Lassen Volcanic National Park is the first stop on our month-long road trip from Seattle, down through California, Nevada, Utah, and Colorado, all the way to Milwaukee.
Lassen is an often overlooked park - it's a bit secluded and overshadowed by California's other more renowned national parks like Yosemite and Joshua Tree. But Lassen is a unique spot featuring all four types of volcanoes (cinder cone, composite, shield, and lava dome) in one park!
We spent two days here, but the weather kept us from doing some of the exploring we had planned to do. Our first full day in Lassen, we drove the main park road to see the viewpoints and features of the park.
We stopped at Sulphur Works, an area that reminded me of Yellowstone.
Next, we hiked the Kings Creek Canyon trail which was rainy and moody. We were told by some other hikers that we'd just missed seeing a brown bear on the trail (but there are no brown/grizzly bears in California, so it must have been a big black bear)!
Some more views of the park:
The last thing we did this day we to hike the Lava Tubes - a short hike through the pitch black tunnel formed by rushing lava!
(Very hard to get a picture because it was so dark!)
Day 2:
We hiked Cinder Cone trail, one of the types of volcanoes in the park:
It was super windy and cold hiking up and looking over the crater on the top! The trail (you can see it on the right side of the dome above) was steep and the terrain was basically soft gravel. It was definitely a workout, but so cool when we got to the top!
Lassen was an awesome start to our trip, even though the weather limited some of our activities. After a couple of days there, we headed across Nevada to Great Basin National Park!
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