Lassen Volcanic NP, CA
2022 Parks Road Trip Diary: Days 59-64
Everyone knows about the eruption of Mount St. Helens, but did you know that there was just one other big volcanic eruption in the mainland USA since the 1900s? Lassen Peak (in 1915)! Since then the area was preserved as a national park mainly for the study of the dormant volcano. We’re just here to hike up whatever the eruption left behind.
Day 59: Manzanita Lake
We arrived at Lassen Volcanic NP around 3:30pm after the four hour drive from Crater Lake. With only a few hours of daylight left, we didn’t form any big plans for the day. Just set up camp, and do a simple walk around Manzanita Lake, which is the lake next to the park’s northern campground where we were staying for one night.
The walk around Manzanita Lake (2 mi; 0 ft elev; yes, there’s an AllTrails route for even this) was peaceful. It was more of a chance to just walk and talk than see the sights.
The one exception to that was this spot where Lassen Peak and its reflection over the lake lets anyone feel like a professional photographer:
Day 60: Lassen Peak & Mini Yellowstone
Lassen Volcanic NP isn’t very big, and is another park whose main attractions we felt we could see in just one day. So this was that day!
The plan was first to hike Lassen Peak (5.1 mi, 2000 ft elev gain), and then to explore the route through Bumpass Hell (2.7 mi, 400 ft elev gain).
Lassen Peak
Lassen Peak is the park’s highest point. It is a volcano, but feels a bit closer to a dusty mountain full of loose rock since it hasn’t been active for a while. Its peak sits at around 10500 ft, so pretty high up there!
Based only on its elevation over distance, this is a fairly steep route, and as the morning wore off, the sun intensified, and total lack of shade made it all a bit more challenging. Much of the park does sit at around 7-8000 ft above sea level, which helped the temperature, but it was very clear we were outside the boundaries of what you would consider to be the nice temperate part of the pacific northwest.
The landscape at the summit is indeed very volcanic, with lots of bare rock and loose debris. Most people actually didn’t want to climb this last little peak because it required a little bit of a scramble, so we had it mostly to ourselves. It made for some good pics.
It was fun to do a little birdwatching on the way down this trail as well. One of the plants that grows in the area is the whitebark pine, which produces very high-calorie nuts that animals love. In this drier environment, the Clark’s Nutcracker was the winner of this prize, and we watched it fluttering between trees, pecking aggressively at the nuts to crack them open.
By 1pm when we finished this hike, it was hot. We headed to the park’s central visitor center to eat our sandwiches, where we would at least have some shade (and maybe even A/C, and wifi) to sit in.
Bumpass Hell
After this we drove over to the trailhead for exploring Bumpass Hell. Yep, it’s a… weird name. Better to think of it as Baby Yellowstone. Bumpass was the surname of the pioneer who was exploring the area and lost a leg from burn damage after falling in boiling water near one of the hydrothermal vents.
The area was cool, but having seen actual Yellowstone only a few weeks ago, it was hard to get all that excited about it.
That night we stayed in a different campground, Summit Lake North, because its location was a little more convenient. We did our standard evening routine of cooking, cleaning, sleeping. Tomorrow we’d leave for San Francisco, returning to the city dweller life for the second weekend in a row.
Day 61-63: San Francisco
I didn’t bother documenting much of what we did in SF. It didn’t feel like travel since being there wasn’t new for us. In fact, in many ways, it felt like a return to normal. We moved away from SF over to NYC right when the pandemic struck, and it’s been a slow process to shake the association that developed of SF = fun, NY = pandemic.
Here are a few representative pics of our weekend there though 🙂
post originally written 10/4, backdated to match reality