I woke up this morning to the sound of Scott talking outside. He was chatting with the neighboring camper, while also petting their dog (and feeding it!!). We had a longer drive today to get to Lassen Volcanic National Park. It’s not ideal that we are bouncing from park to park. In order to really get an idea of each park’s beauty, we would want to spend 3-4 days at each park to explore. However, the time constraints of getting back for Scott to start football and for us to have some time before the wedding, we made the choice early on during planning to make some of the stops for one day only.

Lassen Volcanic National Park is located along the Cascade Range in Northwest California. We got our first view of Lassen Peak while in Redding, CA. We stopped at a rest area between Redding and Lassen, in which we saw a BLACK WIDOW SPIDER. We later learned that both black widows and tarantulas live in California. I guess I won’t be moving here!

 

As is the story for a lot of the places we have visited, there were closers due to the snow. Most of the main road through the park was closed due to the snowstorm that had recently gone through and tree damage. We found out that the road was to open the following evening- too bad we were leaving the next morning! Still, we drove up to the Devastated Area, and went to the Loomis Museum to learn about the explosions that made Lassen Peak gain interest of the public and scientists which ultimately led to it becoming a national park.

Lassen Peak is one of the largest plug dome volcanoes in the world. It’s last eruptions occurred between 1914 and 1921, with the biggest eruption being on May 22, 1915. Because this is an active volcano, there are many different landscapes at Lassen Volcanic National Parks, including mudpots, hot springs, meadows, and mountainous peaks.

 

We left the popular areas of the park to head toward our campground at Butte Lake, which lies on the far northeast corner of the park. We knew ahead of time, but the only way to get to this campground is on a 6 mile windy gravel road. However, the campground was GORGEOUS and we had tons of space even though there were a lot of people there!

 

We settled in for the night, and I cooked us chicken pot pie from a camping recipe book that my coworker Katie got us for our wedding shower. It turned out great! (Thanks, Katie!). Scott looked at our national parks book, and found a cool hike that was right next to our campground up to something called Cinder Cone. We decided to get up early to do this hike, which later proved much more difficult that we thought we we planned it! More on that on the next post!