Thither & Yon

Collecting volcanos is a thing I do, right? So when I turn up to a national park called Lassen Volcanic, it should be obvious to everyone involved that the first thing I do is look for the big volcano and figure out if I can climb it.

Lassen Peak tops out at 10,457 feet, a summit available to those willing to climb 2,000 feet in 2.5 miles. That’s not nothing, but we’d been getting our exercise in lately, and this looked like a wholly baggable peak.

As we drove into the park, however, we watched the smoke from several nearby wildfires lighten and darken the day. A stop in at the visitor’s center netted us this advice from the ranger we asked about climbing Lassen Peak given the air quality: “I wouldn’t.”

We decided to check out conditions at the trailhead anyway. My secret (not-so-secret) dislike of strenuous activity had seen the light by which it might reasonably veto this climb that I very much theoretically wanted to do, and it was muttering loudly that we should probably just give this one up as lost.

But dang, if the mountain didn’t look fine in the morning air. The wind was blowing in a favorable direction, and the mutinous part of me got smothered by the clear skies. We started to climb.

Smoke did lightly perfume the air, but as we started to make upward progress, we could see how the air was moving, how it was blowing the smoke east instead of north, and how even the remnants that came to us might not gain an altitude as lofty as our ultimate goal.

“Three twenty-fifths!” I announced, checking off every tenth of a mile because some days you’ve got to climb big peaks in very small increments.

All twenty-five twenty-fifths of the climb eventually passed under our feet with surprising ease. In fact, for the first time on any peak hike, I passed other hikers. This had been unheard of in the years since I had started hiking. I had always been the slowest hiker on a mountain. But this was the day I passed three separate groups of hikers while going uphill. We don’t need to talk in great detail about how the people I passed were elderly, or had very small children in tow. Progress is progress.

Arriving at the top, we found the crater of the volcano full of crunchy black dacite, which had squeezed out of the volcano like lava toothpaste during a series of eruptions in 1914 and 1915 (it’s a baby volcano!!), solidifying into a black plug which then got blown sky-high after the pressure became too much. Very little of the volcano’s other rock is black, making this crater a very striking pile of rocks.

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Volcano successfully bagged, we went in search of lunch. Peanut butter and jelly sandwiches always await us back at the car, but we thought maybe our great conquest entitled us to a lunch upgrade. We headed to the Kohm Yah-mah-nee visitor center’s lunch counter. We got in line – a strangely long line for 2:30 in the afternoon, but hungry hikers can’t be choosers in a park with only one dining option. Fortunately, everyone else just seemed to be ordering soft serve, so the line moved apace.

Twenty minutes later, we reached the front of the line only to be informed that they were not serving any hot food. For twenty minutes, we’d been staring at the menu overhead, trying to decide between the hot dogs, hamburgers, pulled pork sandwiches, and cups of chili on offer.

“So what do you have…?” I asked, my stomach rumbling.

“Got some ham and cheese over there in the cooler,” the guy said, shrugging in the direction of one of those standing shelf coolers you find in gas stations the world over. I glanced back up at the menu board. The ham and cheese sandwich that someone had probably assembled and wrapped up last night (if I were lucky) cost $12. Even my twenty sunk minutes could not justify that sad meal for that high price.

We shuffled away from the “lunch” counter, dejected, resigning ourselves to backup PB&Js.

Except our loaf of bread had gone all-over moldy.

“We have nuts?” I said, surveying the options. “Oh, and here’s some beef jerky.”

We’d just climbed 2,000 feet. A hand full of snacks, even a handful so proteiny, did not seem sufficient. We reconsulted our map. A convenience store selling $4 bags of chips was the only other food offering in the park. I chomped on a cashew and contemplated how all my preparedness had been undone by a little mold. Well… quite a lot of mold, really.

“I found a little restaurant just south of the park,” Dustin said, having wrung some information out of the weak data connection on his phone. “It’s actually really well reviewed. Will take about twenty minutes to drive down. What do you think?”

My tum rumbled again. “I deserve a hot meal,” I said.

And so we drove to Mineral. It was not hard to find the café because Mineral, California, is a town composed of nothing more than a café, general store, and RV park. A large cardboard sign outside the café announced they would be open again for dinner at 5:00.

The time was now 3:30.

I nearly wept. (In my defense, I get weepy after I move past hangry. Can’t be helped.) We went over to the general store and prowled the aisles. Several loaves of bread were available for $4.50. I suspected they had been sitting on the shelf for a couple of months. We bought one anyway.

Parked in the shade outside, I began assembling my sandwich. The bread was at least as stale as I had imagined, but a girl’s gotta do what a girl’s gotta do. I handed half of the first sandwich to Dustin so we could both start eating while the second sandwich went together.

“You know… 5:00 is barely an hour away,” I mused, waving the plastic knife indecisively over the peanut butter. “We could write a few postcards…”

When the café opened at 5:00, we had our noses pressed up against the glass door. The server who let us in didn’t look even remotely surprised.

I finally got the pulled pork sandwich I’d been expecting since the beginning of that 20-minute line, more than two hours earlier, accompanied by garlic-fried brussels sprouts instead of stale potato chips. First real vegetables I’d had for weeks. The whole meal was all totally delicious.

Back into the park, then, with full happy bellies, for the last stop I wanted to make for the day.

If “Bumpass Hell” isn’t the best trail name you’ve ever heard, I’ll eat my socks. In the visitor center earlier, I called it “bump-ass hell” while talking to the ranger, and got laughed at. Apparently the appropriate pronunciation is “bumpus,” but… “bump-ass” is an easy and practically mandatory mistake to make. I even refuse to make apologies to Kendall Vanhook Bumpass, the unfortunate explorer who discovered these springs in the 1860s by accidentally falling leg-first into one of them. (He lost the leg, making him the most brilliant object lesson in park history. Don’t leave the boardwalks, kids.)

The Bumpass Hell trail lead through the forest for 1.5 miles until it spilled us out into a thermal basin where the springs are heated by the same kinds of volcanic forces that brought us Yellowstone, and oh! if the scenery didn’t echo of my favorite park.

We hadn’t started the trail until 6:30 in the evening, which worked out miraculously well for us. Bumpass Hell is one of the most popular trails in the park, for obvious reasons. We passed a few other people on their way out, but very few other people were interested in starting a 3-mile hike this late in the day, so the only other people we saw were a pair of people hiking farther into the backcountry for the night. We had the springs to ourselves.

The walk back to our car gave us lovely views of Lassen Peak in the setting sun. She really is a lovely peak to start and end the day with.