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.

Sailing for Christmas/Anniversary

For the Decemberween gift-giving holiday, I got Corrie and I sailing lessons. I. figured with all of her half-jokes about packing the kids onto a sailboat for a year, taht we should probably see if we have the constitution for such a thing.

Because it took a while to work our care for the kids---the lessons were over six solid hours on both a Saturday and a Sunday---we ended up doing Day 1 of the lessons on our anniversary this year, the Solstice, June 21st.

Sailing is...sailing is many things. If you're in a hurry all the time, try sailing. Nothing moves fast. You are, by necessity, just chillin'. We were on a Catalina 30 Tall Rig named the Bella Luna. The Catalina 30 is a very common sail boat (yacht) that can be purchased used for under $20k. The 'Tall Rig' title comes from the mast being taller than normal. Here's a picture I did NOT take:

But that's essentially what it looked like. It has the mainsail coming off the mast and attached to the boom, and the foresail, or jib, in front. It had some volume below decks:

That feels pretty spacious in this picture (maybe lol). There's a triangle-shaped bed way back there and a head on the left of the middle in this scene:

Corrie's at the sink in the kitchenette, looking over the checklist of ship-leaving stuff to do:

And there's what's called a quarter-birth next to the navigation table. Maybe a kid could nap there?

The first day I got all sorts of burned up (because, duh). Here I am at the helm, trying to maintain course on a rather choppy sea outside of the breakers:

The first day was for vocab and getting routines down through repetition. I was given the helm about two minutes into the trip, once we were clear of the slips in the marina, and from that time on, each of the four of us trainees would take 15 minute turns, timed out by Marc, the instructor.

Besides me and Corrie, there was another married couple, Cathy and Ed, with four grown kids and a handful of grandkids. Ed was interested in buying a boat and sailing recreationally (once fully retired after they sell their family business), and had been watching stuff on Youtube. He knew a fair amount, but Corrie and I had finished three of the eight lessons (er, homework) before boarding the ship, and had a pretty decent handle on vocabulary.

We tacked, we trimmed the mainsail, we even reefed the jib. We gybed, but I accidentally gybed a few times, which I learned was very dangerous, and in those conditions (wind at your back, but not super strong) a rookie should never be at the helm. Only, I learned that last night, before closing down the lesson we didn't finish before going to bed the night before the first lesson.

Day 2 was much more mellow. We motored up close to Queens Gate, the opening in the breakwater before the open ocean on the LB Port side (the LA Port has its own opening, called Angels Gate, a few miles away on the San Pedro side), but from there, we stayed inside the breaker, turning off the motor, and hit the wind. We hugged the breaker for a while, and moseyed on to Cabrillo Beach, in San Pedro. 

Marc had said that the motoring to Queens Gate and turning north, and then setting to sail, would save us 45 minutes. At the water off Cabrillo Beach, we dropped anchor, and ate some food. It had been smooth sailing all day so far, and here Corrie and I both had a visceral reaction to that phrase: smooth sailing.

Above is a picture of the Long Beach Light, as they call it. It sits at the edge of Queens Gate, and is an icon of maritime Long Beach.

Below was one of the tankers you keep your eye on for, let's say, the entirety of your fifteen minute stretch of being at the helm. As we started to cruise by, I noticed the red-ensign flag, but was able to make out the Indian flag in the canton, meaning it was an Indian ship. I might have even yelped a little, applying something I remembered from my Flags and Logos blog days.

But then, eh, you could easily see it says Mumbai and has Hindi writing. Oh well.

The views of town were obviously nice:

So...sailing.

Imagine sitting in a hot tub. Nice, right? Now, try imagining all the water gone. Um...okay. The fiberglass seating, is, sittable? It isn't fancy and awesome, but you can do it if you need to. 

Now imagine two couches, the three seaters like we all had as kids, facing each other. So...if you make those two couches out of fiberglass and put them in the ocean at traveling at 4 miles an hour, that's sailing.

Four or five knots, that was mostly it. We even got to six knots, and that felt fast, but oftentimes the feel has more to do with the direction of the wind. 

We did a heave to, which consists of the helmsman spinning the wheel, causing a 180 change in direction and loss of much speed. The plan is to be able to pick up someone who's fallen overboard.

Also, I guess I didn't know how sails work. I thought the wind just pushed you along. That's incorrect, despite how it looks. I was curious how anyone could sail into the wind, or how people could said almost anytime forever, basically. But then I learned the physics.

The sail works just like an airplane's wing, an airfoil. It you put a piece of curved fabric into some windy conditions, the wind will travel over the curved outer side (the windward side) faster than on the leeward (inner) side. This creates lower pressure on the underside---leeward side---which propels the sail, and whatever's attached to it, in the direction it's pointing, regardless of the wind direction.

The only thing is, you can't go directly into the wind. Off to the side just a smidge, sure, and one of the hardest is totally with the wind. That seemed so counterintuitive to me---that with the wind was so hard. That's where you get the accidental gybes. And, because the feeling of speed is due to how the wind feels for you on board, if you're going fully with the wind (a run), but the wind isn't crazy strong, it will feel like you're sitting still, not going anywhere. You can kinda see the water moving by, but the air feels still.

But sailing is like sitting on a hard couch, getting across town about as fast as your buddies can push the couch. If you're used to instantly getting things, getting songs or videos, or getting news, or getting things done, sailing will mess that all up. 

It was peaceful if not relaxing. Feeling the connection to every other sailor throughout the ages was heavy.

We may go out again and continue our lessons...you can't rent a sailboat without being a certified skipper!