Turner Mountain

We woke up at 6 am this morning, and then had a leisurely breakfast; we didn't get on the road until just after 8 am. We didn't feel much urgency, as we knew we were only going a few miles to the road we wanted to drive and walk on. Our route took us west along the road to Mineral, to a point called Mineral Summit, just a mile or so east of the town. At the summit we left the paved road and took a Forest Service Road (29N48), an improved gravel road in very good shape, all the way around Turner Mountain in a clockwise direction. The road stays mainly between five and six thousand feet in altitude, generally following the contours of the mountain. We crossed innumerable streams and dry creek beds, and rounded equally innumerable broad shoulders or narrow ridges.

Speaking very generally, the first half of the route was more interesting to us than the second half. We haven't figured out what determines which flowers are in bloom when -- altitude and exposure aren't consistent guides. Everywhere we went there seemed to be plenty of water, so that doesn't seem to be the determinant either. Perhaps it's the soil, or some other micro-ecological factor. Whatever the reason, we saw many more species of wildflowers on the first half, and they were much more abundant as well. The first half was only intermittently forested; many areas were open due to slides, rocks, or fires. These open areas (especially the road cuts along the mountain's shoulders or ridges) were often good wildflower hunting. When the road dipped into a ravine and we crossed a creek, we'd have the opportunity to clamber up and down the creek looking for water-loving wildflowers. And find them we did -- perhaps 25 or 30 species in the day, with many favorites (columbine, trillium, phlox, bleeding hearts, etc.) and many more we couldn't identify. We were particularly taken with one that lay flat on the ground, growing 3 to 6 flower clusters on crawling stems radiating about 3 inches from the center. Each flower cluster was one to two inches in diameter, and looked like a concoction made of pink crumpled crepe paper.

The second half of the trip was more forested, had fewer open areas, and many fewer wildflowers. Even the streams were largely devoid of wildflowers -- they looked like they have been scraped clean to the rock, presumably by freshets in the spring melt. This was largely the western flank of the mountain, which is the wetter side of these mountains, so this makes some kind of sense. We spotted a couple of trees with odd "bracelets" around their trunks, made of thick sheet iron or steel about two or three feet wide. My father spotted a tag on one of these trees, and reading it we discovered that these trees (we saw more later) had been selected by the Forest Service as genetic source material, and they're protected. I suspect the bands are simply markers that nobody could possibly miss, and so no lumberman could have an excuse about accidently cutting the tree down.

The mysterious ground cover that we saw on our first day was here in abundance, especially on the western side. We spotted one mat with a single cluster of blue flowers, which led my father to tentatively identify this as a prostrate ceanothus. The blue flower surprised us...

During the day we climbed quite a few steep road cuts. There are no retaining walls on a primitive road such as this one, and no terracing; the bank made by the road cut is therefore at the angle of repose already. There isn't enough of a root network in most places to stabilize the soil, so if you try to walk on this bank, or climb it, every piece of soil disturbed by your feet will fall down the embankment, and quite often soil from above will fall onto your foot. Worse, your feet may cause entire sections of the bank to slip and slide, taking your feet right out from under you. We developed several techniques for getting safely up and down these banks. My father's favorite method requires a tree nearby with branches sturdy enough to support your weight; then you simply use the tree as a handle to stablize yourself. I like to climb up by pointing my toes up and "crabbing" my way to the top; this awkward posture lets the entire surface area of my feet bear my weight, disturbing the soil less. Coming down, I dig my heel as deep into the soil as I can, on the theory that the deeper soil is less likely to slide. On the whole, experience showed that my father's technique was much less likely to end you up on your butt, but my technique would let you get into trouble in more places...

Just after we rounded the southernmost point on our road we encountered something quite unexpected. We were driving at perhaps 25 mph on a smooth stretch of road when all of a sudden something large burst out of the brush on the road cut above our heads, rumbled down the embankment and came to a halt just in front of us. It was a large brown bear, with sort of two-toned hair that was lighter at its extremities (an older bear?). It only halted very briefly as we bore down upon it; then it whirled around and skedaddled down the road in front of us. That bear was moving very quickly -- I stayed right behind it for something like a third of a mile, going at 25 to 30 miles per hour. The bear raised a dust cloud just like a car does on a dirt road; it drove like a Brit, down the left side of the road (and directly in front of me!). I'd guestimate the weight of that bear as between 350 and 450 pounds, but I could be off by two or three country miles -- this all happened so fast that I didn't really get to look at it closely, and couldn't even snap off a quick photo...

The road between Mineral and Mill Creek (a one-lane paved road) was used for a cattle drive while we were on our trip around Turner Mountain. We never saw the cattle, but it was easy to tell they'd been here: the road was liberaly coated with cow flops for several miles! The aroma in the warm evening sun was close to overwhelming. Driving over all these cow flops at around 40 mph caused an impressive splashing, and we could hear the bottom of my truck being thoroughly coated. It's probably going to smell pretty bad in a few days...

By the time we made it back around to Mineral Summit, it was almost 4 pm and we were a little tired. We decided to eat in our cabin tonight, but we didn't have anything to make a real supper of. So we stopped in both of Mineral's tiny stores and bought the best stuff we could find: a tin of corned beef, a can of creamed corn, and a bottle of applesauce. When we got home I sliced up the corned beef and baked it in the oven, made some rice, and heated the creamed corn. It wasn't a great supper -- not even close -- but it sated our hunger. In fact, it cured us of much of our desire to ever eat food again. We got to bed fairly early; did some reading and then fell asleep...

Mt. Lassen

The morning sun woke us from our sleep of recovery, at about 5:30 am. We had nothing around for breakfast except dried fruit and nuts, so we ate a few handfuls of that and washed it down with a cup of tea. By 6:30 we were on the road, headed for the south entrance to Mt. Lassen National Park...

Nobody was at the guard post when we got there (at just after 7 am), so we self registered using my fathers "Golden Age Passport", which gives our vehicle free admission. As we drove the first few miles into the park, we saw a few flowers, but not very many. Some hellebore plants were just poking up through the mud, which means that the snow melted only a few days before. There were a few shooting stars in wet spots, some western bleeding hearts generally nearby, some very nice crimson Indian paintbrush, and a couple of yellow flowering plants that we don't know. But in general the flowers were sparse, and except for a couple of places I'll mention later, it continued this way all day. The weather could hardly have been better -- clear skies, temperatures in the 60s and 70s...

Not far into the park is a place where an old sulphur works used to mine the sulphur brought to the surface by the boiling springs, steam vents, and boiling mudpots that surround it. Right alongside the road is a very entertaining boiling mudpot, roughly five feet in diameter. The boiling mud surface is out of sight, but not out of hearing -- loud noises emanated from it constantly, sound much like some giant beast was struggling mightly to escape. Every thirty seconds or so, some blobs of boiling hot mud would come flying out of the mudpot into sight, landing on the surrounding soil and building up a rim around the mudpot as it dries. Every few minutes a particularly large blob came flying out -- including, one time, a blob containing roughly a cubic foot of gloppy hot mud. And sometimes these blobs would be thrown extra far -- on the sidewalk that is closest to this mudpot, you can see the dried residue from many such past splats. The smell from the mudpots and the more common steamvents is an evil, sulphurous conconction; so intense that it almost seems to have a physical texture.

After leaving the sulphur works, we took a very leisurely drive up to the summit, enjoying the spectacular scenery, the snow, the frozen lakes with blue ice, and the crazy people who were just starting the climb to Lassen Peak (almost 2,000 feet above the trailhead). The Bumpass Hell trail was closed; many feet of snow remain on it. Then we continued on to the King's Creek trailhead, where many years ago Debbie and I enjoyed a beautiful hike. We actually couldn't make the entire drive to the trailhead; snow blocked the road. But we did get down to the bridge over the creek, and that area was quite pretty. There were pussywillows in seed right near the bridge, dwarf mountain laurel in bloom in the meadow, and quite a few shooting stars. I found two blue hyacinths right at the water's edge, just past prime. We walked a loop around a section of creek, perhaps a half mile in all, with the whole way through an area full of springtime life and vigor. There was a large Ponderosa pine, about five feet in diameter, that had fallen across the creek to make a good bridge -- I didn't want to walk through that ice cold water! The water itself was as clear as lead crystal; not full of milt at all as snowmelt runoff often is.

Then we continued our drive, traveling counter-clockwise around Mt. Lassen until we got to the western entrance. The entire north side of the mountain is quite different than the south side -- much drier, and subjected to eruption effects within the past 100 years. About the only interesting thing we ran into on this portion of our trip was the red flower stalk of a fungus -- very weird looking, and quite common. We turned around just outside the western entrance and zoomed it back to the eastern-most part of the summit road, and stopped at the trailhead for the Chain of Lakes trail. We walked this about a half mile to the first lake (Summit Lake), and just goofed around on the shore there, relaxing. This was a quite a beautiful spot; a small lake (perhaps a quarter mile in diameter), wind blowing straight toward us making gentle wavelets that crashed in front of us, flowers and greenery all around the lake, and very peaceful. We watched a chipmunk gathering dried grasses just ten feet or so from us; he was very obviously not intimidated by us. One interesting thing we saw along this trail was a number of dead and decomposing Ponderosa pines. Some (but not all of them) decompose in a peculiarly regular fashion, leaving cubic chunks of dry wood as the detritus. These cubes were roughly a quarter inch to a half inch on a side, and far more regular in shape and size than you'd expect from the results of decomposition. We don't even have any speculations about how this might happen. By the end of this walk, my father was stumbly tired, so we called a halt to walks for the day...

We headed back down to the south entrance, and down until we got to about 6,000 feet of altitude. At that point there was a nice dirt road heading westward and down, and we decided to try it, to see of we could find any more concentrated wildflowers. We failed on that objective, but we did run into something Debbie and I saw once, years ago, in the Sawtooth Mountains of Idaho: a muddy section of the dirt road that was attracting large numbers of butterflies and moths. I speculate that they are there for some mineral in the water, but that is purely speculation.

Finally we were done for the day, and we headed downhill and southeast to the town of Chester, on Lake Almanor. Here we stocked up at a real grocery store, where I was helped by some very friendly locals -- reminded me of the folks at home in Jamul and Lawson Valley. After I got my supplies, I asked a couple of employees where they'd go in town to get a nice meal. One of them said "Susanville" (30 miles or so to the east) and the other said "Red Bluff" (50 miles to the west). This was not encouraging. So we ended up cruising the main drag in Chester, scoping out all the eateries. There were only about three that were open, and one of them had four cars in front of it (the others had either one or none) -- so we chose it. The Kopper Kettle Kafe turned out to be a good choice -- we had a decent ham-and-bean soup and a great BLT with avocado; the only sour note was the potato salad, which was the standard odd-tasting stuff you'd find in a typical grocery store deli section. But the biggest and best surprise was dessert: an honest-to-goodness old-fashioned strawberry-rhubarb pie, tart, fruity, and none of that friggin' cornstarch-thickened sugar sauce. The crust was delicious, too. You could have knocked me over with a feather. The owner is a woman from somewhere in southeast Asia (judging just from her appearance), assisted by her high-school aged daughter Sonya. Both of them were a delight; attentive, good-humored, lots of genuine smiles and joshing. We enjoyed their company as much as we enjoyed the food...

And now we've journeyed back to our cabin in Mill Creek. My dad is taking a shower as I write this, and I believe he'll go straight to bed, as he's quite tired. I'm going to stay up for a little while to review and process the photos I took today, and hopefully I'll be able to post some of them with this screed...

On The Road!

When we arrived in Mineral, just a few miles from our cabin in Mills Creek, we discovered something quite unexpected: a little store that sells broadband Internet access by the hour. So...it looks like I may be able to do some trip-blogging after all...

Today was "travel day" -- we left Jamul at about 5 am, and just zoomed straight up I-5 until we got to Red Bluff (between Sacremento and Redding). We had good luck with the traffic -- no clogs in all the usual places like Los Angeles or Sacremento. The only obstacles we ran into were a couple of slow drivers and our own endurance. Our ice chest was loaded with goodies we'd bought at Trader Joe's the previous day, so aside from one stop at a Starbucks to stoke up on caffeine, the only stops we made were at rest areas and gas stations. I used a total of about $150 in gasoline to end up here with a full tank -- expensive, but still less expensive than flying to somewhere nearby and renting a car (especially a 4 wheel drive car!).

In total, the trip was 697 miles, and we were at our cabin in Mill Creek at about 4:15 pm. That means we averaged over 63 miles per hour for the trip -- darned good time! We did have one misadventure on the way up, though. At one point just north of the Grapevine my father turned around in his seat to fetch his jacket, where he keeps his hearing aid container; he wanted to take his hearing aids off and put them away. While he was doing this, a police car followed closely behind us, and finally pulled us over. The police officer had spotted the fact that my dad wasn't wearing his seat belt, and she wrote him a ticket! We were only pulled over for a few minutes, and she was quite polite (though insistent) about it, but my dad was quite flustered by the whole experience. Personally, I object to the entire nanny-state notion of government enforcement of my behavior (when it doesn't harm anyone else), and I think this incident in particular was absurd. But...the affair wasn't of the police officer's making; she was just doing her job. And in general, I don't think that sassing police officers is a particuarly smart idea, nor is it likely to result in positive outcomes...

When we arrive at the Mill Creek Resort, where we are spending the next week, we were very pleasantly surprised by how well-equipped the cabin was. We've never been to this place before, but hard past experience tells us that you just never know what you're going to run into -- the description on the web site (or the one you're given over the telephone) often doesn't match the reality you discover when you check in. Here all the surprises have been on the good side, at least so far. The cabin is quite large, with two bedrooms, a full bathroom, a kitchen, and a small "living room" with a big fireplace. It is neat and clean, though a few minor things are in disrepair. There are at least two cords of wood piled in front of the cabin. The kitchen has a full-sized refrigerator, a normal stove, a microwave, and even a toaster oven -- along with a table and chairs. It's not a cozy, romantic getaway -- but it is a very comfortable "home base" away from home. We're pleased!

After we unpacked the truck, we drove a few miles off and stopped at a few places to look around in the forest we're in. It's a diverse conifer forest, with very abundant cedar, Ponderosa pine, several other pine species, and at least two firs. The understory is full of unfamiliar plants that even my dad couldn't identify, but there are some old familiar plants as well -- maples and oaks are very common, as is dogwood. We spotted a few flowers: Indian paintbrush, some nearly-gone lupine, forget-me-nots, and a small pale violet flower that neither of us knew. In general, though, at this altitude (about 4,500 feet), we're too late for the flowers. We found out later that they've been snow-free at this altitude since mid-March -- so the flowers we're looking for will be at a higher altitude. That will be tomorrow's quest...

The Mill Creek Resort has a small restaurant, with a limited menu and hours. We ate dinner there tonight, and in general the food was quite good, simple, home-style fare. We had a nice dinner salad and fried chicken. My dad was hungry, and (in addition!) had a bowl of beef stew and a chocolate ice cream soda! Not a gourmet dinner, but perfectly good, solid food; both of us are sated. But we are also quite tired, and after a shower, we're hitting the sack!

Blog Hiatus

Blogging here will be very limited -- possibly even non-existent -- between now and Monday, June 11. Your blogger and his father will be on vacation in and near Mt. Lassen National Park, in search of wildflowers. We got good news a couple of days ago: the road through the park has been plowed, so all areas are accessible.

The reason for the uncertainty? The area where we're traveling to just barely has telephones, and those few can't be used for computer access. There's a rumor of WiFi access in a town we'll most likely visit a few times, but it's just a rumor. So we just don't know!