Round and round the mulberry bush

2003-09-06 - 10:25 p.m.

Yesterday afternoon, after my dad got home from work, my parents and I got in the station wagon and drove to Redding. We spent the night there and then got up relatively early this morning and wandered around Lassen Volcanic National Park. I've been there before, but not recently. I don't remember how long it has been. My only frame of reference is that I brought home a souvenir for my grandmother last time and she was living in her new house. So that places me somewhere between 3rd grade and sophomore in college. Doesn't narrow it down a whole lot, eh? Oh well, it doesn't matter anyway.

First thing when we got inside the park my dad decided he needed to use the restroom. We pulled over at a ranger station and my mom and I walked over to a pond that was on the other side of the road while my dad took care of business. So we're walking around the pond when I see this:

Those of you who know me will have no doubts about what I did immediately after I snapped this picture. That's right, I walked on the log towards the middle of the pond. Why? Um...why not? Things you should know: I was wearing shorts, a sweater, and flip-flops, in one hand I held a camera, in the other I held a map, the wind was blowing pretty hard, and although the first half of the log is high and dry, the second half is mostly submerged with the fiercer wind gusts blowing water completely over it. Why I didn't stop at the dry part of the log is beyond me at the moment. I kept right on walking on the wet part. I didn't lose my balance--I slipped. There's a difference! First my right foot slipped. I was standing there on one foot the other one waving precariously over open water when suddenly my left foot slipped too. If I had been a guy, landing astraddle the log such as I did probably would've been painful. Fortunately for me, it didn't hurt at all. My biggest problem was that I was stuck. Both of my feet were sunk to mid-calf in soft mud. Standing up in the mud was not an option because I didn't know how much farther I would sink. On the other hand, I couldn't stand up on the log in my flip-flops because it was too slippery. My mom, ever helpful, was standing on the bank laughing at me and taking pictures. Anyway, I was eventually able to stand back up on the log by taking my flip-flops off and walking in my bare feet. And luckily I had a spare pair of jeans in the car because I was wet and muddy from the butt down.

We spent the rest of the day hiking around and there were no further incidents to speak of. We came across a lake that had been dammed up by beavers. I had never seen such an impressive beaver dam in my life. Although you can't really tell in this picture, the dam here is over five feet tall. When I stood beside it, it was nearly as tall as I am. In this picture you can also see the beaver lodge in the upper right-hand corner in front of those two dead trees:

I learned a bit about Mt. Lassen today. For some reason I never realized that it had erupted relatively recently. The last time it erupted was 1915, but as far as volcanoes go, that's not too long ago. And I realized, after getting home and looking at all my pictures, that I didn't take a single decent picture of Mt. Lassen. I have pictures, but none of them are really worth showing off. I do like this picture, though, of a view looking away from the mountain. When I wasn't looking through the camera I could see a couple of lakes among those mountains. They don't show up in the picture, but I still think it's pretty:

And finally, because I like flowers, I'll put in one flower picture. I found this flower on the side of a trail. I don't know what kind of flower it is, though, do you?

I had some deeper, more introspective things I wanted to talk about here, but I'm feeling really tired tonight. I didn't sleep well last night, which I'd like to contribute to my dad's marvelous snoring abilities, but could just as well be my recent inability to sleep at a normal hour. That combined with getting up early and hiking all day have made me pretty tired, so I'm going to hit the hay and hope that tonight, at least, I can sleep.