Month: June 2017

31 May:  Moab, Utah, grew into a prominent town during the early years of the Cold War because of uranium mining.  Nowadays, it is a thriving tourist town, situated very close to the very popular Arches National Park.  The lines of cars at the entrance station into Arches were long, and the trailhead parking lots were especially crowded this year due to road and campground closures due to reconstruction, but the scenery was not to be missed.  There are said to be over 2,000 sandstone arches in the park, created by wind erosion of vertical “fins” of rock that formed from vertical cracking of an area uplifted into a dome.  While Lowry took Corwyn on a shorter hike, we hiked to the iconic Delicate Arch, featured on Utah’s license plate and on the Utah quarter in the National Park series.  Delicate Arch is as emblematic of Utah as the Old Man of the Mountain is of New Hampshire.  Near the trailhead there is an old settler’s cabin and a particularly well preserved petroglyph panel of Ute rock art, chiseled into the nearly black “desert varnish,” a dark surface stain that occurs on some vertical rock faces due to chemical and possibly microbial action.

1 Jun:  Today we hiked to Sand Dune Arch and to Broken Arch.  Sand Dune Arch is hidden within a narrow vertical cleft between two tall rock formations, the trail to it passing over the floor of the cleft on pure, fine, pink sand.  Corwyn really enjoyed playing there.

2 Jun:  Lowry and Corwyn headed for home on the Amtrak train from Green River to Denver through the Rockies, and we did some biking near Moab.  The Moab Canyon paved bike path ascends from the Colorado River up near the southwestern border of Arches NP, on the original highway route through the canyon.  This is a popular mountain biking area, with many challenging singletrack dirt trails branching off the paved path we rode.  The path diverged from the modern highway up into the solitude of canyon country, providing good views, a stiff climb, and an easy return ride.  Back down at the Colorado River, we ate lunch at the beautiful Lions city park and bike path trailhead, then rode to the end of a paved spur trail up along the river and back.  That was a very pleasant ride with towering cliffs on one side and the river on the other.

3 Jun:  We drove through views of buttes, intricately eroded escarpments & pillars, and distant snow-capped mountains toward our next destination, Capitol Reef National Park.  The campground in the park is first-come, first-served, and it fills early in the day, so we camped one night in a nearby RV park.  Capitol Reef NP encompasses a nearly 100-mile-long monocline, or one-sided fold in the earth’s crust known as the Waterpocket Fold.  A deep fault lifted the crust on the west side higher than the east side, bending but not fracturing the crust, then subsequent erosion removed some of the uplifted land.  The remaining escarpment appeared as a formidable barrier to travel westward, reminding pioneers of an oceanic barrier reef.  One of the upraised domes is reminiscent of the U.S. Capitol building.

4 Jun:  After moving to a campsite inside the park, we hiked up the Grand Wash and Cassidy Arch trails and back.  Honeycomb weathering is common in parts of Capitol Reef, where some areas of the sandstone have been chemically weathered into intricate patterns of holes.  Grand Wash is a dry riverbed (except during flash floods) between tall cliffs of sandstone.  It is especially imposing in the section known as the Narrows.  From the upper end of Grand Wash we hiked up out of the valley to the top of Cassidy Arch, where we has good views of the surrounding terrain.  A small group of technical climbers was preparing to rappel down from the top of the arch.  On the way back down Grand Wash we had a fine close look at a bighorn ram grazing beside the trail.

5 Jun:  Today’s hike was about 4 to 4.7 miles one-way from the Fremont River valley floor to the summit of Navajo Knob and then back (trail signs gave conflicting distances).  The 1,600 feet in elevation gain was so gentle and the footing was largely on smoothly eroded sandstone, that we hiked it easily in 6.75 hours (round trip, including lunch).  Much of the trail was on very slightly tilted sandstone layers, and the views were excellent all the way.  Wading in the river afterward felt great.  Then we went to a ranger talk about the Fremont people, named by archaeologists after this Fremont River valley where they lived from about 300 to 1300.  They carved petroglyphs into the rock faces and are thought to be the ancestors of the modern-day Hopi, Zuni, and Paiute tribes.  Later, in the late 1800s, Mormon settlers moved into the valley, taking advantage of the good soil and water supply to establish farms.  The town became known by its present name of Fruita, honoring the plentiful orchards planted by those settlers and still maintained today by the Park Service.  The one-room log schoolhouse that educated the Mormon children until the early 1940s is one of the historical structures maintained in the park.

6-8 Jun:  On the way to our next camping destination, Lassen Volcanic National Park in northern California, we had overnight stops at Hickison Petroglyph Recreation Area in central Nevada and at the home of friends Esi and Terry in Winters, a little way outside of Sacramento.  Hickison has a nice little Bureau of Land Management campground nestled among singleleaf pinyon pines near some petroglyphs and a short interpretive trail to a viewpoint on top of a ridge.  We had met Esi and Terry at their home in Asheville, N.C., about a year ago.  Since then they moved to California to be close to their daughter, son-in-law, and grandsons.  They treated us to a home-cooked Persian supper and took us for a walk along a trail along a creek near their home before we left in the morning.

9 Jun:  We visited Lassen NP several years ago, mainly hiking in the southern part of the park.  This time we camped and hiked in the northern part (the road through the park was still not open for the season).  Today’s hikes were two interpretive trails, Subway Cave and Spatter Cones, just outside the national park, in Lassen National Forest.  Subway Cave is a lava tube cave, formed when molten lava continued to flow inside after the surface of the flow had cooled enough to solidify.  Later the lava drained, leaving a hollow tube.  This lava tube cave was pretty large, easily tall enough to walk through and several yards wide.  The two-mile-long Spatter Cones interpretive trail looped past several 30,000-year-old examples of columnar jointing, partially collapsed small lava tubes and domes, and rough lava deposits from liquid lava that was ejected into the air and hardened where it fell around the vent to form the spatter cones.  There were wildflowers blooming along both trails, among shrubs typical for this fairly arid region.

10 Jun:  We drove south on the park road as far as it was open, about 10 miles.  There we hiked the Devastated Area interpretive trail, which described the eruption and resulting lahar, the destructive mud and debris flow down Lassen’s northeast flank when the hot lava from the May 1915 eruption melted snow around the crater.  Lassen’s eruption was the most recent one in the contiguous 48 states until Mount St. Helens erupted in 1980.  Not only was the forest obliterated in the path of the lahar, but boulders as large as a small cabin were carried as much as four or five miles from their origin at Lassen’s summit.  We explored the park road beyond the closure barrier on our bikes, but soon our way was blocked by large snowdrifts and downed trees across the road.  We continued farther on foot, and found ourselves in a burned area that was part of the 36,000 acres burned by a lightning-caused forest fire in 2012.  On all our hikes in and around Lassen on this trip we were never far from areas that had obviously been damaged by fires.  In the afternoon we hiked up the Manzanita Creek trail from our campground a few miles until the snow cover at higher elevation made hiking more difficult.

11 Jun:  We woke to fresh snow on the ground (not very deep, since it fell mixed with rain).  Before lunch we hiked to Cinder Cone, in the northeast part of the park.  Lassen Volcanic NP has examples of all four main types of volcanos:  shield volcano, cinder cone, plug dome volcano, and composite volcano.  Numbered posts alerted us to descriptions in a trail brochure describing the volcanic history and features along the way.  We then entered the wilderness area (about 75% of Lassen Volcanic NP is protected as a wilderness), where the trail ascended Cinder Cone, which erupted about 1650.  Inside the main crater is a slightly smaller one.  We hiked halfway around the outer rim and halfway around the inner rim.  The fresh snow accentuated the contours of the two distinct craters.  In the afternoon we hiked to Crag Lake on the Chaos Crags trail.  It passed through some of the prettiest woods we hiked through in Lassen this week, but it was still in or beside an extensive burned area for some of the time, and the clouds closed in so we didn’t have any distant views.

 

12-14 Jun:  Our next destination was Ashland, Oregon, to see our friend Caroline, who dyes fabrics for costumes at the Shakespeare Festival.  We camped at a very nice county park on Emigrant Lake, not far from downtown Ashland.  We took a hike on the section of the Pacific Crest Trail that passes near the prominent landmark Pilot Rock, a volcanic plug created when lava solidified in a volcano’s vent and was later exposed by erosion.  We continued east of Pilot Rock until the trail crossed over the crest of the ridge and offered a great view of Mount Shasta in northern California, the second highest volcano in the Cascades after Washington’s Mount Rainier (Shasta was hidden in the clouds when we drove north from Lassen two days before).  Another snow-capped volcanic peak was prominent to our north, Mount McLaughlin.

Caroline had two treats in store for us in the evenings.  One was tickets to Shakespeare’s Merry Wives of Windsor.  The Shakespeare Festival is the largest employer in southern Oregon.  They present plays in their three theaters most nights of the week during their long spring through fall season.  The performance we saw was a real extravaganza, with some interesting modern accents to the costumes and music.  The second treat was an invitation to see the dress rehearsal of the upcoming weekend show to be put on by her aerial silk troupe.  Their athleticism while suspended from ropes, silk, or hoops was very impressive, and the whole performance including some intricate juggling numbers, was highly entertaining, much in the vein of Cirque de Soleil.

15 Jun:  On our drive to the Crater Lake area, we stopped at a short interpretive trail in the Rogue River gorge.  The Rogue River flows south in the valley west of Crater Lake.  The present river bed is hundreds of feet higher than its ancient course, because the river valley has since been filled in by many successive lava flows.  Now the river has started its work of carving a deep river valley all over again and has cut a very scenic gorge through layers of volcanic rock.  We camped in the Umpqua National Forest at Diamond Lake and biked around the lake on the paved John Dellenback bike path.  Spring was just coming to this area.  Riding through swarms of newly-hatched midges was almost like being pelted by sleet.  The lake level was high and a couple of sections of the trail were flooded, but only an inch or two and only for short distances.  In a few places we had to walk the bikes across old snow drifts.  Frogs were croaking.  It made our ride interesting on this very attractive trail.

16 Jun:  A cloudy day with sunny weather forecast for tomorrow, so we hiked near our campground, postponing our trip to Crater Lake for a day.  We hiked east, away from the lake on the Howlock Mountain trail for a mile and turned south on the Spruce Ridge trail for another 2.5 miles.  These are both used as cross-country ski trails in the winter and climb very gently through pleasant evergreen woods.  We had partial views of Mount Bailey across the lake, though its summit was in the clouds.  Diamond Lake is nestled between two volcanic peaks, Mt. Bailey and Mt. Thielsen.  Bailey is rounded in profile, while Thielsen is extremely sharp peaked.  This difference in appearance is because Bailey is much younger, having erupted near the end of the last ice age, and glaciers didn’t have enough time to carve a sharp peak and ridges the way they had on the much older Mt. Thielsen.

17 Jun:  Beautiful clear weather.  Up on the rim of Crater Lake, snow was still very deep.  The 33-mile scenic rim drive was only open a little over a mile beyond Rim Village.  Beyond that, snow removal crews had a lot of work ahead of them and road would not be completely open for a very long time.  The north entrance to the park had not opened yet, either.  Crater Lake was formed after Mount Mazama erupted explosively 7,700 years ago.  Extensive lava flows emptied the magma chamber below, and the unsupported top of the mountain collapsed, leaving a caldera 4-6 miles wide and about 4,000 feet deep.  Over the following centuries, rainfall and melting snow within it slowly accumulated to make what is now the deepest lake in the U.S.  The lake has no streams flowing into or out of it.  The water is exceptionally pure and appears deep blue because of its extreme clarity.  We drove, then walked as far as allowed along the rim drive, enjoying the snowy scenery and views both inside the crater and off in the distance.  Driving back to our campground on Diamond Lake, we stopped for a short hike down to the bottom of National Creek Falls (very pleasant trail switchbacking down among big old trees) and at a couple of viewpoints along the highway with signs explaining the views and volcanic history.  We resolved to return to this area another year later in the season for more extensive hiking at higher elevations.

18 Jun:  Traveling north through the Oregon section of the Cascade Range, we were treated to good views of several snow-capped volcanic peaks.  Whereas California’s Sierra Nevada Mountains are “intrusive” formations (where magma cooled below the earth’s surface slowly, hardening into large-grained rocks like granite that were later exposed by erosion of the overlying rocks), the younger Cascade range consists of “extrusive” formations (created when magma reached the surface to be expelled by volcanos to cool quickly as lava, cinders, and ash deposited on top of the earth’s crust).  Volcanic peaks we had seen so far included Lassen Peak, Mt. Shasta, Mt. McLaughlin, the Mt. Mazama caldera at Crater Lake, Mt. Bailey, and Mt. Thielsen.  Today, driving north through the relatively flat high desert of central Oregon, we saw several more:  Mt. Bachelor, Broken Top, the Three Sisters (South, Middle, and North), Mt. Washington, Three-Fingered Jack, Mt. Jefferson, and Mt. Hood.

We spent about three hours at the Lava Lands visitor center in the northern part of Newberry National Volcanic Monument.  Newberry Volcano is one of the largest volcanos in North America, with its flows covering an area nearly as large as Rhode Island.  Its many eruptions have occurred throughout the last 400,000 years, most recently 1,300 years ago.  The video and exhibits at the visitor center, the view from the Lava Butte cinder cone, and the Molten Land interpretive trail improved our understanding of the volcanic history of the Cascade Range.  We didn’t have enough time to investigate other sections of this National Monument, but made a mental note to do so on another trip.