7/12/2022 North Cascades National Park Rockport Washington

 This park is the closest I have seen to the beauty of Alaska.  The similarities are amazing in that the snow melt coming from the mountain runs fast and the water color is a grayish green like the silt running in the Alaskan rivers.  The rivers here are full of Salmon like Alaska.  The towns are small, they may have a diner and possibly a gas station.  The food is good but mostly bar type stuff (hamburgers, milk shakes, chicken wings etc…).  The towns are spaced 30+ miles apart with forest in between.  Washington State Rt 20 runs directly though the Cascades.  There is still snow a couple feet deep on some of the hiking trails at elevation.

While here we have hiked some of the trails.  My favorite trail being Rainy Lake trail which is at 4800’ elevation.  It still had up to 2’ of snow in some parts of the trail.  Luckily we had carried our hiking poles, lunch, & other things with us.

Including Bear Spray as all the Trail Head signs in the park recommend you carry it.  A Bear is not on my list of animals I want to see along a trail I am hiking on :-).  I love to see them from the safety of a car!

Interesting that this park is only maybe 2 miles North of Seattle, yet its not that busy.  Possibly due to the snow it gets or possibly because the park does not have a lot of accommodations to house week-long visitors on vacation.  Even the campground accommodations remind me of places from the 1950s

Attached are some pictures from our visit to the Cascades:

7/12/22 Have you ever had a Steam Bath while sitting in a Wooden Barrel? Sandy told me no way :-).

 I guess I can understand Sandy’s hesitation but she only saw the facilities from my attached pictures.  She didn’t visit the site like I did and know all the particulars.  If she did she would of said “Hell No”.

You see the wooden barrels looked like oversized wine barrels wedged between some roofed wooden structures at the end of a cul-de-sac. 

The campground was in Washington state, a mid-way stop between Portland Oregon and the North Cascades National Park.

The pictures are below, but what you don’t see is:

1. Clothing was optional.  The sign reads “Once you close and lock the gate nobody can see inside.
2. The Cul-de-sac surrounding the barrels contained a bunch of old 1960 trailers with roofed front porches.  Old Men with long gray beards (think Rumple Stilskin) were sitting in there rocking chairs smoking corn cob pipes facing the barrels.  
3. Let’s just say the facilities may have looked somewhat clean, but it even gave me the Weebie, Jeebies and believe me I am not that picky.
4. Oh and the lock on the door was just a slide lock like I may use on a backyard shed.  No combination,  no clasp, no chain, and probably wi-fi cameras :-)

Oh, If slats of the wooden barrels could talk.  I am sure there are stories to be told :-)

6/4/2022 Lassen National Park. What a Surprise

We were driving towards Lassen Nation Park when Sandy discovered using her IPhone that today was our lucky day.  The Park Rangers had opened up an additional 25+ miles of roads in the park.  This allowed us to drive all the way through the park from the North side on RT 44 to the South side to RT 36.  When we left the campground we had expected only to be able to see four miles of the park as up until today only four miles of road was open.

As we drove into the park it became evident that it takes some major work to open the roads after a Winter in this park.  The soil is volcanic ash.  The trees are pines with a root structure that lies close to the surface.  The winds are brutal and the snow is high and heavy.  As the snow slides down the mountain it knocks the large trees onto the road as well as covers the roads.

Lassen is a volcano that erupted in May 1915.  It blew volcanic ash and gas 30,000’ and could be seen 150 miles away.  The mountains stand above 8000’ in elevation.

Since it is an active volcano, it has boiling mud pots, sulfur pits, hot springs and frozen lakes directly along side of large amounts of snow.  A very interesting dynamic.

We were lucky to be one of the first cars to travel completely through the park in 2022.

Today they still have seismographs monitoring its activity

From the pictures below you can see how high the snow was along side the road.  In one picture I am standing next to an outhouse that was just unburied and Sandy is standing next to the snow that is along side of the parking lot.

6/1/2022. Come out with your hands up

It’s 6:30 A.M. in the sleepy town of Redding California. I wake up to a helicopter circling close to the campground. We are camped in Mountain View RV resort. Arrived yesterday. My first thought is there must be a bad accident on RT 5 as we are relatively close. The helicopter kept circling and circling. I hear police cars running hot coming towards the area. Still thought it must be an accident. After 45 minutes I hear from a megaphone “Come out with your hands up”!  OK, now it is time to get out of bed to investigate. With shorts over my pj’s and a hat on my head out the door I go. There are 3 other campers standing outside in the same state of dress watching the helicopter circle. We can’t see a thing for all the trees. Well we are in California. Time to go back to bed and check the news later in the day😉

PS. Sandy slept through the whole thing

Yup, I will be glad to have California in my rear view