We took the beauty and scale of the beach with us as we headed back into the mountains to go camping with my dad and some friends. I deeply love the Cascades; the North Cascades are easily one of my favorite places to camp and hike. As my dad joined us, we mostly just spent …
After the site of the most famous eruption in Washington State history, we still had a couple of days before our house sit and needed to figure out how to spend it. We still weren’t sure if we were going to camp in the Cascades or head towards the Pacific Ocean to camp on the …
The outdoor adventures of Bend in our minds, we went camping with our friends, stayed with them for a night in Portland, and then crossed back into Washington at long last. In the seven years that we lived in Seattle together, we never once made the trip to Mt. St. Helens, so we decided that …
Bend was thankfully far enough from the fires to let us escape the haze, but the fires brought us into the area a couple of days earlier than we planned, so we had some time to check out the nature that Bend is so renowned for. Newberry National Volcanic Monument The most famous area is …
Our minds blown like so many shards of obsidian, we crossed into Oregon, just one state away from home. The first stop on the list: Crater Lake, where my mother took me as a child. The fires tearing through California and Oregon were wreaking havoc throughout the West Coast, creating many of the same problems …
We walked through the remnant tubes magma and onto something that sounded vaguely interesting, glass mountain. Apparently there were lots of obsidian lying around and people were pretty free to walk around. California actually has two placed called Glass Mountain and as the one we didn’t go to is by Yosemite, finding information on this …
Now that we better understood some of the active volcanoes in the area, we went to see what some of their predecessors had done by exploring a couple of the caves in Lava Beds. There are so many caves that it would probably take 3 days to explore all the ones that are open to …
The USA’s second deepest lake behind us, we began our trek North, researching places as we went. One place that happened to be on our route and seemed interesting enough was Lassen. It sounded interesting enough, but not awe-inspiring, but it was on the way, so why not, right? The park encompasses one of the …
After our brief stint jumping over an in-land border, we crossed another line, from Nevada into California so that we could pivot North at Lake Tahoe. Known for tourism in all seasons, this massive lake feeds draws countless visitors in the summer and every town around the lake shows it. We drove through the town …
Nevada primarily traversed, we finally made it to the border of California, with a stop in Reno. Unsurprisingly, the cheapest hotel there was a casino, so we just stopped for the night, wandered the casino for 10 minutes, then stayed in our air-conditioned room watching TV. Reno As we were there, though, we did make …