Our first big adventures -- the South loop
The thermometer in the van read 114 when we came up out of the lava tube caves at Shasta. Inside the caves it had been cool and dark, a chamber where someone had rigged colored lights to swell with a piece of orchestral music while we stood in it. Outside, the air was pushing toward 120. And the air conditioner, which had been dead since March, was the hot topic of support conversations with Roadtrek.
We had left Portland on June 13th, the day after our two kids finished school. This trip was the prototype, the longest stretch we had ever spent living in the van. A test run before we do it for real and don’t come back to a house. The morning we left, I filled the propane for the first time at a U-Haul, ran bleach through the water tank, drained it, and refilled it through a new filter. Then we packed the van the way you’d pack it to actually live in it, not the way you pack for a weekend, and found out what that looks like. It looks like everything having to be somewhere.
We slept the first night in Roseburg. The next day we reached Ashland, walked along the Rogue, and stayed the night with an old friend, an author and entrepreneur who’d been down in the south valley for years, his kids grown now. I slept in the van. Erika and Big and Little slept inside. At breakfast we all chatted and then our host took us by a coffee and co-working space he’d opened downtown called White Rabbit, a room full of regulars who knew him by name. He’d built the payments system himself and had software agents helping him manage the menu and the signage. Then we went south into the scorching heat.
The night after Shasta we found a place in a valley town with air conditioning that worked on purpose. Pool, burgers, a load of laundry. In the morning, packing the van to leave, I opened it up and the AC was running full blast for the first time. It had turned itself on in the night after numerous attempts. Sadly, it wouldn’t shut off and my only option was to flip the breaker.
It was a quick ride from Redding to Lassen’s entrance — around 30 minutes.
At Lassen we camped at Manzanita Lake. That first afternoon a family near us at Summit Lake offered the kids their paddle board, and Big took it and didn’t really come back. By the end of the day he had worked his way most of the way around the lake, far enough out that he was a small shape against the far trees. Little took the board too, but in short runs, close to shore, where she could put a hand down and touch bottom. That evening there were neighbor kids at the campground and hours of running between sites, then s’mores, then the parents talking by the dying fire while the kids finally wore out.
The next day we hiked up to Bumpass Hell, five miles round-trip on the alternate route to Bumpass Hell because Bumpass Hell Trail is closed. The alternate path started at Kings Picnic Area/Trailhead and was mostly uphill to the scenic overlook. The first stretch had been opened up by the Dixie Fire years back, so there was almost no shade where we most wanted it. We passed Cold Boiling Lake, water cold and faintly working at the surface. Where the trail crossed snowmelt streams we stopped and soaked our shirts so we could carry the cold a little way up the dry part. Little was carried for much of the climb.
The top is the full version of what Sulfur Works hints at down by the road. Bumpass Hell is the largest hydrothermal basin in the park, a bowl of steaming ground and milky pools and the smell of sulfur sitting in the heat, the boardwalk threading over near-boiling water. It is older than the rest of the mountain. The place is still cooking and full of wonder.
We came down and ate dinner at a burger spot off the highway, then camped by a river. The kids went straight to the water. Big studied the creek and decided the center channel, where it ran faster and looked smoothest, was the interesting part. Little stepped in to follow and learned in about one second that the rocks on a creek bottom are not padded. I pulled her out and carried her back to camp with a couple of bumps and bruises and the lesson fully understood.
The third day we went back to the visitor center and admitted that Lassen Peak itself, the long climb to the summit, is not the right hike for this family right now. Rain came in overnight. We decided to head north.
We spent a day and a night at Lava Beds National Monument, which has its own full write-up here, so I’ll keep it short. The AC settled itself in the parking lot there. Standing by the van I heard a clicking, the breaker-off system trying to start anyway, refusing to stay dead. I went after it, reset the whole electrical system to make it stop, and somewhere in the resetting I accidentally fixed the thing. The AC worked the rest of the trip, on command, off command. By then the heat wave had already broken at Lassen. The van fixed itself the week it no longer mattered, which felt about right.
Crater Lake we came at from the rim. You pull up to the visitor center and the lake is just there below you, that blue, and this year nobody is on it. Cleetwood Cove is closed through the 2028 season, so the boat tours aren’t running and the Wizard Island landings aren’t either, and the water sits there flat and unbroken. It is a lake you look at. That turned out to be enough.
We took three nights at Mazama Campground. It’s right by the South entrance to the park. One was a rest day, just Annie’s Trail looping around the campground and nowhere we had to be. The last evening we ate dinner up at the lodge, a good view and ordinary food and a server who kept the kids’ waters full without being asked, and the kids were asleep in the van by the time we got back.
I woke at 3 in the morning and stepped outside. The sky over Mazama was all stars, the kind of dark you don’t get within a hundred miles of a city. We drove up to the rim at 4:30 to watch the sun come up over the lake at 5. Sadly, as Jodie Foster said in Contact “they should’ve sent a poet.”
Bend was next. A natural history museum on the south edge of town, where Big found a live newt in a tank and a teenage volunteer who knew about it, and the two of them talked for a long time while the rest of us drifted over to listen. The volunteer told him the Mazama Newt lives in Crater Lake and nowhere else on earth, and Big told him about the petition. Big has a petition going to list the Mazama Newt as endangered, and standing at that tank was the first time I’d seen him pitch it to a stranger. Afterward there was a raptor show at the same museum, a barn owl and a falcon and a vulture worked by handlers while someone told us what we were looking at, and we sat through the whole thing. We stayed two more days in Bend with family friends, hit the local pools, and let everyone rest.
On the way home we stopped at a u-pick farm in the Columbia Gorge and picked strawberries, ate lunch, and parked a while at a farm with the mountain out in front of us. Then we drove home to Portland (picking up little’s new bike), to the rental house, and everyone was asleep by the middle of the afternoon.
The house feels too big now. I keep crossing rooms to find someone. We’ll be back on the road on July 3rd.