Lassen National Park

In northern California, there is a place called Lassen National Park. No, I hadn't heard of it really until a few days ago. There were some volcanoes, things blew up and now they have boiling stuff in the ground that smells a bit.

 Actually, Lassen NP has all 4 types of volcanoes. Pretty rare. Plug Dome, Cinder Cone, Shield and Composite. I won't go into all of the scientific details now (mostly because the book is somewhere in a suitcase) but the photo below is of Lassen Peak, a plug dome which erupted 100 years ago. Its peak is about 10457 feet above sea level and is 2000 feet above the car park at the bottom.

We found a camp site and set up all of our stuff. We decided to have pizza for dinner.

We worked out a way to make our saucepan and frypan set into an oven. Basic system. Put pizza in, close and shove lots of hot stuff around it and on it.

Below is the result. Pretty happy with it and more importantly, Shannon was. Olivia doesn't like pizza but has never tried it. Apparently kids don't eat pizza.

We came across our a smelly pile of bubbling mud called the Sulphur Works.

There was also a mildly bubbling lake called Cold Boiling Lake. It wasn't really anything to right home about. Although apparently it was.

Olivia wanted to play in the snow, so we went to Lassen Peak car park. I headed off up Lassen peak while they did snowy stuff. The snow wasn't exactly glowing white but it was better than most road side snow we had seen.

2000 feet up while at decent altitude seemed like a good idea for training. 3 - 5 hour round trip.

 The only slightly sketchy bit was a section where if you slip off to the right, you would slide down about 100m down a 45 deg slope until you hit another 45 deg slope of rocks.

The view from up the top was pretty good and the air was thin enough for some good training. 58 minutes up and about 29 back.

This was the hardest junior ranger thing and they normally only have it for 7s and up but a few tears and some memorising sessions later and she had her badge which in this case, was actually a patch.