Days 17 to 23, or so I've lost track of what day of travel this might be. Not that it really matters,
one way or another.We drove along the east side of the Sierra Nevadas, and it was lovely. We really enjoyed that route - not a
lot of traffic, beautiful scenery, and friendly small towns. Only downside were the mountain passes - all that up and down was rough on ear pressure!
We arrived at the southern end of Lake Tahoe, on the California side, and wow, what a gorgeous spot! Lake Tahoe 
is the largest alpine lake in North America, the second deepest lake in the USA, and the 16th deepest lake in the world!!! The average depth is 1,644 feet (just over 500 meters). The 
lake is 22 miles long and 12 miles wide - 35.4 km by 19.3 km - and the surface area is 191.6 square miles (496.2 sq km). The surface of the lake is at an elevation of 6,225 feet (1.9 
km above sea level). What seems even more
incredible than this beautiful and huge lake way up in the mountains is that the lake is surrounded by snow-capped mountain peaks!!! People were playing on the beach, boating and enjoying water sports in the lake - and then there are all of these ice and snow covered mountains in every direction!!!It really didn't seem quite real. Like a beautiful movie set, or sitting inside some picture postcard. Or maybe a lake in the Swiss Alps.
At the same time, this gorgeous and not-quite-real location was packed with visitors, and all the touristy accoutrements that go with capitalism and travellers. Casinos across the state line in Nevada, tons of national food chains, tee shirt shops at every turn. It was a bit overwhelming.
But we had a nice hotel tucked in the woods, and were visited by a friendly raccoon who was hoping for a snack. I went out to say hello to him/her, but it really just came by for food. Wasn't willing to say hello, and wandered off after it became apparent I wasn't giving out treats.
We also found several nice local restaurants rather than eating at the national franchises, so we had a little flavor of Tahoe. And our hotelier suggested coming back in late September, when there are fewer tourists but before the snow arrives.
I came down with a major cold, and that curtailed my activities a bit. But we enjoyed our three days in Tahoe.
Then we drove on to Reno, Nevada. More winding roads, snowy peaks, mountain passes, and oddly, tons of small orange butterflies! Really, there were hordes of orange butterflies all over the mountain passes between Tahoe and Reno. Alpine butterflies or something like that!
I didn't do much in Reno. We spent three days there, and I sneezed and coughed my way through our first two days there. Not fun, but again, we had a comfortable hotel. TV, naps, and an e-reader, plus catching up on the previous blogs.
And some time planning where we'd like to go next. Well, maybe not planning. More like looking at different potential routes, places to visit along the way, and both of us throwing out ideas of what we'd like to see and do along the way. We have a very loose planning style where we decide a day at a time where we'll go and what we'll do.
Because the journey is as much a part of the trip as the destination is.
So, I kind of hunkered down in Reno, and Richard did a bit more exploring.
Our plan was to aim for Crater Lake, Oregon, driving mostly on Highway 395 and then switching to 
US-97. Again, the less travelled path, with less traffic and more scenery.We spent a night in Alturas, CA, a pretty little town. It seemed
as if most places closed up pretty early, so our dinner ended up coming from a gas station mini mart. But we also saw the most incredible sunset while standing 
out by the road. Just one of the perks of life without a plan.The next day, as we approached the California-Oregon state line, we saw signs for the Lava
Beds National Monument. And we thought, well, why not?So we drove in, and this was another one of those bizarre
other-worldly experiences. It turns out that the region is a huge - I mean HUGE - shield volcano! What felt like a very slight and slow
incline was a drive up the side of a volcano shaped something like a very broad and low dome. Shield volcanoes don't have cataclysmic eruptions like 
most other volcanoes, such as Mt Shasta or Mt St Helen's. Shield volcanoes tend to have lava flows that slowly leak and ooze across the area, building up into 
the shield shape. As the lava oozes across the landscape, the outer layer cools and hardens to igneous rock. But the lava
often continues to flow below that rock, spreading farther and farther from the source of the slow eruption. Eventually, the lava runs out, and this leaves a tunnel, tube, or cave inside the volcanic rock.Sometimes the gasses from the lava cause vents through the rock, and sometimes some of the molten lava erupts through these vents, so that there are splatters that turn into weird little blobs and piles of volcanic rock.
Sometimes those same small eruptions are a bit bigger, with more lava and gas and burned material piling up into a cinder cone, a small rounded hill built up of volcanic rock and other material. There were several of these cinder cones around the Lava Beds Monument.
There were also spatter cones, where more lava erupted quickly so that the molten rock was only semi-cooled when it came back down, building up odd shaped cones and pinnacles from this semi-hard semi-molten rocky substance.
The last lava flow from this massive shield volcano, the Medicine Lake Volcano, was about 950 years ago - a rather recent eruption in geologic terms, making this a dormant but still active volcano. This volcano has erupted off and on over the past half million years (and yes, that's the geological information given out). Most of the volcanic rock formations that we saw were from previous flows and eruptions, about thirty to forty thousand years old.
As I said, it all looked very other-worldly. Sort of a science fiction landscape, where rock people might rise up and chase us off their land.
People sign up at the ranger station to visit the caves, borrowing flashlights and getting directions to caves appropriate to their level of spelunking expertise. We're amateur spelunkers, maybe even novices - so we only visited Skull Cave. No, no dead people were there. The early settlers found large animal bones, so it was named Skull Cave.
This is a giant cave, with maybe an 80 ft high (24.4 m) opening, and stairs going down into it. This is also an ice cave - snow and rain accumulate deep inside the cave, and freeze during the long winter. Then during the spring and summer, as this snow-ice slowly melts, various animals are drawn to the water available here.
So as I walked down the stairs into Skull Cave, I could feel the cold air coming up out of the cave! Really, it was like air conditioning blowing up!
Plus the butterflies, those same little orange alpine butterflies, were clustered on the metal handrails. All I could figure is that with the hot sunny day, and the cold air blowing through, the metal rails must collect some kind of condensation. And these smart butterflies have learned that this is an easy way of finding moisture. Brilliant little butterflies!
We drove through the entire Lava Beds park, all
46,000 acres (73 square miles, or 190 km2) of it. Okay, we didn't see every acre or kilometer. But we did drive from end to end, in the south entrance and out at the north. It was amazing, and the kind of scenery that leads to fanciful thoughts such as volcanic rock people rising up from the splattered lava and going to war against humans. Definitely sci-fi movie worthy landscape.
Oh, the website for the Lava Beds National Monument: www.nps.gov/labe/index.htm
I'll leave Crater Lake for another blog. But I like to include maps of our route, to help our readers see where we've been.
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