Time for Another Update

A snowy hello to our kids from Lassen Volcanic National Park. Well we just parked ourselves in Florence Oregon. We are staying 8 days at South Jetty Thousand Trails park. But first lets talk about where we have been for the last few weeks. We spent some time in Lake of The Springs, Thousand Trails Park. It was in a small town called Oregon House, California. We spent 2 weeks resting up, getting ready for some dry camping in some state & national parks. Of course there was some line dancing, 5 days a week, which was great. After our 2 weeks of just relaxing, we decided to go to Lassen Volcanic National Park. Candy & Frank went to Shasta Lake. We met up with our friends again in 3 days.
Lassen Volcanic National Park
This park was breathtaking. There was so much snow.

The ride through the park was awesome. It had some of the same characteristics as Yellowstone National Park, but on a much smaller scale. There was some thermal hot springs, boiling mud,

sulphur works and cauldrons. There are 4 types of volcanoes in the World & Lassen has all 4 of them. Lake Helen was still frozen over. You can see where the thermal springs are. The lake has these little circles where the intense heat melts the ice.
Emerald lake also has some thermal activity creating thin ice areas. After all the fun in Lassen we headed to Lake Shasta to meet up with our friends again.

Lake Shasta
We met up with Candy & Frank at Lake Shasta. Below this lake used to be boom towns. They were mining towns gone bust. The area used to experience floods & drought. A dam was built & flooded out the boom to bust cities and now it is a beautiful recreation area. The pollution was bad from the smelting mines. The historic California-Oregon Trails also lies beneath the water of Lake Shasta, even some of the railroad and Indian tribal territory (Wintu's) lies beneath the lake. A town called Bully Hill (under the lake now) used to produce flat copper ingots and they were shipped to NJ.
Shasta is also the home of California's largest population of Bald Eagles. I have never seen so many eagles in my life as I have here & in the Redwoods. John & I drove up to Mt. Shasta. It was a pretty view. There was still some snow on the mountain. Then we drove over to Lake Siskiyou.

It was a very nice park with a beach on the lake and a campground. Redwoods National & State Park
After leaving Shasta Lake we headed to the Redwoods, tallest & oldest trees in the World. The temperatures range from 47-75 degrees year round with lots of fog. The ocean is numbingly cold with treacherous rip tides. There is something called a sneaker wave here in California & in Oregon, maybe Washington also. A wave will appear from nowhere onto the dry beach and actually pull people into the water. Once pulled in, your chances of survival are not good because of the rip tides & the temperature of the water.The sand was black with sea stacks. We saw some Roosevelt Elks, which were almost extinct in 1925. They were down to around 15 in the park & now they have over 1000. We also did some whale watching, which was pretty neat. We heard some seals along the beach but we never did see them. I guess they were hiding in plain sight. We took some small hikes through the Redwoods & found some awesome trees. We found one you could live in. It was hollowed out with a doorway in the front & one in the back with 2 windows. We had so much fun inside that tree. Another hollowed out tree. This one had a bigger room inside.Walking through the forest we saw some banana slugs and some turkey tails (fungus). We went to trees of Mystery and took a cable ride through the trees. You would think that we would see the tops of the trees but they are so tall, we still weren't on the top.

We still couldn't get on the top of most trees. We left the Redwoods and drove up the coast to Florence, Oregon.