100 miles of forest roads in a weekend – pt2
A peaceful night at Hay Meadows is where we left off in the story, although I did leave out the hordes of mosquitoes due to the marshy landscape just a few feet out our door. Kerri and I are just beginning to accept that it is the season for those F’n things. For the life of me I can’t figure why they exist at all.
Anyway… we survived the mosquitoes at night and rested peacefully until morning. After coffee, we decided to walk some of the trail leading off into the woods. Moose came with while Byron worked on his beauty some more. It was a pleasant 1-mile hike out into the woods, along tiny ponds and meadows, crossing a small stream or two… and more mosquitoes of course. I was in no mood for a proper hike, just a stroll, so once the trail began going uphill I opted to turn around to return to out weekend’s adventures.
We had the majority of the day (Sunday) to do what we wanted. We did not have a huge number of miles to travel before out next hopeful location to camp, so we took our time doing just about everything. It was nearing noon by the time we left the meadow, passed by Echo Lake again, and immediately stumbled onto another fantastic spot overlooking the lake. Not only did we both wish we had found this one the night prior due to no mosquitoes, it also had enough cell signal to work from. No biggy though, we noted it and moved on towards more lakes to our North.
We arrived at Caribou Lake, found a spot to camp, but decided to move on to see what else was right around the corner (lessons learned). An hour was spent looking around random dirt roads, but in the end we returned to Caribou Lake. Not because it was the most scenic place, but because it was the largest lake nearby and Kerri really wanted to put the kayak in the water (which we haven’t done since Baja). That would take place the next morning. First, we had an entire afternoon and evening of just hanging out. Kerri foraged for mushrooms, the dogs played in the water, and eventually I laid down for a quick nap to reset myself. In the evening Kerri and I setup the kayak for an early paddle in the morning, prepared a simple meal, and settled in for a night of Yahtzee again before calling it a night. The area was quite through out the night and once again we had the place all to ourselves.
In the morning we stuck to the plan to put the ‘yak in the water for a lap around Caribou Lake. While it was good to get back out on the water, the lake itself was simply okay, and barely 30 minutes later we had paddled the entire thing. In the end it took more time to setup and repack the kayak then it took to paddle the small lake, but that’s just fine.
Again, we took our time getting going. We were not in a huge rush to end our weekend so it was late into the morning before we got rolling again. We still had miles of dirt road to travel, but unfortunately the destination now was back to an asphalt highway where we could make the hour-or-so drive to Burney, where we planned to stay the work week.
In the end, over the three days nights and nights since we left Mineral, California, we traveled more than 100 miles on forest roads around Lassen Volcanic National Park. It really was a fun little weekend away from the asphalt and the rest of the world.
This national forest has really taken us for an adventure, and we have been falling for it in recent weeks. So much so that we decided to stay this extra week just to explore already. But now we decided to stay a third week in the general area so we can explore even more of the national forests of California before rolling into Oregon. This I have mixed feelings about – the recent months exploring the state have been great, but I’m all for getting out of CA too.
