The Cabin, 2023

Drives to the Farm take multiple days (in some cases), but the drive to the Cabin is half as long. We used to make the trip in two days as well, though. We'd drive to my brother's in Sacramento, hang out for an afternoon and evening, and then head up to Tehama County and the Cabin at Mill Creek.

This trip we skipped that, mainly because we're afraid of my brother's dog. We passed Norm and his boys on our way, and since we took Hwy 99 instead of I-5, we passed more symbolically than in reality. We met up with our guest, Lauren, and her dogs in Chico for dinner, then skedaddled the last hour up to the Cabin.

Off the deck, into the wilderness

Trips to the Cabin are always a special time. My mother came here as a kid with her parents, and her grandmother was here often. Then she brought my brother and I while her mom was here. Then I brought my kids, when she would be there as the grandparent. So it goes.

So many memories: the smells; the sounds of the creaky stairs; the feel of the ashy dirt and volcanic rocks under foot; the other parking spot---seen above with our friend Lauren's car. I'm sure I've mentioned them before.

The Cabin itself has gone through renovations before (sorta), but mainly it remains a beacon on the edge of the wilderness for those of us who get to visit. The scale changes as you get older, but the magic doesn't.

During these visits, we always head to the park, and by park I mean Lassen Volcanic National Park. We try to find hikes that we haven't done, or just tool around and check out the sights.

Mt. Lassen behind a meadow's creek

This year on the first day in the Park, we just drove around and pointed out things to Lauren. She brought her two dogs that day, and while the Park is dog-friendly, they're not allowed on un-paved trails.

Besides the Park, we usually walk from the Cabin---sometimes drive---to Mill Creek proper, it's comfortable rushing audible from the Cabin itself.

Creek selfie with Camille

Everything is so picturesque. The creek is fast but not obscenely deep, so finding a spot and getting all wet on the river stones is a nice beatable challenge, if occasionally painful.

Back at the Park and we climbed Hot Rock:

Hot Rock was part of the dacite plug that stopped up the top of Lassen's plug-dome. In the eruption of 1914, it was ejected in the first massive blow. The explosion and excess heat started an avalanche of rock and water, having melted the snow that lingered on the volcano, took the rock above, the Hot Rock, five miles clear of the site. The name, Hot Rock, comes from the fact that it still sizzled in the surrounding water 40 hours after the eruption.

My memories had more cold mornings and warm days, had my grandma making hot cocoa on the wood burning stove. For us the mornings are cool and the days are hot, likely due to our July trips nowadays and June trips as a kid. But it is hot enough and bright enough for the kids to get popsicles after dinner and before bed. Look at this good boy sharing with his little sister:

Cass was definitely luvvy-duvvy with Nelson, Lauren's rough-and-tumble puppy, almost the same size as the Boy. They took a special shine to each other on this trip:

Since the Park's entrance pass is good for a week, making multiple trips to the nearby gem is easily justifiable. One day Corrie and Lauren decided to hike Cinder Cone. A cinder cone volcano is specific type of volcano, one that has very regular slopes and a nearly symmetric roundness. The smooth sides may look nice from a distance, but the terrain is loose shale and gravel, and the lack of trees give you no cover.

We knew that Camille would never finish the hike, and Cass may be able to, but the plan was for me to hang out at Butte Lake, another attraction at the Cinder Cone entrance. One issue was getting there.

The Park's southwest entrance is a fifteen-twenty minute drive from the Cabin, and it takes about an hour to drive all the way through to the northwest exit, about 30 miles away. To get to Butte Lake and Cider Cone, the fastest route is to drive through the park, head east once you're above the park, eventually turning south on a random road that loses its pavement quickly, and driving for six miles back into the park to the Butte Lake campground and various trailheads.

Corrie and Lauren made it all the way to the top, which is fantastic. It was a brutal hike, but they persevered. Me and the kids played in the lake for a few minutes, but found things to do. The lake was frigid and got deep fast, which made getting used to it easy. My phone was dead, so my man camera was out of commission.

The last major hike we all did this season was the Mill Creek Falls hike. The trailhead is at the visitor's center at the south entrance, and the hike is doable if robust. This year, the Dixie Fire remnants were visible, as the last time we did this hike, it was shadier:

The Falls themselves were beautiful, but I expected more water, especially after this past season:

Hiking out follows. Camille, at 3 years old, made it a total of 2.5 miles of the 3.5 mile hike. You can see her with Corrie below, as the indomitable Cass leads the way:

It was around the end of that last incline when she'd finally had enough, and I had her on my shoulders for the last mile. Whew.

Another tradition of any Cabin visit is Reading Time. As kids who wandered inside from hours of forest adventuring, my brother and I were directed to the pile of kids books---or our own---and told that if we didn't want to go back to the woods, we needed to read. This trip I found a couple of books that held my attention for a bit. One was from a stack of kids books upstairs; another was on the adult bookshelf and I recognized a s a recommendation from my literary critic dad:

I seem to remember my brother talking to me about Ice Station Zebra, and inside can be found a boarding pass stub---back before phones had QR codes that you'd use to get on planes there was an actual boarding pass that would be torn, and the stub you'd receive---with Dan's name on it from a Denver to Sac flight he made years back. The book was in a stack of kids books upstairs. Labeled a thriller, I picked it up and felt like I could keep reading it, begrudgingly, if I had little else to keep me occupied. It wasn't bad, it's just wordy genre fiction that uses characters reading newspaper articles to divulge exposition. As I'm American and not British, I identify with the Yankee crew of the submarine and not the first-person narrator, a liar and likely spy/intelligence officer. Alistair MacLean wrote many books that were later made into movies, and he even worked on screenplays, this being one of them. I didn't finish it, or take it with me.

The second book there, Tinkers by Paul Harding, was a book my dad suggested for me, which is why I grabbed it off the shelf when I found it. These two books couldn't be more different, as the only thing similar about them is their slim page count. Tinkers starts with a dying man on a gurney in his living room as his family toils around him awaiting the end. He starts hallucinating the roof collapsing in on him, exposing the room above, and then he goes through the floor, peering up at the two holes above. Then the roof caves in, followed by the blue sky and then the black starry skies of night. Meanwhile there's another strain of narrative that is the dying man's father, and how he used to ride a horse-drawn cart into the backwoods of America selling sundries of all sorts: needles, thread, washers, screws, soaps... It's good and creative, but didn't grip me hard enough to take it home.

Two kids---ages 7 and 3---kept me busy enough that only the best books would have wrested my attention, and since I've been working on my book, I haven't been reading so much...not full on novel commitment anyway.

For the post about the Farm, I summed it all up quickly, as we returned in a single day, 18 hours and two time-zones and all. This trip we did our normal thing, only not seeing as many people as usual. We usually see Dan and Pita, Norm and his boys, then head to the Cabin, then head down the coast and see Sam and Aurrie in Berkeley, Donny and Ana in San Jose, then Ryan in San Luis before heading home. We almost did that, this trip. Well, mostly did, anyway.

The Cabin is magical in a different way than the Farm. Smaller and possibly more claustrophobic than the Farm, the Cabin has more magical wilderness all around. Both are special in birth-right ways for our kids, and that's pretty special.