Day 22

It was a pretty cold night! We woke up this morning to a beautiful day. The campground here is a bit of a “dust bowl”, so we've got dust all over the tent and ourselves. At least on the bright side, after tonight, we won't need the tent anymore.

After breakfast, we headed out to the visitor's center and watched a short movie about the park. After that, we started driving the main park road, stopping at several viewpoints and interesting areas along the way. There was a pretty bad forest fire here last year, and there are some very large areas of the forest that show the effects of that fire.

When we arrived at the Lassen Peak Trail, we found out that it was only open part of the way. They're reconstructing the trail, so we wouldn't be able to go all the way to the top. Based on that, we decided not to bother doing the hike at all.

We then moved on to the park's main geo-thermal feature, an area known as Bumpass Hell. To see this area requires a three mile round trip hike. The terrain wasn't too rough, but it was pretty hot. When we reached the geo-thermal area, we walked around and viewed all of the “smelly smoking holes”, a term coined by Patty when we were in Yellowstone National Park quite a few years ago. We then drove the rest of the park road to the Southern entrance. There wasn't too much else to see or do, so we simply turned around and drove back through the park to our campground.

We spent the rest of the afternoon playing games and then we cooked our last camp dinner of the trip. We're planning to wake up very early tomorrow, eat a quick breakfast, get packed up and hit the road. We have a LONG drive to our first return trip destination of Rawlins, WY.

Along the way tomorrow, I'll try to post yesterday and today's blog posts.