Last time I wrote about my family vacation to southwestern Oregon, en route to Crater Lake.

Ever since we took her to Rocky Mountain National Park, she’s been obsessed with visiting them all. As soon as I can figure out the road map to American Samoa and Virgin Islands, we’ll get right on that.

In the meantime, we hit some of the ones in California.

Of course, her main goal in visiting these parks is to procure stamps and stickers for a passport we bought her. Each visitor’s center usually has its own stamp, sometimes two, and it’s the only damn thing that is free there. 

They also have stickers, which look like postage stamps, that aren’t free. Nor are they as cheap as postage stamps.

Since Lassen has a visitor’s center at each entrance, that dictated a lot of our plans for the day.

But if she can get the stamps and stickers while I have an excuse to see some new parks, it’s a win-win.

And as long as I can pretend she’s still in fourth grade, it’s a win-win-win.

I believe Lassen might be the closest national park to my house. Technically Yosemite might be a few miles closer geographically, but Lassen is a more direct route. 

Yet somehow I’ve visited Yosemite at least forty times while going to Lassen exactly… let’s see, carry the two… zero times. 

I’m not the only one. Lassen is pretty far down the list of most visited parks and it’s often described as “Yosemite without the crowds.”

Now that I’ve been there, I can confidently say it’s… not really Yosemite with some crowds. Plus some bubbling mud farts. And rednecks.

First, I’d like to clarify that I visited Lassen before it, and the entirety of Northern California, became a smoldering hellscape of smoke and ash. For most of August, the park was closed as a result of the Park Fire, which is a stupid name because all fire names are stupid, something I noted when Paradise burned down. Call this one the Lassen fire, if you must.

So yeah, Lassen was still open in mid-July when we visited, although you wouldn’t know it. Manzanita Lake was packed. The Bumpass Hell Trail was closed. Burney Falls was closed. 

Technically that last one isn’t in Lassen, but it’s so close that it would be silly to make the trek to one without stopping at the other. Like people who go to Australia without checking out New Zealand. 

Burney Falls, our first stop on the day, was closed because of construction. Sounds like it’s been closed for a year or so and ain’t coming back until at least next year. They’re making it, I don’t know, ADA compliant or more accessible or some other such excuse that government types use to shut things down for a while. My commute has a bridge that’s had “construction” on it for two years or so, complete with lane redirects, and as far as I can tell, this construction isn’t going to expand the bridge or add any lanes. It’ll just fuck with my commute for two solid years and tell me it was for my own fucking good. Then they’ll increase my taxes to help cover the chaffing.

Fortunately, you could still see the falls, you just couldn’t walk to the falls. That was probably the good news, because if we had spent longer there, we never would’ve made it to the second visitor’s center before it closed at 5:00. 

The falls were beautiful. Half cascade, half fall. It spreads out like a mini-Victoria Falls. There are portions of it that just pop out of the rock halfway down.

In fact, the entire river that creates Burney Falls pops out of the ground only a half-mile upriver. I didn’t check it out myself, just heard it from the old man who was trying to alleviate our annoyance that we couldn’t walk down to the falls.

The price to get in, of course, hasn’t gone down from what it was when you could walk to the falls. As if that’s not a key piece of what you’re paying for. As if there wasn’t a free friggin’ parking lot on the other side of the falls that offers more or less the same view of the falls but that doesn’t offer access to the falls. So now the “State Park” gives us the exact same experience as the free parking lot, but charges $10 for it. 

No wait, there’s also a store there. Where we spent more money…

The Bumpass Hell trail is usually listed as the top destination inside Lassen. It was closed not for refurbishment, but for snow. In July.

I’m not saying there wasn’t a fair amount of snow around. I’m sure we would’ve had to walk around a couple mounds. We’d had to do something similar at one of the Crater Lake lookouts. But even at 8,000 feet, it had been a pretty damn warm three to four weeks. I assume the Bumpass Hell Trail is like some of those campgrounds I’ve booked before, where it’s not open in mid-June despite the last storm having been in February. But the campsite can’t open until some bureaucrat fits it in his schedule to check that the snow didn’t damage a tree or, in the case of Bumpass, a wood plank.

I wonder if Bumpass Hell ever opened this year. It couldn’t have been there more than a week or two before the fire shut the whole place down. I guess that makes Lassen the only place in this country that can claim 2024 was a year without hell.

Before I get much farther, let me clarify: Lassen is absolutely beautiful. I don’t know that I’d compare it to Yosemite. For sure not Yosemite Valley, which is only at about 4,000 feet elevation because it’s, follow me here, a valley. Most of Lassen is double that. So the landscapes were more reminiscent of Rocky Mountain than Yosemite, 

It also doesn’t feature distinct images like Half Dome and El Capitan. Maybe if I traveled there often I might be able to pick Lassen Peak out of a lineup alongside Shasta and Hood and Rainier, but on first viewing, it was just a tall mountain. Although not too tall because I think the trail up it started at 9,000 feet. No way was I attempting that the day after Crater Lake.

There looked to be some other fun hikes, too, that totally warrant a return. The Kings Creek Falls trail looked totally accessible. We almost went on it until we opted for getting home at a reasonable hour. I also noted it was one of those “the downhill comes first” trails I don’t particularly love, but it was a more gradual drop (and then rise) in elevation than Crater Lake. Maybe if we weren’t on back-to-back days, and on a time crunch, we would’ve done it. 

Bumpass Hell would be nice to try, too, if I can ever make it there in the ten day period between snow season and fire season.

And maybe I could even tackle Lassen Peak. A two-thousand foot elevation gain, starting at eighty-five hundred? Easy peasey! At least the uphill comes first.

But on this particular trip, we stuck to the lakes.

First up was Manzanita Lake, which was crowded. It’s so close to the entrance that I got the feeling this was basically the closest beach for the towns of Red Bluff and Redding. Hence my rednecks comment. If you’ve never heard of Red Bluff and Redding, California, I’ve now given you all you need to know. Rednecks. And a Sundial Bridge.

I noticed that Lassen had a price for an annual pass to just that one park. I don’t think I’ve seen that elsewhere. Nobody heads up to just Yosemite for an evening. And if they do, they’re probably enough of an outdoors nut to buy the annual pass to all of the parks. But Lassen is close enough to a couple towns that don’t have a lot of beaches, and Manzanita Lake was proof of that. I assume eighty percent of the Lassen-only annual passes never venture farther than two miles from the entrance.

Daughter wanted to swim. I didn’t, especially in one of those mountain lakes where the bottom is basically slime. So, after we spent a half-hour walking to and from the bathroom at the visitor’s center to change into her swimsuit, because all the closer parking lots were full, I sat down on a log near shore to read a book while she walked into the lake.

Then promptly decided she was done and came back to shore.

Like seriously, I don’t think I finished two pages. And these weren’t Game of Thrones pages. I was reading a friggin’ Jack Reacher book. Two Jack Reacher pages probably don’t have a single word longer than two syllables. No sentences longer than five words. I made it about as far as “Reacher said nothing” before she was waving and squawking at me to bring her towel and shoes to the shore.

But she wanted clean feet, so what followed was a never-ending cycle of sit on a log, lift up a foot, get it dirty again, move to a rock, get distracted, clean the other foot, fall back in, et cetera, et cetera, ad nauseam. I shit you not, she probably spent less than five minutes “swimming” and more than twenty minutes getting out. 

And I might never find out what Jack Reacher said.

We went through a similar process at Summit Lake. Fortunately that lake was much less crowded, because Manzanita Lake is right by the entrance while Summit Lake is, follow me here, at the summit. So she kinda had the whole lake to herself and stayed in for a good fifteen minutes until some teenagers showed up and made her feel self-conscious. 

We stopped by a couple more lakes on the way out that were absolutely beautiful. Helen Lake and Emerald Lake were pristine. Technically we could’ve swam in them, but at 8,200 feet elevation, they were pretty much a degree above ice. But damn, did standing next to them feel great when the valley had been over 100 degrees for a month straight. 

My favorite lake, though, wasn’t really even a lake at all. It’s called Hat Lake, and maybe there are times of the year when it’s a legitimate lake, but if my visit was any indication, the times when Hat is a Lake and Bumpass is a Trail are months apart and never the twain shall meet. 

When we were at Hat Lake, it was a beautiful brook babbling through a lush, peaceful meadow. Even better, we were the only people there. I guess everyone else took one look, said, “screw that, it’s not a lake,” and raced on to see the “Closed Do Not Enter” barricade at Bumpass Hell. Me, I could’ve stayed next to the stream all day, found a comfy batch of grass to fall asleep in, and woken up in the same spot the next day, never witnessing a mud fart, and I would’ve been content. 

It was Daughter’s favorite part of the park, too. Good to know she’s taking after some of my nicer qualities and not just my blood type and allergies.

Then we stopped at the mud farts. Technically it’s sulphur pools, where underground magma pockets turn the surface into boiling liquid. And magma, being sulphur, smells like hard-boiled eggs or, less charitably, farts. Ergo bubbling mud farts. 

Which were impressive. But still, after a minute or so, you realize it’s just bubbling mud and you start to realize the smell ain’t going away any time soon.

Oh, and lots of friendly signs tell us what should be obvious, that you shouldn’t try to touch the molten plasma.

Not sure who looks at something that’s literally boiling granite and feels the need to touch it, but… hold on, I teach high school. I probably encounter a hundred people a day who would do that for nothing more than a dare. 

And they’d use their penis.

Two parks down, one to go. Time to head off to some islands.