Water, Trees, and Mountains

We've spent the last couple of weeks in Northern California and Oregon. When we left Lassen Volcanic National Park, we drove to the Pacific and camped just south of Redwood National Park in Elk Country RV Park. You can see below how it deserves its name.

This wild herd of elk spend much of their time hanging out in the campground - perhaps their version of "glamping."

We'd seen sequoias when we were visiting Yosemite, and were anxious to compare them to the coastal redwoods. A number of the redwoods we saw rivaled the sequoias in girth, but they really towered above the forest floor. We spent several days hiking through different groves, as well as exploring the rugged coastal shore.

Unfortunately, we were not the first to discover these wonders. It appears that Paul Bunyan and his blue ox Babe made it there before us.

We continued up the Pacific coast into southern Oregon, staying near Oregon Dunes National Recreation Area. It's an area of remote beaches and the highest coastal sand dunes in the US, some reaching 500 feet high.

Oregon Dunes is also a popular area for dune buggies. We'd booked ourselves into a KOA for our visit, and when we arrived we discovered that we were the only campers there without sand toys and had arrived just in time for the annual "Dune Fest."

While we were in the area, we also explored other portions of the southern Oregon coast, including the fantastic onshore and offshore rock formations.

We then headed inland to visit Crater Lake National Park, site of a large volcano, Mount Mazama, that erupted and then collapsed 7,700 years ago. Snow melt and rain eventually filled the caldera with exceptionally pure blue water. It is the deepest lake in the US. A small "cinder cone" in the lake is all that remains of the once mighty volcano. We did some hikes and found wildflowers that had just now (in July!) erupted in full bloom. We also explored the exposed ash fields that were under a thin layer of soil supporting thick forests. The amount of ash produced by the eruption would have covered the entire state of Oregon to a depth of 8 inches.

Crater Lake is also a designated International Dark Sky area, and we stayed late one night to watch the sunset and take in the stars.

It was finally time to head back toward the coast for a planned week-long visit to Portland, OR. More about that in our next blog post!

NOTE: To date, we've logged just under 5,500 miles of RV driving, plus another few thousand exploring with the Fittata.