleys to Redwood National Park, my first destination.
A light rain was falling when I parked in the park’s Prairie Creek unit. Having decided to hike a longish (12 mile) loop, I shoved my rain gear, water bottles, and some trail mix into a daypack, and splashed off into the woods. The first grove was magnificent. Unlike the austere foothills where the giant sequoias grow, the coastal forests that nurture redwoods have a jungle-like fertility. The pillar-like redwood trunks that defied gravity on either side of the path were wrapped in moss and ringed by ferns. Beneath a gray sky, the world pulsed with green.
The first trail ended at Fern Canyon. In summer, when the water is lower, a series of wood bridges gives easy access to the gully floor. In spring, one is forced to soak one’s boots – unless, like yours truly, one decides to walk it barefoot. The waving ferns of the canyon were gorgeous. But I could have done without the half-mile trek over shifting stones.
At the canyon’s end, as I sat massaging my aching feet, a small group of hikers warned me that a herd of elk was grazing on the path just ahead. Figuring that elk were basically plus-sized deer, I was not much worried by this news, and strolled on ahead. When the elk came into sight, I clapped my hands and shouted, assuming that the herd would move out of the way. Instead, they stood their ground, and one – a particularly large specimen – began to approach me. I continued walking forward. The leading elk, now only about fifteen feet away, took this as a sign to charge. I leapt through a bush and sprinted off through the swamp beyond. For reasons I did not pause to consider, this worked. The elk stayed on the trail, pawing and snorting – and I put some distance between myself and the Pacific coast’s most vicious herbivore.
For the next mile or so, I walked along a beach. Huge breakers were rolling onto the sand, sending rivulets around bleached redwood logs. North and south, fog banks stole through the woods. Invisible gulls cried. All told, it was a beautiful place to reflect on the joys of not having one’s ribs broken by an enraged elk.
The trail back to the visitor center wound through another spectacular grove of redwoods. A drenching rain added first to the ambiance and then to discomfort of the walk, particularly after it began to hail.
After a harrowing drive up serpentine route 101 in a driving rain, I decided to stop in a Crescent City Subway for dinner. The restaurant was staffed by a single woman. In the middle of making my sandwich, she got a phone call. Abandoning me, she went to the back room, where she began alternately cursing her interlocutor and weeping. Profoundly uncomfortable but unwilling to relinquish my meal, I stood by the counter until she returned. Without saying a word, she wiped her eyes, put mayonnaise on the sandwich, and rang up my order. Still without a word, she proceeded to lock the front door and turn out the lights. I took this as a sign to leave. While eating in my car, I watched as a homeless woman with herpes sores on her face shuffled past, followed a few minutes later by a man with a pentagram tattooed on his bald head. If Crescent City has a chamber of commerce, they want to consider reshuffling the welcome committee.
It was now nearly sunset; but I wanted to see a few more redwoods before I left. Seeing a sign for the Stout Grove, I decided to make a quick last stop. I soon discovered that the grove lay at the end of a four-mile unpaved road. The rain had picked up again, filling endless potholes with water the exact color of the surrounding gravel. As my rental Yaris labored valiantly through hubcap-deep ruts, the redwood forest on either side began to fade into twilight. By the time I reached it, the grove was wreathed in shadow.
The long road to Medford, OR would have been beautiful in the right weather. In the darkness and driving rain, however, the hairpin turns and shadowy mountains were more exhausting than anything else.
5-13-17
About halfway up the winding road to Crater Lake, cold rain gave way to flurrying snow. Massive snowbanks began to rise along the road, mounting to small cliffs by the time I reached the park entrance. After stopping by the visitor center, which was buried to the gables, I headed up to the observation point at Rim Village. The view was awesome. The thousand-foot cliffs ringing the caldera, hazy behind falling snow, stretched to the limits of sight. A few shafts of sunlight stole through torn clouds to the gray lake below, making the silvered trees of the island glisten.
Entranced, I decided to walk as far as I could along the rim of the lake. The old snow, frozen hard, afforded a firm base. But since the six inches or so of heavily drifted new powder made it difficult to choose a path, I soon took to the freshly-cleared rim road. Crews were working about a mile down, so I walked over snow to Discovery Point for another staggering view of the lake. I stood there a long time beneath the frosted pines, watching a snow shower roll over the northern mountain wall.
The snow that slowed the first part of my outbound drive gave way to watery sunlight about a half-hour from the park. The weather remained bright and cool through the long drive to Lava Beds National Monument. This little-visited park, located in a remote corner of northeast California, protects a blasted landscape of lava tubes, lava caves, and – yes – lava beds.
I spent some time exploring the volcanic features, which reminded me of those in Malpais National Monument in New Mexico. I was particularly struck by Captain Jack’s Stronghold, a pitted lava flow that became the last refuge of the Modoc Indians in their ill-fated struggle with the US army.
The most memorable part of my visit to Lava Beds, however, was a hike up Schonochin Butte, an 800-foot cinder cone on the north edge of the park. The views from the trail, which wound around the butte to a fire lookout still closed for the winter, were austerely impressive. In every direction, ridges and buttes projected brokenly from a barren and lava-scored plain. Mountains glimmered about the horizons. As I walked back down through a snow shower, only the rasp of flurries on my coat troubled the immense silence.
Snow turned to rain again as I left Lava Beds, and persisted through much of the drive back to Redding. In the city of Weed, however, the clouds suddenly broke to reveal the awesome profile of Mt. Shasta, which sent me scurrying out into the rain for a picture. As long as daylight lasted, I found it hard to look away from the gleaming summit.
5-14-17
Mt. Shasta shone again on the northern horizon along the drive to Lassen Volcanic National Park. As I climbed into the Sierra foothills, orchards and pasture gave way to pines, and snowbanks began to mount along the roadside. In the Lassen visitor center – buried, like its counterpart at Crater Lake, to the roof – I learned that it was possible to hike along the mile or so of the park highway that had been plowed, and that a snowshoe trail led up from the road to a pair of mountain lakes.
I strolled between the towering snowbanks of the park highway until I reached the Sulfur Works, a small and memorably pungent geothermal area. After peering at a few superheated pools and fumaroles, I set off to find the snowshoe trail. Two paths diverged from the Sulfur Works parking lot, and I chose the one less traveled. This proved to be a terrible idea: after a few hundred feet of elevation gain, the path abruptly ended, and I realized I was climbing up an unmarked ridge. But by that point, I was committed; and so I continued up, scrambling along a colossal line of drifts. Sweating despite the chill, I struggled to a point more than 1000 feet above the highway, nearly at the ridge line of No Name Mountain. The views were tremendous: black stone and gleaming ice in every direction, veiled to the east by an approaching snow shower.
On the return trip, remembering something I tried in Rocky Mountain National Park last year, I decided to ski down the slope on my boots. Despite a few wipeouts, this method worked reasonably well.
It was snowing heavily as I shuffled back down the park highway. But winter gave way to spring a few miles after I left the park, and the sun smiled on my long ride to Sacramento. There, after checking into a faded budget hotel of the usual variety, I wandered the city for a few hours, enjoying the perfect weather. The Sacramento River, lined by massive cottonwoods, had an almost Midwestern look, though the homeless encampments along the banks were pure California. Nearer downtown, I strolled through the beautiful arboretum-like park in front of the state capital before returning to my motel to write this report. Back to Chicago tomorrow.