Tom's National Park Adventure

I got up early to find a cell phone signal. Turns out that it is in a small town 20 miles away from the park. I was able to upload and publish my blog entry from yesterday. I drove back to the park and started to get to know it.

Lassen Volcanic National Park is very different from Yosemite. It is significantly smaller. Yosemite is around 1200 square miles. Lassen is about 166 square miles. Lassen was made a National Park in 1916. Just a year after one of the largest volcanic eruptions ever recorded at that time. There are four different types of volcanoes. Shield, Cinder Cone, Plug Dome and Composite. Lassen is one of only a few places in the world that has all four types represented. There are over 70 volcanoes in the park. Hard to believe that this little area I had never heard of before can have so many! Many of which are currently active!

I drove back to the park and drove down the Lassen Volcanic National Park Highway, from one end to the other. It is about 35 miles long. It takes about an hour to drive if you don’’t stop all the time. The drive is a wonderland of different views and scenery. It’s hard to drive it and not stop.

At the end of the drive I went to the Kohm Yah-man-née Visitors center. I got my stamp in my Passport and watched the movie.

From the visitors center I drove to an area called the Sulphuric Works. The Sulfuric smell permeates the area. There are springs of hot boiling water bubbling out of the ground. The geologists think that there is hot magma just six miles under the ground in these spots causing the groundwater to boil and mix with the soil to make bubbling pools of grayish looking mud.

The highway is just like all the other roads I have been driving on for over a week now. Lots of switchbacks, lots of pull offs so people can do exactly that and take another picture of another fabulous view.

Broke off Mountain is an example of a composite volcano. It is the only one in the park. The original mountain was much taller than Lassen Peak (Lassen Peak is the volcano that exploded in 1915). They don’t know when Brokeoff Mountain lost its peak. They speculate that is was a few thousand years ago.

Bumpass Hell. Bumpass was one of the first white men to find and explore the area. Legend has it, that while bringing some people to look at the area, he was warning them where to step and not to step. The area in question is filled with pools of hot water and Mud. Many of which have a very high level of Sulfuric Acid. While conducting the tour, Bumpass boot broke through the crust and his leg fell into the pool burning him severely. They say he never really recovered from his wounds.

Further along the highway there are several Lakes and streams

The following images are of Mount Lassen. This is the volcanos that blew up in 1915, several times. There was a local business man who also had an interest in photography who happened to be there when the volcano erupted and was able to capture the first photographic images of this phenomena. The devastation left from the explosions are still visible today.

I mentioned the Dixie wildfire of 2021 briefly earlier. I was vaguely aware that there were some really bad forest fires happening in California in 2021. Everyone in the country saw the news stories on national TV. It was a big story. And yet……I had no concept of how big these fires were. I had no real reference for how much damage they caused out here. It is very hard not to see that devastation now. The last four parks I have visited have all been hit hard by these fires. Lassen Volcanic National Park may be the hardest hit of all of them! Lassen lost over 69% of all the forest in the park. The areas it hit are completely dead. Nothing survived in its wake.

There is also something else that is different than the other parks. In all the other parks, they are leaving all that dead and charred wood to either stand or lay where it fell during the fire. It makes for some very erie landscapes that aren’t very appealing to look at. That is why you haven’t seen a bunch of pictures from me of them in this blog. However, here at Lassen, it seems like they are harvesting some of that wood!

At the end of my drive I ended up at The Manzanita Lake area. This is where my campground is located. I took one more hike so get a shot of the lake with Lassen Peak in the background

I was finally able to get a couple of shots of some wildlife while on my hike.

Tomorrow I will get up and bug out. I am heading to Crater Lake in Oregon for one night. Then I will head up to Portland to spend three nights with my son Logan and his lovely wife Alex!

13966 Non Travel