North...to Alaska! Part 3. The final leg.

 

At Manzanita Lake, Lassen National Park.

We now were back in the USA. Our first night was spent at the Veteran's Memorial Park at Oroville, WA. It's a pretty big RV park, probably better suited for the big rigs but it was a handy location for us. Next stop was on the Yakima River, at the BLM campground at Big Pines. It turns out that this is a very popular place for the people from Yakima to stay and raft and party, so it wasn't exactly a peaceful stay in the wilderness. Lots of campers and rafters and generators. It was kind of disappointing so we weren't too sad to leave the next day.

We quickly passed through central Washington and entered Oregon. We passed through lots of vast farm fields and small country towns. We eventually came to Skull Hollow CG, a USFS site. Now this was a more remote site north of Redman, OR, with just a few campers. This was a nice place but with very few amenities. 

At Skull Hollow CG.

We took a side trip over to Smith Rock State Park and took an interesting hike down to the river and back. Off in the distance we could see a pall of smoke begin to rise from a wildfire to the wets.

Smoke from a wildfire in the west at Smith Rock State Park OR.

Our travels found us passing through Bend the next day, so we stopped for lunch at Deschutes Brewing. After lunch we drove down to La Pine State Park to camp. This is a huge park with many campsites. We got a campsite with electric hook-ups and as it was pretty warm we tried out the air conditioner; it actually worked! This CG had free showers so we used them, then had dinner in town, (at Andule's?), and it was pretty good!

We spent two nights at La Pine CG. The morning of our second day we visited some volcanic formations, including the "Big Obsidian Flow" at the Newberry National Volcanic Monument.

Hiking through the Big Obsidian Flow.

We left La Pine and headed for California! We stopped in Klamath Falls for groceries. It's always interesting to me to pass through Klamath Falls, since I spent a year there when I was in the Air Force. It still seems like a nice town to me, although it's quite a bit larger than it was in 1978!

We decided to head into Northeast California and to camp at Lava Beds National Monument. This is really a remote park, a long way from any large cities. The campground was really quite nice and virtually empty. We spent a couple of nights at Lava Beds, exploring several caves. Our first cave tour was disappointing because our headlamps were quite dim. We picked up some new batteries at the visitor center and that really improved our caving! We visited several caves but there are still more to see. We plan to come back to this place. 

At the visitors center, we heard of another Obsidian "flow" at nearby Glass Mountain and decided to check it out. After an interesting drive we came to the place and it was amazing! Tons of obsidian all around! At Newberry, there was a ban on removing any obsidian, but here you could take whatever you wanted! Shelly was thrilled, and we piled a bunch of obsidian into the back of the truck.

Also at this mountain was a huge deposit of some sort of white material, I think it was gypsum. It was really huge!

That's a large bulldozer in the middle of the gypsum deposit!

After that we drove out to Petroglyph Point to see the, well the Petroglyphs, of course. That night there was a terrific thunderstorm at our campsite; we had to take the awning down in a soaking rain! 

After our stay at Lava Beds, we continued south, heading to Lassen Volcanic National Park. While there were many open sites at Manzanita Lake, you had to book them on line! We were able to get online and book a pretty nice site. After setting up we strolled around Manzanita Lake. We weren't real hungry so we skipped dinner. The weather there was great with mild temperatures.

At Manzanita Lake.

Now we were almost home, one day's drive was all that remained. From Lassen Park we drove Highway 36 to Red Bluff, then turned down Highway 99. Just north of Chico, we visited the monastery's chapel at the New Clairvaux Vineyard. This chapel was originally built in Spain. William Randolph Hearst bought it and shipped it, stone by stone to is estate, but it was never reconstructed by him. Eventually it was bought by the order and brought to the monastery to be reconstructed and used as their chapel!

Now we took an easy drive down Highways 99 and 65 and soon pulled up to the condo in Rocklin!

In all, we had covered 9,532 miles in just over 9 weeks. We had no serious mechanical issues except for our battery charging issue early in the trip, and the sway bar failure which we replaced in Fairbanks. There were a few little issues like pulled rivets inside the trailer, I think these may have been the result of rough roads and the suspension our 15 year old torsion axle finally showing its age. Overall, we were pretty happy with the Casita. Also, the deluxe porta-potty was a good investment for this trip!

So it was a pretty successful trip. I don't know if we'll get back to Alaska anytime soon, but we definitely want to visit more of Canada in the future. 

Here's the link to this trip's photo album.