Cabin Trip 2025

Back in 2021, it was Fire Season, but this year, after last year's fire season, where we feared that much of the surrounding forest and maybe even the cabins themselves were lost, was different. There wasn't smoke in the air, like back in 2021; the air was clear and warm and smelling just like we all remember: pine forrest. The fire last year did not destroy the Cabin, nor did burn all the surrounding wilderness, but it did get very close.

The Gouge

A large gouge, it looked like, was first burned and then cleared, so it looks like a stumpy clearing, along the road the Cabin's on (HWY 172). This dense forest, and much of the surrounding forest, has been burned. I'll revisit this sadness at the end.

I took a few establishing pictures of the upstairs, as I was in a nostalgic mood and thankful my kids are probably starting to remember things like the smells and the sounds of the squeaky stairwell.

Camille chose the big bed in the room

Cass chose the Boss Bed by the stairs

I generally liked the alcove bed...

Anyway...

Corrie has a multiyear plan to do all of the hikes in Lassen Volcanic Park, which is awesome. We never really did too many hikes beyond Bumpass Hell when I was a kid. We saw Hot Rock and Sulfur Works, but real hiking wasn't exactly my family's activity. At least I don't remember. I remember being told, with my brother, to go head to the woods and not to return for a few hours. Reading and traipsing around the forest, that's what much of our time at Mill Creek was like.

But each year we're up here---me and Corrie and the kids---we do ever more hikes, working opur way through the park's many trails.

The first day we went to the park, Lassen National Volcanic Park, we drove in our usual gate, the south-east entrance, and drove around to the Cold Boiling Lake hike. 

We stopped for photo ops at Helen Lake, still with significant ice coverage, even as it was June 28th:

That volcano takes fantastic pictures, by the by.

The Cold Boiling Lake is a lake that is swimmable---as all lakes in the park are swimmable, except the ones that are heavy with geo-thermal activity, and swimming in them will likely result in you being dead.

The Cold Boiling Lake has some vents underneath that have been venting carbon dioxide in small amounts, so the water isn't any warmer, but the surface bubbles in spots, like it's boiling. So...cool, I guess?

The hike, though, was kind of a bummer, in the following sense:

It had been ravaged by the fires the year before. There was no shade, which we understand and all, but look above! How quaint and secluded and surrounded by wilderness would that hike have been? How long will it take to look that way again? 100 years? 200?

Anyway, the lake was pristine and beautiful:

The next day we went to the park (er, the next day), we drove on to Summit Lake, did the trail around it, and then the kids got in and swam around. It was a rather glorious and warm day.

Here Corrie is with the kids as I finished the last fifth of the walk, got the car, and drove over to the beach zone:

It was a campground with a Day Use area, and that's where I parked the second time, moving from one Day Use spot to another. We decided to all come back and swim together as a family a few days later.

The next Park trip we decided to drive into the park from Chester, the town 20+ miles away to the east. It drives up the Warner Valley and branches off to two separate southeast entrances, one for Juniper Lake and one for Warner Valley. 

Since the Juniper Lake region, with four easy going hikes we were looking forward to, was fully shut down due to fire, we went with Warner Valley and the mostly chill Boiling Sulfur Lake hike.

The drive was pretty and unassuming, and shocking how well it was preserved, as the fire hit much of the environs. In the beginning of the walk, the water features were slamming:

And the little boardwalk was very nice, transporting you to a Ghibli movie:

But the fire scars were serious:

Can you imagine how dense and beautiful and awesome this hike was twenty months ago? In that picture, you wouldn't see any blue sky. 

This lake (with Lassen in the background) is one you would not want to swim in:

The sulfur steam coming off it were powerful, and keeping upwind---weather permitting---was the plan.

Not every trip was to Lassen Park. Some were to our little slice of Mill Creek. The fire made the hike down to the creek stones easier, and then we traipsed around the water:

It was the next day at that same location, when we saw river otters. In my 45 years of going to this place, I never even heard that we had a specie of river otter in North America. But on this day, we saw a family taking a baby out for a swimming lesson, only for the baby to nearly get washed away. It was magical. (The baby was definitely safe, in case anyone's concerned.)

Another park trip had us doing the Paradise Meadow hike, and then planning on heading back to Summit Lake to swim.

We stopped again at Helen Lake to throw snowballs (and rocks) onto the ice:

Paradise Meadow was a hike that was untouched by fire:

It's pretty, and not very long, but mostly up the entire time:

You follow a creek that oscillates between tumbling and rushing:

But it's all so beautiful:

Near the end there was a clearing in the woods. Itw as smallish and covered in ponderosa pine needles, and I thought to myself: It's nice, and all, but all that walking up for this? But the path kept going, so I just kept going. It turned off to the right, and a green glow pushed into the woods:

And when you get through those last trees, the high marshy plateau was breathtaking:

We tried to keep it mellow for the 4th of July. I took the following picture explaining the rather robust backstory for Candyland, a game we played multiple times an evening:

When we were kids, my brother and I would put peanuts in the shell on the deck bannister to lure the bluejays. They would fly down, spy us with cocked heads, and happily snatch up the peanuts. Sometimes we'd even shoot them with water pistols, but they never stopped coming.

I always wondered why our bluejays did not look like the bluejays on the logo of the baseball team. Ours had black faces and not a shred of white anywhere. When I looked it up, it turns out they're Stellar Jays, named for a guy named Stellar. That's what we get on this side of the country.

But, a few years ago, we saw zero jays. Our last trip, in 2023: zero jays. It was sad. You couldn't even hear the call.

This trip I heard the call a few times, and even snapped a picture of one out the window at the kitchen sink:

They weren't everywhere like when we were kids, but it was nice to see them around, even if it was just a brief view.

One of the activities we'd do as kids during this time of year was head to the pancake breakfast. Down at the general store/resort, they would set up large griddle tops outside and spend hours making pancakes, raising money for the volunteer fire department. I remember it being well attended as a kid, and again, this year, it was well attended:

They even had a parade, woith firefighters and kids on bikes and, visible below, the great Lady's Kazoo Concerto:

The kids even got to give a high-five to Smokey Bear:

(Cass sure looks like he's enjoying himself...)

Our next trip to the park would be our last, and we made sure to stop at some of the easy-to-get-to classics we'd skipped so far, like Sulfur Works:

The video is more telling...

Fumarole

The ice at Helen Lake had receded quite a bit, too:

We finally drove around to Hot Rock:

And parked at Manzanita Lake, at the northern entrance on the main road. We hiked around the lake and then decided to kayak it if they had available kayaks.

See? He enjoyed some stuff...

This volcano just doesn't take a bad picture! Along the Manzanita Lake hike:

And from the kayak:

Cass and I shared one kayak, and Corrie and Camille had the other. I was nervous about capsizing, but everything went okay. I was really only scared the car fob wouldn't work; the lake is, like, four feet deep for over 80% of the surface.

Another tradition we keep up was the "Stump Picture." A huge tree had been cut down in the '60s, and my mom and her siblings and cousins had their pictures taken on the new stump. Years later, in the '80s, the tradition was kept up, as the stump aged. Now, the stump is just a soft memory of it's former mighty status, and we can only fit a single kid on it:

We found another stump, though, of a possibly 250 year old tree. This was in the Gouge area close to the Cabin.

The bark was as thick as Cass's hand in some places:

This was part of the Dealing with Fire and an Ever Changing Climate section of the trip. It was basically an ongoing situation, but the reality has never been so close. The smoky air in '21 was certainly real, but the woods close by seemed protected and off limits. But not now. 

The piles of heavy timber sit past the Gouge, both within a mile of the Cabin. They seem to come from the clearing of burned trees down the way, in the area of the road closure on HWY 172. This old growth lumber will provide some good wood for construction purposes, but it all needs to be trucked away to the fancy new lumber mills:

Boggles the imagination...

Cass and his stack:

These are some big, former trees:

I didn't want to end this on the FIRE part, a downer. When I was writing the into, days back, I put the pictures down here at the end and figured I'd leave it until it was time.

Now that it's time, I want to talk about something else. Anything else, really. 

We brought the kids' bikes, and they rode like crazy. Cass got a flat halfway through our visit, so later Camille would ride alone on the street for fifty feet in both directions. We painted watercolors and played games. We read books and enjoyed good cooking. We never pulled the television out, and we never handed out the tablets.

In fact, the kids never even asked. No TV, no phone, and no service for our digital devices. For 11 days, my kids got the true 1987 experience. And they loved it.