Day 5: Exploring the lava tubes at Lava Beds

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We are awakened around 630am by the sound of an airplane just outside and it turns out to be a crop duster doing its thing over the sunflower field right across the street from the hotel. There's a pretty big hill just behind the hotel so when the plane reaches the end of the field across the street, he has to pull up into a pretty steep climb and then turn around for his next run back over the field. It takes about half hour for him to cover the whole field, but it's actually kinda cool to watch. We've never seen anything like this before.

We're off to Lava Beds National Monument after breakfast. The kids are anxious to explore the lava tube caves. We've played up the idea of crawling around in caves in the dark and they're excited since that sounds like a lot more fun and excitement to them than hiking around looking at a bunch of trees.

The terrain here, similar to the drive over when we passed through what was left by a long-ago eruption of Mount Shasta, is wide open with sage brush covering the volcanic rock. It's called high desert, but it sure doesn't look like desert which is typically associated with sand. Nothing but mostly basalt volcanic rock here from an eruption of nearby Medicine Lake shield volcano some 30,000 years ago. Along the drive to the visitor center, I stop a few times to take some photos. The sage brush and rocks are picturesque so I have a hard time resisting the urge to stop every 100 yards or so. Especially when we hit Devil's Homestead lava flow, which looks mighty cool. But by this time, the kids are practically screaming to get to the visitor center to buy helmets and get big flashlights so we can get down into the lava tubes and start having some fun and adventure. The reviews of Lava Beds we'd read on yelp and tripadvisor (yeah, I was surprised too that there are reviews of national parks and monuments on those sites) were all pretty positive and highlighted how much fun it was for kids so they're anxious.

Somehow, we managed to convince the kids to stop and do a short hike up the Schonchin Butte cinder cone. There's a fire lookout on top and the view of the area from up there is supposed to be awesome. Zach isn't very into it because it's just delaying the crawling around in the dark with a helmet that much longer, but after a few minutes of sulking he gets out of the car. The trail is steep but not so bad, and it's short so we're up at the lookout within a short time. As described, the view is indeed very nice. But what really makes this interesting and enjoyable is the lookout himself. He's a retired Forest Service firefighter who spent the better part of his career leading a hotshot team. Apparently, there are only about 90 teams like that in the country and he'd been all over and even sent over to some foreign countries to fight forest fires...I don't think I'd describe myself as a treehugger, but I realize just how important forests are to the planet after talking with him. The magazine Outside had recently published an article on a hotshot team and he was friends with many who were subjects of the article. Coincidentally, that was one of the magazines Kris had brought with her on the trip and she'd read that article on the plane ride out here, so she was very interested and asking all kinds of questions. The lookout then took us all inside the tower and showed us all the tools of the trade, so to speak, showing the kids how he looks for fires, locates them and calls them in. It was all pretty cool, and they were impressed. It was only a few days afterward that practically an entire hotshot team in Arizona died working to put out a fire, and we gained a new appreciation for the hazards and risks of that line of work.

Anyways, we finally head to the visitor center and get the helmets and flashlights so we can finally start exploring. We spend the next few hours checking out several of the lava tubes. Most are rated easy and moderate so they are short and don't require much stooping or crawling and are short enough that you don't need a map. A couple are more difficult and there is quite a bit of crawling. We only bought helmets for the kids and Kris has had enough of bumping her head on the hard rock so she sits out the last one, which is unfortunate because that one turned out to be the best. The kids and I made a wrong turn somewhere and got lost, so were down there crawling through some pretty tight spots till we finally spotted an opening and headed out even though we weren't sure that was where we'd entered. We found ourselves out in the open and a bit disoriented but I was able to get us pointed in the right direction back to the car waiting near the entrance, joking along the way about how we'd just popped out of an opening in the earth. The kids liked that, and it turned out to be the highlight of the day.

Back at the visitor center we turn in the flashlights and the kids relate to the park rangers how we'd popped out of the earth at that last lava tube cave. After a good laugh, he admits that's pretty common at that particular cave because it's easy to get lost down there. Since there's still a good while before dinner, we decide to head up to Medicine Lake, a nice little lake in a collapsed dome of the Medicine Lake volcano (the largest volcano in the Cascade Range, it forms a caldera that is 4 1/2 miles wide and 6 1/2 miles long) located in nearby Modoc National Forest. This turns out to be a neat spot and the kids enjoy swimming around for a bit.

It's going to a take a while to get back to town for dinner at the same restaurant at which we ate last night, really the only option, so we wrap things up a the lake and head out. We pass the southern side of Tule Lake on the way and see a lot more birds in the wildlife refuge today than we did yesterday, including American White Pelican, White-faced Ibis, geese, mallards, a pheasant and hawk and others I have no clue what they are.

One of the tidbits that caught my attention in the reviews I'd read about Lava Beds is how amazing the stars and night sky are here because of the elevation (between 4000 and 5700 feet) and almost total lack of light pollution. I've always been interested in stars and learning more about astronomy is on my list of things to do. Based on past experiences in open desert, the stars at night are an incredible sight so I decide to take advantage and head back to into Lava Beds. Since everyone else was tired and not very excited about staying up to see stars, I dropped them all at the hotel after dinner and grabbed my camera. I pull off the road into a turn-out and set up my camera on the tripod that I've lugged out on the trip (pretty much specifically for this). As it grew increasingly dark, the stars got more impressive. However, even though I had the remote set up up on the camera to keep the exposure open as long as 1 second, nothing came out. A bit disappointed, but at least I got to see and experience it myself even though I couldn't record it on film. After a while, I was getting tired myself, and truth be told, a bit nervous of being alone in the dark far from anyone or anything and I'd read about the huge swarms of bats at night here...not to mention the possibility of bears, mountain lions and other wild animals (sure, it might be slight possibility, but they're out there).

Anyways, that's enough for one day so I head back to the hotel for some sleep because tomorrow we're heading to our next destination.

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