Gates Place: California-Oregon

We stayed at a real nice hotel in Kalamath Falls; it even had soup/chili/sandwiches/lemonade/ice tea for a light dinner...and cookies and milk at 8:00 pm. The swimming pool was outside and nice too. We set out in the morning for Lava Beds National Monument on the way to Lassen Volcano National Park.

The caves were formed about 10,500 - 65,000 years ago; the lava colled and caves formed. Many of the marked caves in the park on a loop road right by the visitor center. The below photo is of the Mushpot cave. An easy 700 foot long cave that the park service lit up with motion sensored lights. It gave you a good idea of what the caves are like.

We then set off for some more difficult caves - but not the most difficult as we didn't have the proper gear to be crawling. I ended up going back to the visitor center to check out one of their big flashlights for my little LED just wasn't giving me enough light to see around. Rob used his head lamp.

Probably the best cave we did was Golden Dome - about 2,229 feet long with a figure 8 at the end. You got into complete darkness quickly. It made you realize that we were happy we had more than one light just in case...

Sunshine Cave and Sentinel Cave were also favorites. We knew we had about a 3 hour drive ahead of us, so we tried to leave by very late morning/early afternoon.

We had lunch at a drive in in Burney. I had researched Burney Falls state park when choosing the route to get to Lassen. I figured it wasn't too far out of the way. It is spring fed - so unlike the rest of California, it didn't have a drought problem.

Totally worth the stop. We did the one mile loop hike that went down and back up the river on the other side. Very nice.

I think we spent the right amount of time here...it was fairly crowded for a Sunday with locals.

We kept onward to Lassen making it there around 4:00 pm. We went right to the visitor center to ask the ranger what hike to do while we still had daylight. There were three of them there, and the young ranger quickly said "Cinder Cone". He said it was in a remote part of the park about 45 minutes away, down a gravel road...but it would be easy to do around sunset if we had flashlights. He said the walk back to the car was not problematic.

So, we checked into the campground, got our dinner (we had picked up some salad and sandwiches at Safeway in Burney), and back in the car (as if we didn't do enough driving already). The hike was termed "4 miles round trip, 846 feet; a path of loose cinders skirts the Fantastic Lava Beds before climbing steeply to the summit". Okay. So we hiked two miles and got to the volcano formation below. Note the swoop to the bottom right - that's the trail. ugh. Loose cinders...slow and steady wins the race. Also note in this picture what appears to be a rounded peak at the top.

Up. Up. Up.

It was slow going - you feet just sunk every step you took. What did this guy send us on?

On the trail map, near the cinder cone volcano - there were a bunch of trails all over and we just didn't get it...until we got to the top and saw this crater. Huh? Is this the same place we saw from he bottom? So Strange! It was HUGE!

You could walk around the crater...in the crater...on a few cut through paths...this was a few to the other side of the painted dunes. Had we had time, I would have loved to keep going into this area.

I don't know if you can even tell where Rob is...but he just stepped out of the crater...it gives you the sense of how large it is.

Cool.

I think this was my favorite hike of the trip.

We shared the top with about five other people. We ended up starting to walk back with another gentleman - a photographer. We got to talking and enjoyed each others company. We had done many of the same hikes in other parks around the country. He was a big fan of the Southwest (but lived in the Washington DC area).