Do you want to know the best way to irritate two campers? Have their propane alarms go off at 3 in the morning!

Yup! We were woken up to our propane alarm going off this morning. This happened once before in Washington, and we thought it was because our battery was low. We jolt out of bed to get the alarm off. This time, however, the alarm showed that there was propane in the air. This didn’t make much sense as the only propane thing on was the fridge. We turned the alarm off and went back to bed, only to be woken up 10 minutes later from it again! Scott turned off the fridge, shut off the propane, opened windows, and we tried to get a little more sleep.

6 am- ALARM GOES OFF AGAIN. We obviously have a faulty wire somewhere. Scott takes the alarm off the wall and cuts the wire so it can no longer sound. Probably not our best solution, but knowing there wasn’t any actual reason for it going off made the decision easier.

Anyway, after a rough start to the morning, we decided to get up and go on the hike near our campground to Cinder Cone. This was to be a 2.5-3 mile hike to the Cinder Cone. A cinder cone volcano is made up of loose ash, volcanic rock, and cinders that accumulate around a singular vent. The Cinder Cone volcano in Lassen formed somewhere around 1650. Scott was super excited to hike and see this piece of landscape that neither of us knew anything about!

That enthusiasm would quickly wane as we hiked. What I didn’t realize is that we were hiking to the top of the cinder cone. What Scott didn’t realize is that the 700 foot elevation gain for the hike was mostly in the last quarter mile when we hiked up the side of the cinder cone. As we approached the base, we saw two people hiking up the path. I kept wondering why they were going so slow- I soon found out! Hiking up loose ash, rock, and cinders is WAY hard. Every step you take up takes you two steps backward! Our calves and quads were KILLING by the time we reached the summit. The views though? SO worth it! We could walk around the entire rim, see down inside the volcano (we could have gone down there if we had really wanted to), see the Fantastic Lava Beds and Painted Dunes that surround the cone, and got great views of Lassen Peak! For such a terrible hike, the reward was amazing!!!

 

We hiked back down/ran down the mountain. We did encounter a couple people on their way up who said nearly the same thing I did when we saw people going up “We saw you guys hiking up and thought you weren’t even moving! We thought we could hike this whole thing with maybe 3 stops!” We chuckled because we thought the same thing!

We got back to the camper, and took off. Today, we were heading toward Yosemite. We were a little nervous about our camping spot, as we had to book something last minute. I had booked our spots in Yosemite and Sequoia months ago, but recent snowstorms caused a lot of tree damage and a lot of campgrounds ended up getting closed so they could take care of the damage. So, we ended up having to book at an RV resort, which is the exact opposite of anything we wanted to do.

Yosemite Pines RV Resort was everything we expected it to be. Super packed, no space between campers, and all those tacky touristy things that we hate. They had a pool, a gold panning area, a petting zoo….need I go on? I could see the attraction for people with children, but not for us! The one good thing was that they had a laundry area, so we could get that taken care of (even though we did meet another #kathy who barely waited for us to get our things out of the dryer before she barged in to put her stuff in-even though we were still checking to see if our towels were dry! We don’t understand some people).

 

On our next post, we will go into depth about our time at Yosemite National Park. For those who enjoy quiet nature and calmness, Yosemite is definitely not that! We will go into that next!