All the world was before me…

and every day, a holiday.

—John Muir 

Monday: I'm slowly acclimating to 9000 feet and not having internet access. I'm not sure which is harder. 

I climbed a steep, boring trail most of the way to Dog Lake before deciding there was no need to push myself. The air was smoky from the North fire burning in Sequoia. A black and orange butterfly landed on me, lingering for a full minute. So I went to the beach at Tenaya Lake. 

Crazy people were swimming. A woman was doing yoga. 

Then I took an easy walk through the meadows to Soda Springs. 

Cool water burbles up through the surface. 

Nearby is the Parsons Lodge designed by Bernard Maybeck for the Sierra Club. 

Such glorious architecture. 

They even have a poetry festival in August. 

My breakfast companions were a couple of bear rangers who've been camping in the backcountry all summer and scolding people for leaving food around. 

More black bears in Yosemite are killed by cars each year than die of natural causes. 

Volunteers are restoring the meadows, which like the bears, suffer from too many visitors. 

Tomorrow I'm off to May Lake, leaving the car and the luxury of a cabin to myself behind. The hike is less than the 7.5 miles I walked today. 

A woman from Long Island at dinner thought I was brave setting off on my own. Maybe if I were camping and cooking or heading off the beaten track. So far it's been glamping all the way. Hot showers. Kindling for the firewood. And warm, clear days and nights. Maybe by the time I get back I'll have a glass of wine to celebrate. 

Going home

Going to the mountains is going home.  

—John Muir

Sunday: I've arrived at cabin 22 where I'm trying to get my woodburning stove going for the first time since Black Sheep in Quilotoa. 

Not too bad for a girl from the suburbs. Even if I did use all the matches.  

Oh, yeah. This is why I'm here. 

Also this. That's Half Dome from the back side. 

I took an easy stroll out to the Lyell fork of the Tuolumne River. 

I loved this tree. 

There's no electricity aside from the dining room and shop. Less prepared people line up to charge their devices. For my 7-day adventure, I have a car charger and a solar-powered external battery. We'll see how they do. (It's very sunny.)

The tent cabins come with old-fashioned looking lanterns.

There is a pay phone with a few odd free calls: God, Wells Fargo, Social Security. 

Tomorrow I'll do a harder day hike, to get used to the elevation. I met a couple at dinner doing a similar but longer loop: 55 miles for her 55th birthday. 

It's early, but I'm going to turn in while the fire's still roaring. 

There's no place like home. 

Yo!

Thousands of tired, nerve-shaken, over-civilized people are beginning to find out that going to the mountains is going home; that wildness is a necessity; and that mountain parks and reservations are useful not only as fountains of timber and irrigating rivers, but as fountains of life.
—John Muir

rapids/raptors

On the way to yet another waterfall. I've gotten so blasé. The water's not even moving very fast.

Yet.

Outnumbered by families on bicycles. Sunriver is just too tidy for me, with its bumper cars and water slides and numbered roundabouts. 

I did love the raptors' demonstration at the High Desert Museum, especially this white barn owl flying nearby. 

And these jagged rocks. 

And the rushing water as the creek narrowed. 

It all pays off in the end. 

Miller time

Sometimes the best hike is the easiest. 

Today I walked around Miller Lake. It was a short detour on a gravel road off my route from Fort Klamath up to Sunriver. 

It was full of purple flowers and woodpeckers and butterflies. 

And lots of pine cones. 

Some logs had fallen in the water and formed an isosceles triangle. 

A few people fished, close to the campground at Digit Point. Otherwise I saw exactly one other person on the trail in two hours. 

Me, I just walked. And walked. All the way around. 

Not a bad way to spend an afternoon. 

deep blue sea

Crater Lake is the deepest lake in the U.S. at 1946 feet.

The rim at its highest is roughly the same 1900 feet above the water. 

It's also the clearest lake in the world with visibility of over 100 feet. 

When the sun comes out, so do the colors. 

I saw people swimming despite the surface temperature of 59 degrees. 

It was created not by a meteor but by a volcanic eruption 7700 years ago, 100 times that of Mt St Helens in 1980 and perhaps the largest eruption and collapse in history. 

Everything about Crater Lake is filled with superlatives. 

The formations have fanciful names like phantom ship (above). The ranger on our boat was a geologist who pointed out all the layers of sediment and lichens (the light green on the Pallisades below) and erosion and seepage. 

This is Wizard Island, the volcano inside the volcano. A bunch of tourists on a fishing trip were waiting to be picked up. Rainbow trout and salmon were introduced. Apparently there's now a bit of a crayfish problem(!). 

All in all, a pretty blissful spot. 

True blue in every direction. 

Surrounded by forests. You can see why the Klamath people considered it sacred. 

PS: I've wanted to go to Crater Lake for years. I've talked about with John and Jill in Ashland. I've flown over it. But what finally got me here was my trip to Quilotoa, a very pretty but much smaller crater lake at 13,000 feet elevation in Ecuador. My misadventures there are recorded in this post.

subterranean blues

Lava Beds strikes a delicate balance between spelunkers looking for adventure and tourists looking for an easy, packaged cave experience, all the while looking out for the delicate environment and real dangers of people disappearing and never being seen again.

I'm not that sure-footed, and I get claustrophobic, and I haven't always loved the caves I've been to in the past: Oregon Caves was cheesy and slippery and crowded, and Howe Caverns in upstate New York terrified me with the elevator hundreds of feet beneath the surface and the moment they turned the lights out in the boat and all the bats flew by. 

But I did love the cave filled with glow worms in New Zealand. And Carlsbad Caverns, a roadside attraction of a different era, filled me with awe. 

So today I visited four of the easy caves at Lava Beds and then went for a hike called the Big Nasty by Mammoth Crater. 

Pretty impressive, right? And even though it was a Saturday in summer, hardly anyone was there. You could wander in a cave and have the whole place to yourself. 

This is me : 

I had my Langer's "hot" pastrami baseball cap and a dorky headlamp and of course my iPhone flashlight, but you get the idea. 

My favorite was Valentine cave which has two arteries that meet up, like a heart or a subway tunnel. 

I did feel momentarily overwhelmed by the vastness of Skull cave. It had 20+-foot ceilings.

The people who went in ahead of me seemed to vanish into the darkness and their voices grew quieter and quieter. 

Or maybe it's that post-apocalyptic novel I'm reading, imagining living underground for years, with the skylight and the cave opening sealed. 

The Mushpot cave even has a classroom and lights on the floor, like an airplane. 

And warnings before you conk your head on the sharp lava rock. 

At the end of the day, it sure is nice to emerge back into the bright daylight, and take a deep breath, and appreciate the vastness of the sky.