Crater Lake

Day 17: Monday, September 12, 2011

We had a lovely day at Crater Lake today. We overslept, because Joe’s phone (with our alarm on it) ran out of battery during the night. So we were well rested when we finally got up and got going. We could see blue sky and Roxy and I had a nice walk before we pulled out of our campground. Stopped at the village store, and discovered they had showers! That is something that would have been of interest to me .

We spent most of the day going around the Rim Road of Crater Lake. Sure enough, this morning the lake was actually turning blue in the sunshine--it is really quite beautiful. We stopped at pretty much every single overlook, and the color changed depending on the moment and the sky and clouds. We ate our lunch at the Phantom Ship overlook. The Phantom Ship is actually a small island formed by a rock formation which is coming up out of the lake; it is the rim of an older volcano which was exposed when Mount Mazama imploded into the crater.
We took photos from every direction and sometimes I took photos just to avoid looking at the road itself! If you can imagine a road with exactly two lanes, no shoulder at all, and a drop-off at the edge of the lane straight down into a valley or over a cliff, you can imagine some of the spots on this Rim Road. Truly there were times I simply closed my eyes. Joe did a great job driving, though.

At about 3:30 we were ready to leave the park. I had decided earlier that the farthest we could get today was the city of Bend, OR, about 2 hours drive north of Crater Lake. The problem I had was, that from there, we were heading east, and there is NOTHING for 130 miles. And then, there’s precious little for another 130 miles or so, until the Idaho border. And THEN, I think there’s nothing TOO much until Boise. I really wanted a campground with hot showers and wifi. And I didn’t think I would find it any time soon after Bend. So that’s where we headed.

We didn’t have such an easy time finding those things in Bend, either! The first campground I called, which sounded VERY deluxe (fire pits on the patio of the clubhouse--huh?) actually told me we couldn’t come there, because Mo is too old! I’d heard of this before, but I think it’s the first time we’ve run into the problem. Then the GPS guided us to an address which our AAA book said was a state park, but turned out not to be a camping-type park, it was a city park. My Woodall’s app in my iPod was not being too helpful either. Tons of Forest Service campgrounds but not many private campgrounds. Finally the GPS gave us a park based on proximity to where we are--turns out it was listed under the town of Sisters, not Bend, which is why I hadn’t found it. So we are at a very very fancy KOA, with gardens, a lake, a manicured dog walk, patios for our picnic table and grass for the rest of our site, heated shower floors (!), and all kinds of pleasant things. Joe and I are sitting outside in our lawn chairs--he is reading, I am typing, and Roxy is enjoying lying in thelawn. It is delightful and I feel like I’m on a leisurely vacation. [PS: added at 10 pm: the shower/bathroom building is like a spa. Absolutely gorgeous and deluxe (designer sinks!?!) What a pleasure.]

Only one problem: the wifi STINKS here! I have been able to answer two letters, but I can’t get any pages on the blog to load. So I will not be updating the blog, certainly not with photos, until I don’t know when. This is completely unsatisfactory as far as I am concerned, and we will not be doing our trips this way again. It is just too frustrating. I can live without the email, but I love my blogging! [PS: At 10 pm the bandwidth opened up! I have uploaded 3 days of blogs, without photos thus far. But at least my days have been recorded for posterity!]

Tomorrow we will be heading due east via US 20, a road which runs from the Oregon coast to Boston. We will be taking it only as far (right now( as I-84 in Idaho, and from there to Craters of the Moon National Recreation Area. At least, that is the plan.

From Sea Level to the Rim of a Volcano

Day 16: Sunday, Sept. 11, 2011

Today was a day of many contrasts--the scenery and the weather. When we woke up in our campground a few 100 yards away from the seashore, it was cold and gray. Our trip to the Sea Lion Caves attraction, our first stop, was COLD! We bundled up in jeans, socks, and several layers of sweatshirts. Whatever happened to our warm sunny day from yesterday? It was buried in fog.

The Sea Lion Caves is a privately owned attraction a few miles north of Florence, OR, on the scenic ocean highway CA 101. It is the largest sea cave known, and is a shelter in the winter for Steller Sea Lions. In the spring, they have their babies there, and there’s a shelf along the ocean’s edge where the pups can be seen playing and growing. Unfortunately, our timing was not good for this one--it is obviously not cold enough for sea lions to want shelter, and it’s not the right time for them to have babies. I suspect that when it is really warm out, they can be found basking on the haul-out area at the ocean’s edge, just as they were all over the rocks and wharves yesterday in Newport. But today was really cold, and no sane creature would be resting out by the seashore.



The thing was, there were only four actually inside the cave, either. I have no idea where all the other sea lions could have been today--maybe still in Newport? The cave was actually pretty awesome and huge, but only those four sea lions were out on the rock in the middle of the watery part of the cave. The cave also had a short video telling about how it was found, its history since the 1930s as a tourist attraction, and all about the life cycle of Steller Sea Lions (named for the guy who did the research on them.) There is a view out one of the exits (there are three) toward Heceta Head Lighthouse, and I got a photo of it just as the light, the brightest on the Oregon coast, turned toward us. It makes the fogginess of the day quite plain.

So it was all interesting, but a little disappointing. I said to Joe as we were leaving, “Do you think maybe those were four animatron sea lions specially made just in case all the real ones were away?” And he said, he was wondering the exact same thing! We are both so cynical! I did take photos of them with my zoom, and I saw movement, but of course it *could* have been fake, LOL!

We continued down the coast a little farther, going first through Florence. There we got gas (the lowest price we’ve seen recently--$3.67) and a few groceries. Then we continued on, passing some of the Oregon Sand Dunes National Recreation Area. We knew we were there when suddenly I realized that just behind the row of single trees lining the road, was a sand dune about as high as a 2-story house! Then just ahead we saw one at the side of the road, just beginning to encroach, and it too was 2 stories high. We stopped a park day use area for lunch and walked up to an overlook. We could see that between us and the beach were a lot of large sand dunes (there was a young couple attempting to slide down the nearest dune using something like a snowboard.) We were at the sand dunes along Lake Michigan a few years ago, and this was very much the same thing. I don’t know of anyplace on the east coast that has dunes like this--ours are much smaller and more manageable!

We arrived at the town of Reedsport, and that is where we finally turned left and headed east again. I felt kind of sorry--as I said last night, it’s never as much fun going east as west. But we were driving along the scenic Umpqua River for miles, and it was gorgeous. In addition, the foggy cold overcast-ness went away as soon as we drove over the first hill--and there was the sun. We stopped at a pull-out and looked down at the river, to see several groups of people swimming. It looked like a lot of fun.
By this time, the weather had gotten quite warm, and the idea of swimming was definitely appealing. But instead we kept going. We followed the Umpqua in its valley, and then the Northern Umpqua. The latter was very reminiscent of the river along the Lolo Pass--very tumbling, with lots of rocks and cascades, and deep green pine trees lining the road which wound along the river. We stopped for gas and changed into shorts, as the folks at the station assured us that it was “very hot”, much hotter than usual.

As we got higher into the mountains, however, the air got cooler again, this time in that wonderful mountain-y way. At about 6:30ish, we arrived at the gates of Crater Lake National Park, waved our America The Beautiful pass at the ranger, and drove in. We had been smelling smoke for about 20 minutes before, and after we came into the park and had more scenic views, we could see that there was a fire off in the distance to the west. The sky was cloudy, but I don’t think it was truly overcast--without the fire in the distance, it would have been a beautiful late afternoon. But the smoke smell and a brownish smoky haze was very noticeable. Sure enough, when we got to the rim road of Crater Lake, and stopped at the first stop, we were somewhat surprised to see that the famous blue of the lake was not to be seen--the crater seemed to be filled with smoke, and the color was a sort of dull gray-blue. We could see how awesome the crater is, but the color was simply not there.
This being the case, I told Joey not to stop at the subsequent rim overlooks, and to continue on to Mazama Village, the only campground in the park. I’d been counting on getting a space here, because I don’t see any other obvious places to stay outside the park. Luck was with us, and we did find a nice space here in Loop C. Like the sites we had in Yellowstone and the one last night, there are no hookups, so we are dry camping again. No big deal, really, and we are fine here. We just had a delicious dinner of chicken wings on our new grill (which we’ve used every night since we got it), corn on the cob from the farm market we stopped at on our way to the beach, and salad. We are not suffering in the food department, for those of you who wondered! We’ve had steak, chicken with black bean sauce, hamburgers, thai curry chicken, spaghetti with meat sauce, and chicken burritos, to name a few of Joe’s dinner creations.

So anyway, I am hoping that the wind will blow in a different direction tomorrow, and we will see blue in the crater on our drive around the rim. And at some point we’ll probably peel off east again, toward Idaho.