I decided to go to Lassen Volcanic National Park because Hey! everyone knows volcanoes are fascinating. The power and uncertainty and the amazing amount of heat produced all form these magical images in our heads of otherworldly places that we just can’t seem to fathom might actually exist in our real world.
Well, Lassen is definitely one of those places. Visitors can go from the normal wilderness with trees and animals to places where sulfur steam is floating out from inside rock faces and super heated mud is boiling to the surface in large mud pots as they are called. It was truly a fascinating journey through many levels of nature.
We started at the visitor center and asked about some accessibility advice. Unfortunately, the one place we really wanted to visit, Bumpass Hell, that had a boardwalk that takes you through a series of hot springs, fumaroles, and remnants of volcanic activity. That being said there is so much more to explore in this park that we were far from disappointed.
The road through the park is about 30 miles and it took us nearly an entire afternoon to travel because we were stopping at so many places to take pictures of the amazing views. We started our journey outside the visitor center and headed up the road. When I say up I really mean up. We topped out at just over 8000 feet in elevation.
I had forgotten how my wheelchair air cushion reacts with higher altitude so by the time we got to where we started back down I was getting a little worried it might pop. Luckily that didn’t happen.
One thing I didn’t expect to see at the end of June and in a volcanic park was snow and I mean lots of snow. We were up around 6000 – 8000 feet in elevation and there were snow fields. Coming from Maine and living near Mt. Washington I obviously know this is possible but it never occurred to me I would see it in California this time of year. There were even lakes that were still iced over. This of course just added to the beauty of the park and made for some very spectacular photos.
Given my proclivity toward challenging myself, I kept thinking it would be really epic to push myself up the road and maybe even get to climb some of the rock faces throughout the park. It’s probably not possible but I would like to think I could some day.
We concluded our trip through the park staying in Burney California which just happened to work out that it was at the right end of the road for us to arrive at our hotel without driving back through the park. We were a little worried about that because we had no cell service to check the GPS until we left the park. I randomly chose to go right instead of left and sure enough, I chose correctly.
The next day since we were 2 miles from Burney Falls State Park we decided to go check it out. What a spectacular place in a different way of course. Hands down one of the most beautiful waterfalls we have ever seen. Niagara Falls would be the first which we also saw on this trip. The park was generally accessible but definitely had some places I could not go without major time and lots of crawling. Maybe another time I will make a go of it but we just didn’t have the time nor the energy that day. We did, however, find a really great trail that leads to the back side of the top of the falls and near the Pacific Crest Trail. This was another random find. We had all but given up that there was any less than accessible trails for me to try out when I decided to try going a different way before we left. It turned out to be an awesome workout and a beautiful scenic trail. It was definitely not “accessible” by ADA standards but as usual, I made it accessible with some brute strength and some fancy wheeling haha.
It is hard to say what was the best part of the trip up to this point but this day was definitely near the top.
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lassen is at location [lat: 40.49766 lon: -121.4206552]