2003/10 Lassen Peak trip - Painted Dunes |
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Saturday was my last day there. I took an early walk around the nearby Manzanita Lake
and watched the sun rise over Chaos Crags above the lake. There were lots of mule deer about but no people.
There had been a big storm last Christmas and that had brought many big trees down, damaging the park buildings and wiping out the bridge across the creek. I waded across but then realized I could 
have crossed much more easily on another fallen tree.
I wanted to take a look at the big cinder cone I’d seen from the top of Lassen Peak. It was about a day’s hike from the park road, but there was a closer dirt road outside the park that I could start from. This went to Butte Lake, a normal pretty lake on one side, but with a 30-foot high wall of black 
lava on the other. The trail went through a forest of big pines, along 
the edge of the lava, rather like walking alongside a big block of apartments.
The cinder cone is enormous, 600 foot high, and almost a perfect cone. 
The trail winds up the cone, but it’s almost straight up. The surface is loose ash and clinker, rather like climbing a very steep sand dune, murder on the calves. A family was halfway up the cone when I started, and they hadn’t moved much further when I passed them. They looked to be in a lot of pain, but they did make it eventually.
The view from the top was weird. I saw the mountains, trees, and lakes, as expected, but also a great swath of black lava smothering the valley, and then a blanket of ash covering some of the lava. The ash had formed the Painted Dunes, like giant moguls, with vivid red streaks from the minerals in the ash.
The cone has a crater, a very big ‘ole in the middle of the cone, about a third the height 
of the cone. I decided to have lunch in the bottom of the crater. There was nothing special down there, just some larger pieces of clinker, but it was a strange spot, with a steep 200 foot wall all around, and no sound coming down from the rim. The climb out took a while, as I had to herringbone up the ash, rather like climbing in snow with short skis.
Amazingly, some trees manage to grow in the ash, and there were quite a few birds using them, including 
some mountain bluebirds. I trudged down the backside of the cone and across the fields of ash. I could see some teenagers running down the main trail. They were flying. If they’d tripped the results would have been ugly!
I barely had any legs left, but on the way back to Manzanita I came across the Subway Cave, and had to go take a look. It’s a giant lava tube with a high ceiling, big enough that it looks like a subway tunnel, and hard to navigate through with just a small headlight. Other than being a big tube there wasn’t much to see.
Back at Manzanita, I walked around the Chaos Jumbles and then took one last loop of 
the lake to watch the sunset light up the mountains. This meant crossing the creek again, this time in the dark. I remembered the tree for crossing but found that there was a chunk missing in the middle where the tree had broken. It’s probably an easy jump in daylight but I found myself crawling across the gap trying not to dangle any cameras in the water below, and asking myself how I keep getting in these predicaments.
I had to be up really early next morning to pack up tent and gear and drive back to Reno for a noon flight. It was icy cold, perhaps the end of the good weather. There was little traffic through the mountains, but there were hordes of bikes going north through the desert on 395. Reno’s Street Vibrations rally had ended and they were on their way back to Northern California.