Fidget

I’m in progress on pulling together a big post about our recent vacation in Lassen with the KT side of the family, but here’s some late breaking news: We’re moving!

It’s been a good 4 years in our south Eugene apartment. Now we are ready for a change, to upgrade our geographic location. We applied with the student housing office for an apartment in their family housing complex, which is just a mile from campus and close to a ton of other useful and fun places, and still close to the stuff we are close to now. Most importantly, it’s on the level. No more huff-n-puff up the hill to get home from a run or a bike ride. (in fact the bike path and the high school track are right next to the complex.) It’s close to the YMCA, too! Just in case you were worried that our fitness would suffer from no longer being perched on a mountain.

So, like I said, our application was in… months went by… then on Friday night BN was checking email and discovered we’d been offered a unit in family housing. We had to notify them of (and pay for) our acceptance by Tuesday. That’s 4 days to decide, two of which were weekend days when we couldn’t get any more info. And they didn’t tell us which unit we would get. Don’t you just love academia?

So, we downloaded the map of the complex and speculated and weighed pros and cons and lived in suspense until yesterday, when we found out our unit was on the west side, which is what we wanted, and upstairs, also a plus. So we’re going to move this week! I hate the upheaval of moving but I’m excited to be in our new spot.

Our camping trip at Lassen with my family was really fun. It was nice to just relax with my Dad, Mom, and the 4 youngest of my siblings. I’d forgotten how beautiful Lassen Volcanic National Park is, and the weather cooperated very nicely. The evenings and mornings were cold, but the days were mostly sunny and we even got to swim a bit in the early part of the week. Some momentary sprinkles of rain on several occasions, but nothing to speak of.

We camped at Manzanita Lake, which was the only campground that stayed open all through the week we were there. We caught the very tail end of the season!

On Monday, we drove to Summit Lake where my family has camped most of the other times they’ve been there. It’s a good swimming lake so we did that and took a stroll all the way around, remembering past trips. Here’s my Mom with MA and HN. Aren’t they cute?

On Tuesday we visited Bumpass Hell, which is a wonderful place with a not very attractive name. When I was very young and we visited Lassen for the first time, I did think it was hellish because of the sulphur-smell and it was a very hot, glaring day. But now I love it. The smell is actually enjoyable because it comes with such wonderful visuals - intense shades of turquoise and green, enigmatic gray mudpots and streams… It feels a little like a visit to another planet.

On Wednesday we went rock-climbing near Terrace Lake. It’s almost as if no family camping trip would be complete without a bit of rock-climbing because my Dad used to take us older kids in Yosemite every summer growing up. Now the babies are all grown up and climbing strong. GC, age 16, made it to the very top (more than I was able to do!)

BN had been entertaining the idea, inspired by our various lake visits and star-gazing sessions in the past year, to take a boat out to the middle of a lake at night. Kinda crazy, but it just might work! So BN, GC, HN and I bundled up in our puffy jackets and wore our sandals down to the shore about 9:30. Very carefully we stepped into the inflated raft and pushed off from shore.

The moon had just risen, very close to full, so we didn’t see very many stars. But it was a totally clear night and the moon was so bright that we could see each other clearly.

Manzanita lake was formed recently, only about 350 years ago, and during our daytime rafting we had noticed the “kelp forest” type of plants growing a yard or two down from the surface. There were even a few tree trunks growing up from the murky depths. In the daylight it was pretty creepy, at night even more so!

On Thursday was our biggest excursion - out to Cinder Cone. We had to drive outside the park boundaries and then back in again, over a dirt road. We hiked through a stately forest of similarly-sized trees, with a thick blanket of pine needles and cones. The path was black sand.

Cinder Cone is this amazing huge pile of gravel! It’s quite intimidating, actually, and the climb up the path that spirals around it is quite steep and the gravel is constantly shifting. I was unpleasantly reminded of the South Sister, except black gravel instead of red. I hadn’t been to Cinder Cone before, (though my family had been a few years before) and I was starting to wonder about the hike. Was I almost to the top or only halfway up? It was like a gravel treadmill… two steps forward, one step back. Then I realized I WAS at the top, and wow, it was so worth it!!!

There’s the huge crater at the top, and an amazing view all the way around. The wind was so strong up there that we had to stow our hats and squat down to hold cameras steady. Cinder Cone was the highlight of the trip for me, scenery-wise. Here’s BN and Dad with the kids:

They are standing in front of the Painted Dunes, which you can get a great view of from the top of Cinder Cone. I thought they looked totally surreal, with swirly dots of gray, beige and pink, and the sparse green trees with mid-afternoon shadows… looks like a computer-generated landscape (or, another planet! Lassen is like its own galaxy…) Behind the dunes is the lava field.

On Friday, we took a hike through a lichen-laden forest to the Chaos Crags. Just to look at them, we weren’t up for another day of climbing…

On the hike we discovered a fairly sizable log that was covered in drips of transparent yellow sap.

BN was inspired, once we were back at camp, to collect a bunch more sap (or resin, as we later discovered is the proper term) from around the campground and RC helped him melt it down and embed a yellowjacket. Cruel, you say? Well, the pesky buggers had been our constant mealtime companions all week and we were sick of them.

On Saturday we took it easy and strolled around Manzanita lake in the early afternoon. The sky was full of pillowy clouds but the sun was out and those of us with cameras - 5 out of 8 - couldn’t stop snapping shots of Lassen reflected in the lake. Wow!

All in all it was a wonderful week. Thanks, family, and let’s do it again soon!

Well, we had a nice long vacation - on the tail end of summer. We were planning to meet up with my parents and younger siblings in Lassen, but before that we wanted to visit the California Redwoods. On our way there we stopped at Oregon Caves and took the guided tour. It was a weekday afternoon so there were only 7 of us including the guide which was a good thing because most of the cave rooms and passages were quite small. It was really neat to see the various cave formations and hear the stories about the cave’s discovery and history and the theories about how it was formed. I was snapping a lot of photos, both with flash and without, but when I got them home I realized they almost all came out looking super scary (and/or blurry.) Oh, well.

The first night we camped at Jedediah Smith Redwoods. The campground was packed, and the only sites available said “one night only.” So we went on our way the next day. BN took an exploratory mission to see if he could discover any of the record-breaking trees that are in an undisclosed location in the nearby forests. Here’s one that’s pretty impressive:

Next stop was the coastal redwoods. We camped at Gold Bluffs Beach. It was very foggy the whole 2 days that we were there, and pretty cold.

We set up our campsite and went down to walk on the beach.

There were so many beautiful rocks on the beach that BN was inspired to make a mosaic.

On our second day we took a hike in the redwoods.

The weather was nice for this, cloudy but dry. The forest was very dense with weathered-gray redwoods, and of course the coordinating ferns and clovers. Lovely!

Then it was off to Redding, to visit my uncle, aunt, and cousins who recently built their new home there. As we drove inland it started to get very hot and we were able to find a really neat swimming hole accessible by a short hike from the road. BN found these very flat, very round, very discus-like rocks. Skip that!!

My uncle’s house is on a bit of property (at least from my city-girl perspective) with beautiful oak trees and views of wide-open space with distant mountains. They have a wide porch running almost all the way around the house and we sat out there in the balmy evening under the nearly-full moon. They are so hospitable and open, we really enjoyed spending the evening with them and were so amused to watch the dog (a little Westie) and cat play-fight and chase each other around. The fact that it was so warm was very pleasant, coming from the cold foggy coast and heading to the high-altitude chill of Lassen…

For our pre-vacation vacation, we took a quick trip to Waldo Lake. Waldo of where’s-waldo fame is sort of dorky looking, but Waldo Lake is really beautiful. BN got up early to see it at dawn:

We also took a swim in the late afternoon:

Waldo is known for being very clear and blue. No motorized boats are allowed on it. We were relieved to find that the mosquitos aren’t nearly as vicious as they were when we’d been in early summer.