national park

A Great Basin and a Lonely Road

A.B. Kelly · October 23, 2024 · Blog Entries, Musings · Driving, Great Basin National Park, Highway 50, national park, nevada, travel, travelblog · No Comments

Earlier this year, I visited five national parks.

Why not add a sixth?

I had the first week of October off as a quarter break, and my mom had always wanted to see Great Basin National Forest. I’d always wanted to drive Highway 50, the “Loneliest Road in America,” so it seemed a great time to tick both of those boxes.

I didn’t bring Daughter on this trip, since she had school and Great Basin wasn’t high on her list. This worked out better for me, since there’s no way she would’ve done Highway 50. If she were included in this trip, we would’ve flown into Salt Lake City.

So her path to 63 is still stalled out at six. If you can call it “stalled out” if she’s added four in a span of seven months. And we might or might not hit Joshua Tree when we visit SoCal for Christmas. Stay tuned…

Baker, Nevada

Although we didn’t fly into SLC, we did in fact circle through there to get to Great Basin. We hit a Boise State Football game and the Golden Spike National Monument (where the first transcontinental railroad was connected) just north of Salt Lake. The whole round trip was over 2,000 miles. Good thing I had a rental car.

So we actually started at the eastern edge of Highway 50, coming in from Utah, which was the opposite of how I always envisioned driving it. Who knew a road goes BOTH directions?

My initial thought, before even getting into Nevada, was that Highway 50 might be the loneliest for humans, but not for bugs. We went over a mountain that Google tells me is called King Top, but which at the time I could only assume was the River Styx, shortly after sundown. Holy Hell! How many plagues deep are we when the locusts kamikaze against the front of your car?

I had literally washed the windshields an hour earlier.

We stayed at a place right on the border of Utah and Nevada, calling itself a hotel and casino, with a very liberal use of both words.

And by “right on the border,” I mean it pretty much straddled it. The hotel portion of the property was in Utah, while the casino portion, obviously, was on the Nevada side. Bear in mind, Nevada and Utah are in different time zones. They told us our check out time was 10:00 am. I didn’t have the wherewithal to ask WHICH 10:00 am, considering the hotel office was in the casino portion.

This played havoc with my electronic devices not just when we were at the hotel, but the entire next day. My car believed we were in Pacific Time, while my watch thought we were in Mountain Time. My phone, which was “roaming” for the first time since the Bush administration, tried to split the difference with this beauty of a save screen:

While it seems like it’s a standard screen for traveling, I’m ninety percent sure it hadn’t been giving me the “Local/Home” split the previous day when we were in Idaho and Utah, which are firmly in the Mountain Zone instead of straddling the two zones. Plus this split times showed up the entire day we were in the Great Basin National Park, which is 100% in the Pacific Zone, but I’m guessing, being on the eastern side of a mountain, was getting all of its (roaming) cell phone signal from Utah.

The casino, meanwhile, consisted of about twenty slot machines that didn’t pay out. They didn’t even print a ticket. When you wanted to cash out, you had to go get the bartender to come zero out the machine, then go back to the bar and get some cash out of the till for you. I usually like going from slot to slot, but didn’t want to keep pulling her away from her primary job.

The hotelish/casinoish also had a restaurant. Ish. That was one of the main reasons we booked it. Unfortunately, we were informed when checking in that the restaurant is open 8:00 am to 9:00 pm, every day. Except for tomorrow.

I don’t know if the “except for tomorrow” was because it was a Sunday night. Or the last day of the month. Or because the bartender had to empty out the slot machines. All I know is that we were only staying one night. The person checking us in knew we were only staying one night. So the “except for tomorrow” information, for us, might as well have meant never. She might’ve wanted to lead with the fact that there was no breakfast for us instead of telling us the regular hours that we would never encounter.

Fortunately, we found a solid spot for breakfast in the town of Baker the following morning. I say “fortunately” because it was the only spot in town. If it had totally sucked, it was still where we were having breakfast.

But it didn’t suck.

There were only three things on the breakfast menu, along with three things on the lunch menu. I was a little skeptical when those three breakfast items were a sandwich, a burrito, and a quiche. Those all seem rife for being torn out of a plastic bag and thrown in the microwave. Damn you, Starbucks!

I was thrilled, then, when what I can only assume to be the sole proprietor spent ten minutes in the back putting some TLC into our breakfast. The sandwich featured an egg/cheese “brick” between a cheddar biscuit, both items of which were homemade. The brick didn’t sound appealing, and I’m still not entirely sure how it was made, but the texture was fine and the flavor was good. Kinda like a quiche that’s been run through a vice. And the cheddar biscuit, holy crap! This woman might be the sole reason Red Lobster went out of business.

Plus a very stripped down espresso menu. Lattes and cappuccinos plus a handful of Torani syrups if you absolutely must. I enjoy a coffee shop that caters to people who enjoy coffee instead of sugar bombs.

They didn’t have dinner on the menu, but we noticed there was a back room with a full bar, so I’m guessing when all two hundred town inhabitants get off work, they enter through the other side of the building where they see a dinner menu. Outsiders have to go to the Mexican restaurant, which was the only other dining establishment in town.

We also frequented what might’ve been the only store in town – it had everything from books and clothes to some minor groceries. All in one room.

But the most important thing we got there, the item that ended up dictating the course of the journey back home, was free. A Highway 50 stamp passport. To complete it, you have to stop at all the random little hamlets you’d normally blow past.

Challenge accepted!

Great Basin National Park

In terms of how prepared I was going into a new national park, Great Basin was down on the “I’ve vaguely heard of it” end of the spectrum. My mom was the driving factor here, so I let her do the research.

Her primary interest in Great Basin was not the lakes and mountains and shit I usually focus on, but for astronomy. Being up in the high desert with nary an electrical light in sight, this park is “certified dark sky” and known for stargazing. We had some great views of the sky the night before, especially the few times the damn bugs got out of the way.

There’s an observatory in the park. Unfortunately it’s a) primarily in use at night, and b) closed to the public. At multiple locations, we asked, just out of curiosity, where in the park the observatory was and the only response we ever got was “it’s closed to the public.” Even when we assured them we weren’t going to go bother the scientists or aliens, we just wanted to know where the heck it was, we were told “only the employees can go there.”

Sheesh, even Area 51 has fucking signs!

Great Basin also has a solar telescope, which, follow me here, is in use during the daytime. Even better, it’s accessible to the public. Because the aliens are at work during the day. Unlike the nighttime telescope, employees actually answered questions about the solar telescope and we only had to ask three or four times to learn that the it was located behind the visitor’s center.

Unfortunately, when we went there, we saw no telescope. We hiked up a trail and still no telescope. We returned to the visitor’s center and asked the same employee if we somehow missed it, she responded, “Oh, sorry, it’s only set up Thursday through Sunday.”

Clearly E.T. and the chef at the casino like to take days off together.

Another of the park’s main draws is also currently off limits, but for a different reason. The Lexington Arch, which looks spectacular, currently has a washed out road, adding a couple miles each direction to the regular trail that was already five miles. The wash-out happened in 2013. So I’m sure they’ll get around to it, you know, sometime. Unfortunately, up to this point, the only thing they’ve had a chance to do is change all the permanent maps to tell us the road is “temporarily” washed out.

Fortunately the other main draw of the park, the Lehman Caves, are fully accessible and open midweek. Only two tours with twenty tickets each, so get there early.

I actually thought we had missed the first tour, because the tour was at 10:30 and my watch said it was 10:40. I said as much to my mom, prompting someone nearby to remind me that my watch was in a different time zone. Great, we still have close to an hour!

Unfortunately, the 10:30 tour was already sold out, so we bought tickets to the 1:30 tour, which of course we were going to be an hour early for because of the Baker, NV time warp.

The caves were fun, as are most caves. The stories of Absalom Lehman, who “discovered” the caves (that had been in use by Native Americans for a thousand years), were hilarious. He built a shack over the entrance and, for a dollar, sold you a candle and let you in. He said if you weren’t back in 24 hours, he’d come looking for you.

He also, unfortunately, had a rule of “If you can break it, you can take it,” leading to a number of broken stalactites and stalagmites. Although it does give us a good barometer for how long the various columns took to form. The caves became a national monument in 1922, so we can assume the “new growth” in this photo represents about a century of progress:

Which, of course, just makes the rest of the cave all that much more impressive. So, thanks, I guess, Mr. Lehman? Your assholery destruction of nature’s majesty helps us… appreciate it more?

We took the “short tour,” which only goes into the first chamber, then returns to the entrance. There’s a longer one that was finishing shortly after ours, coming out of a different exit. I didn’t see it as an option on any of the boards, so I assume it needs to be booked ahead of time online. I’ll be checking that out before my next visit. I think it would’ve been much cooler.

The other thing on my “return list” (which is usually the purpose of these unreasearched first trips) are some hikes. The only paved road in the park, which diverts just before the Lehman Caves, is to Wheeler Peak. It kinda looks like Half Dome, and was formed the same way. Although the hike up to the peak doesn’t look nearly as precarious as its Yosemite brethren.

No, that’s not the hike I want to do next time. I don’t care that it’s a standard hike instead of cables that will kill you if you let go. It’s nine miles and a 3,000-foot elevation gain, starting at 10,000 feet. No thanks.

The hike I want to take, instead, scrambles up the snow and rocks toward the front of the mountain. Unlike the behemoth hike around the back side, this one’s “only” five miles with a 1,000-foot elevation gain. That might be doable if I was prepared, and now that I think of it, isn’t Half Dome cooler from the front than the back? Being at the base of a cliff seems more majestic than on top of it. Especially when I can already get views like this without hiking anywhere:

We almost did a shorter hike past a couple of alpine lakes, but opted not to. We only had a little water and no sunscreen, and that sun was scorching up there. It was 100 degrees in the valley that day, and when there isn’t a lot of tree cover, 10,000 feet doesn’t give you a ton of air pressure protecting you, either. As one of my college girlfriends remarked, snow should melt on the mountains “since they’re closer to the sun.”

I wasn’t dating her for her brain.

Plus, we weren’t sure how long the hike would take and we’d already spent primo bucks (8!) for a cave tour in a couple hours. So next time I hit Great Basin, I’m doing a loop that includes both lakes and the glacier on the moraine.

After the park, we hit an archeological dig that would’ve been really cool when it was being excavated. Unfortunately, that was in the early 1990s. When they were done, they filled all the dirt back in, in order to “save it for future generations.” Who will have to dig it up again.

What we were left with was one very torn-apart booklet that explained where in a wide-open desert scrubfield there were some 800-year-old adobe buildings are buried.But we just have to take the book’s word for it.

Highway 50

Finally we headed north to Ely, which I thought was pronounced Elly, but my mom thought was pronounced Eli. We were both wrong. The locals say Ee-Lee. Far be it from me to criticize from afar, but I think that is, obviously, the worst of the options.

Then again, I’ll acquiesce to their demands. They’ve got enough problems. First of which is living in Ely.

Not just because it’s a small town. There are plenty of small towns I would love to live in. Along the Mendocino Coast, maybe, where you have beaches and cliffs and forest all coming together. Maybe someplace in the foothills of Oregon or California, where it only snows two or three times a year – not enough to get sick of and it all melts away so you never have to shovel. The Big Island of Hawaii has some one or two-road towns that could be called paradise.

But high desert amongst the sagebrush? No thanks.

At least Ely had more than one street in their town. The other towns we visited didn’t have that.

Technically, most had at least one street that ran parallel to Highway 50, with some connectors that are best referred to as alleys, but Ely (a town of almost 4,000 residents!) actually had a legitimate T intersection!

Take that, Eureka!

I shouldn’t bag on Eureka. We had a breakfast there that rivaled the one we had in Baker. Same general menu, breakfast sandwiches and burritos, but the sandwich was “build your own.” I opted for a croissant with egg, ham, peppers, onions, and avocado. Solid!

Their coffee options were substantially foofier than in Baker. Options like chocolate hazelnut, cinnamon apple, and chai. While I enjoy a good cappuccino, gimme that chocolate hazelnut.

How did we find this hidden gem? When we got our passport stamped in Ely the night before, the guy at the visitor’s center told us about it. It’s his favorite spot when heading west. So I guess they don’t talk smack about Eureka’s lack of perpendicular streets. When your only claims to fame are being on the loneliest road in America, I guess you develop an affinity for each other.

Unfortunately, the stamp people in Eureka didn’t then give us a secret gem in Austin. I was hoping we’d learn a secret handshake by the end, but most of them were just “here’s your stamp, wanna buy something?”

I also noticed that most of the businesses in those smaller eastern towns sported a “Highway 50 stamp here” sign out front. It’s clearly a draw. However, as we made it farther west, into towns that consider themselves exurbs of Reno don’t give a shit. In those towns we had to go way off Highway 50 to find the Chamber of Commerce or something similar. It’s a good thing I didn’t do my first plan of driving west to east, because I wouldn’t have realized there was a passport until I was halfway done.

Austin was probably the cutest of the towns. It’s more or less smack dab in the middle. A couple houses on the outskirts have “Speed Trap” signs and, sure enough, there was a cop sitting right there on Main Street as we inched through. Part of me thinks it was a setup not to give out tickets, but to get us to slow down enough to spend some money in their town.

After all, I doubt there’s a lot of crime in this town with a population of… huh, Google gives me results ranging from a high of 167 to a low of… one? One person? Is the cop the only inhabitant? Then where the hell do all the other employees in the town live? In the abandoned castle on the outskirts of the town? It’s not like there were a ton of suburbs. Huh, maybe he really was looking to hand out tickets, because he isn’t paying his salary with resident taxes.

As for Highway 50 itself, I’ve been on far lonelier highways. A couple of them on this very trip. Interstate 84, for instance, on the way from Boise to Salt Lake City. Or, for what it’s worth, the portion of Highway 50 in western Utah. Minus the bugs.

What Highway 50 has that those other highways don’t have, though, are the far-off views. While it looks like it’s flat, you’re actually spending large portions of the journey on long, sloping valleys. This allows you to see ten or twenty miles in front of or behind you at any given time. And the road is straight as all get-out. While there might or might not be other cars in that long vision (usually there were), they were pretty damn far off, and it’ll take forever for them to reach you.

As for cars going the same direction as you, let’s just say it was pretty easy to determine when it was safe to pass them. What was a little bit harder was to determine how fast you were going. Fortunately you should be able to see a cop coming from miles away. Assuming there were more cops on Highway 50 than the “Speed Trap” guy in Arthur. I don’t recall seeing many.

According to the stamp passport, this road got its “Loneliest” designation in 1986 when Life magazine sent some reporters to do a vignette. I guess Baby Jessica hadn’t fallen in the well yet and they needed some hard-hitting picto-journalism.

Kinda makes sense since Life was known for taking grandiose pictures and Highway 50 certainly has majestic visuals. However, the story that went with it said you shouldn’t undertake the journey unless you had desert survival skills. Sheesh, I know 1980s cars weren’t known for distance or longevity, but the longest you ever go between civilization is maybe seventy miles.

Although now that I think about it, my first car was a used 1983 Chrysler LeBaron and that thing would’ve probably only overheated twice in that seventy miles. On a plus side, the hour-and-a-half it would take me to drive that distance at the federally-mandated 55 miles per hour would be almost enough to get the air conditioner to start working.

Still, you can see why they were so keen to push the toddler down the well if all they’ve got in the planning room is “Hey, how about we cover a really long, straight road?”

Nowadays, you can zip through it in a handful of hours without finishing your audiobook or ever stopping for gas.

Although you’re going to want to stop for gas early. The closer we got to Reno, the closer we were to California.

And than means higher gas prices.

Welcome back to civilization, Bitch!

Summer Vacation on Channel Islands

A.B. Kelly · September 6, 2024 · Blog Entries, Musings · Channel Islands, family vacation, national park, summer vacation, travel, travelblog, Vacation · No Comments

For the summer after my daughter’s fourth grade, year, we used a perk available to all fourth graders to get into national parks for free. After visiting Crater Lake and Lassen Park on consecutive days (not to mention a Treehouse Resort), we were off to Southern California for a jaunt out to the Channel Islands with my mom.

Channel Islands is one of those less-visited national parks. Shocking considering you have to book a boat long in advance, then be at the dock, which is a good hour outside of L.A., by 7:00 am..

Pretty sure they aren’t selling park-specific annual passes.

Come to think of it, I’m not sure Chanel Islands has an entry fee at all. You pay for the boat and it takes you out to an island. Perhaps the boat ride in counts as a de facto entry fee. Except the boat is operated by a private company. Do they bury some graft for the government inside the price of the boat? If so, we totally got shafted. In addition to Daughter’s fourth-grade status, my mom has a lifetime senior pass. Bogus.

If I ever make it to American Samoa, I’m going to demand that the airplane trip is free.

Since the boat ride takes an hour or more, you’re only allowed to visit one island per trip. “Fortunately” for us, a couple of the islands were closed for refurbishment or something, so we only had to decide between two islands. I don’t know how one refurbishes an island, so if you happen to check out Santa Rosa Island after it reopens in 2025 or 2026, you can let me know if it’s retrofitted for 5G or something. I sometimes still get crappy reception despite having the Covid vaccine.

My mom originally wanted to do Anacapa Island, which is the smallest island and the one closest to land, because she believed it was the basis for the book Island of the Blue Dolphins. However, we noticed on the website that people had to use a ladder and large staircase just to get from the boat to the island. That would wipe my mom, in her late 70s, out for the day, and it didn’t look like there was a ton of shade. Wouldn’t be very fun to have her sitting there baking and exhausted while Daughter and I explored the island.

In addition, Anacapa Island has a beautiful selling point of being a bird sanctuary, making it loud and smelling of bird crap. Five star accommodation all the way.

Finally, we found out that it’s actually San Nicolas Island that is of Blue Dolphin fame. It’s inaccessible to the public, which seems like a huge marketing miss.

So to sum up: Anacapa means exhaustion, sunburn, bird poop, and nary a dolphin nor a shipwrecked Native American in sight. Santa Cruz Island, you’re the winner!

There’s a ton of things to do on Santa Cruz. There’s kayaking and there’s hikes and there’s… um… swimming.

Oh, and a visitor’s center. Although don’t expect a visitor’s center like other parks, which are ten percent geology information and ninety percent store. The Santa Cruz Island visitor’s center was basically somebody’s house from a hundred years ago, in which they’d put some information about the Native Americans who once lived on the island. They did have the passport stamp, which made Daughter happy, but they didn’t have a single thing you could buy. What’s the point of visiting a national park if I can’t buy a cheesy “Go Climb a Bird Poop” t-shirt?

The boat company’s headquarters also had the passport stamp available, so Daughter managed to get two different stamps. I told her she should get an Anacapa stamp, too, but she only wants stamps that represent where she’s actually been. So while stamps from both the north and south entrance was a goal at Lassen, she’s not getting some cheap-ass reflection of a place she’s never been.

Damn, I was hoping I could just ebay the Virgin Islands.

If left to my own devices on Santa Cruz Island, I would’ve kayaked. They go into caves that look beautiful. Unfortunately, the ten-year-old and late-seventies-year-old I was with weren’t likely to be the strongest kayakers. If it was on a calm lake, I could maybe take a kayak by myself and hope that the two of them together in one kayak could get where they needed to be, but in the ocean, I assume the best case scenario would be the waves washing them back to shore. Not sure I want to envision the worst case scenarios.

So hiking it was. There were a number of different directions to go. One trail goes along the north side of the island, first to a couple of lookouts, then to another port (Prisoners Harbor) where we could have taken the boat, but which doesn’t have a visitor’s center, so why bother? The other trail goes up and over the middle of the island to a more secluded inlet (Smuggler’s Cove). That looked cool, and as an added bonus, we might be able to see the Island of the Blue Dolphins from it. But that hike was listed as strenuous, which didn’t sound appealing less than a week after I nearly died on a similar hike at Crater Lake.

Okay, fine, I didn’t really almost die. I just took a really long time to get where I was going and felt like an out-of-shape almost-fifty year-old the whole time.

So we opted for the first trail. In addition to only being “moderate,” there were a number of spots along the way where we could double back in case the going got too tough. Those roads back were a shorter distance and a smoother grade than the hike up. You might question why we would have opted for the steeper and longer distance in the first place, but that’s because the view was better, hiking along the cliffs over the ocean instead of a dirt path amongst the sagebrush.

And boy howdy, hiking at sea level! OMG, I could breathe! I kinda forgot about that whole thin vs thick air thing. But all of a sudden I could hike uphill without stopping every hundred paces. I wasn’t trying to parse out my water as if it was the last bit of moisture on earth. Daughter and I did a five-mile round trip and I was still at damn near 100%. If I had known it was going to be like that, I would’ve opted for the strenuous hike over to Smuggler’s Cove.

The hike to Prisoner’s Harbor, meanwhile, was never gonna happen. Santa Cruz Island is not as small as it first appears. We started on the northeast corner of the island and Prisoner’s Harbor was barely at the halfway mark. I figured it was maybe five miles away. But the round trip between the two is 34 miles! Kinda hard to hike that and be back in time to catch the 4:00 boat home.

My mom didn’t make the full five miles. After we saw Cavern Point, the first destination on the hike, we were faced with that first return route. She kept going back and forth about whether she wanted to press on to Potato Harbor with us or return to the harbor and wait for us. I didn’t think she should come with us but didn’t want to come across as a “go away” dickhead. At the same time, I think she also wanted to go back but didn’t want to sound like a “Screw you guys, I’m going home” asshole. What followed was the most passive aggressive debate ever.

In the end, she finally returned to port and let us venture on by ourselves. When we reconvened at the end of the day, we all agreed it was the best option. That turn-back point wasn’t even halfway to Potato Harbor and the path back wasn’t quite as pedestrian as it seemed. It was mostly level, but there were a few spots where the path was thin and steep, cut into granite that didn’t provide a lot of cushion for the pushin’ (of my feet).

Fortunately I had a walking stick.

Daughter had wondered about hiking sticks when she saw a number of people using them at Crater Lake. She asked what they help with, and unfortunately, I wasn’t much help.

In truth, I’ve wondered my whole life how much of the help people gain from hiking sticks are the placebo effect. At best, it maybe helps keep your arms in motion , stops you from getting to where you’re just dragging your knuckles behind you like a gorilla. But it’s odd that ninety percent of hiking tools are designed to lessen the weight and effort, then they top it off with a clunky, anti-aerodynamic deadweight.

But my mom had some of the lightweight collapsible poles, so I let Daughter try them out. She used them like ski poles, swinging both out in front of her, staking them on the ground, then walking through them before moving them back in front. If only this path had some flag-gates to slalom through.

When we parted from my mom, she took one walking stick, we took the other. This might seem like yet another dick move by her son, taking the support away from the elderly, but again, bringing both sticks just makes more burden. Even if they’re collapsible, she was already carrying a water bottle and a backpack. Gotta keep at least one hand free.

And yeah, for the most part, I still don’t get them. They don’t seem to help with balance or momentum. Now that I’m older, they helped a little on the downhill. I put it in front of me to slow down gravity’s momentum. But I mostly see people using them on the uphills, as if their upper body strength is going to be the thing that drags them up to the upper echelons. This ain’t rock-climbing, people.

Daughter and I went on to Potato Harbor, which could either be named for being in the shape of a potato or because that’s where potatoes once grew or were delivered or washed ashore after a shipwreck. I heard multiple explanations, and everyone spoke with absolute certainty that their explanation was correct. Shocking that in a country where less than five percent of the people change their mind from one election to the next, everybody would be certain that their explanation of Potato Harbor is the correct one.

Is it a Potato? Is it a Harbor? The world may never know.

Unless you voted for Dan Quayle, in which case it’s Potatoe Harbor.

Boy, I would’ve been a hilarious blogger in 1992!

The weirdest part of the Channel Islands trip was what came after we finished our hike. It was around 2:00 and our boat back to shore was at 4:00. Not enough time to do another hike or anything. But two hours is quite a long time to occupy ourselves with only a few park benches and informational signs.

Daughter wanted to go in the ocean, so my mom and I hung out on the beach. I made it more than a couple paragraphs in my Jack Reacher book this time, which I’d failed to do when she went “swimming” in Lassen. Not that Daughter was better at occupying herself in the water here. But this time Grandma was there to take the brunt of her “Come play with me.”

As we sat there, more hikers came back. Then the kayaks all came back. A few of those kayakers didn’t seem much more adept than my mom or daughter would’ve been. Seriously, people, how hard is it to get to shore in the goddamn ocean? There are waves coming in, for pete’s sake.

The beach grew more and more crowded as everybody found themselves in a holding pattern after finishing their activities. In most national parks, you can drive out whenever you feel like it. All done for the day? Great. Leave now and grab dinner outside the park instead of whatever crap they’re serving there. Suddenly decide that hiking at sea level was easy peasy and you wanna try Smuggler’s Canyon? Go for it! So long as you’re willing to leave the park after dark.

But on the Channel Islands, you’ve already pre-booked the time at which you can leave the park. One boat leaves at 4:00 and the other at 4:30. Which means a whole lot of sitting around waiting for said boat. Most of us were lined up and rarin’ to go as soon as that bad boy appeared on the horizon.

At least there was a beach to enjoy while we wait. A rocky beach that might slice your feet up, but a beach nonetheless.

But the Channel Islands were lovely. Simple hikes, ocean breezes, and allegedly some caves you can kayak to.

I only have two complaints. One is that we didn’t get to see an Island Fox. The Channel Islands are considered the Galapagos Islands of the North because they all have their own breeds of certain animals. The main one is the Island Fox, which is a different species on each island. The websites implied they were all over the place and would be easy to see one. Not so much. Perhaps if we camped there, they’d all come out in the evening, but we searched the whole way down from Potato Harbor and couldn’t find one.

There’s an island-specific blue jay, as well. We might have seen one of those, but I couldn’t tell for sure. However, I can verify that we saw Huginn and Muninn conspiring before sending some messages back to Odin.

My other complaint is about the visitor’s center. Not the visitor’s center on the actual island. That one I understand. It’s sparse with nothing to buy because the island is pack-in/pack-out. Can’t really have the usual commerce in that environment, to say nothing of the difficulty it would require to boat your employees in and out every day. On a boat owned by a private company that is currently selling every seat.

However, there is another visitor’s center. It’s back on the dock in Ventura. As far as I can tell, it’s got all the usual shirts and knick-knacks and stickers emblazoned with the park’s logo.

I say “As far as I can tell,” because the visitor’s center is only open from 8:30 am to 5:00 pm. Our morning boat left Ventura at 8:00 am and our return boat left Channel Islands at 4:00 pm, with a travel time of a little over an hour. Which means, follow me here, people who visit the park cannot go the park’s visitor’s center. What the hell? They should name it the non-visitor’s center.

Fortunately we live in the internet age, so when I returned home, I ordered some Channel Island stickers for Daughter’s passport. Plus a little coin for myself.

But really, it feels kinda cheap to order these things online. The whole point of the passport is to get us to visit those parks. Not to get us to order shit online.

Or maybe spending money is precisely its goal. Doesn’t matter where.

And, voila!, it’s time to cross American Samoa off the list!

Summer Vacation in Lassen Park

A.B. Kelly · September 5, 2024 · Blog Entries, Musings · family vacation, Lassen, Lassen National Park, national park, summer vacation, travel, travelblog, Vacation · One Comment

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.

Summer Vacation at Crater Lake

A.B. Kelly · September 4, 2024 · Blog Entries, Musings · Crater Lake, family vacation, national park, summer vacation, travel, travelblog, Vacation · 2 Comments

Did you know fourth graders get into National Parks for free?

Sure, at half of them you still need to pay a reservation fee or whatever, but once you’re at the gate, you just point to a fourth-gradish looking child and tell them to shove their entry fee right up their ass.

Then apologize to said fourth grader for the profanity.

We discovered this last summer when Daughter was between third and fourth grade. I don’t think she technically should have qualified, because the pass we got expired August 30 of that year, meaning it was probably for kids who were finishing fourth grade, not going into it. But her school starts in mid-August, so if the federal government can’t figure out how to classify a fourth grader, who am I to tell them?

We got a new one for this year and have visited five. And since fifth graders don’t have government id’s, guess who’s going to be a fourth grader again?

“She’s a fourth grader.”

“She looks eighteen.”

“She’s really dumb and has been held back a lot.”

After a few days of treehousing and riverboating and… cat-seeing… we finally headed up into the mountains to accomplish our primary goal, which was visiting some national parks whild Daughter gets in for free.

First up was Crater Lake.

I’ve technically been to Crater Lake before, but not really. I headed up there on a weekend in early May once, not realizing that pretty much the entire mountain around the lake is still caked in twenty feet of snow in early May. Hell, even when we visited in late July, there were still substantial clumps of snow.

So on my first visit, they had only plowed the road up to the visitor center (because the beauty of national parks is second only to the commerce of national parks!), from which you could walk to one specific viewpoint on the south side of the lake. Because it was 90+ degrees in the valley, I took a picture of me wearing shorts and flip-flops in the snow, then promptly drove back down to Medford, thinking Crater Lake was almost as worthless of a National Park as Kings Canyon, in which there’s pretty much only one road in and, once you’ve made it to the end, all you can really do is get out of your car, say “Wow, look at that canyon,” then turn back around and leave the park.

Fortunately, this time around, a fair amount of the ring road was open. None of it had snow, but most of the east side was closed for construction or potholes or some of the usual road-closing reasons. I imagine if they’re only snow-free for four or five months a year, ya gotta get all your constructing done at that time. It seems like every time I visit Denver, the entire downtown is torn apart. Then again, I always visit in the summer.

So I can now confirm that Crater Lake has, not only a southern view, but also a western and a northern view. Whether or not there’s an east side of the lake is still a mystery.

You can also view the lake from, wait for it, lake level!

We weren’t sure if we were going to make it down to the lake. There’s only one path down, and it’s all the way on the north side of the lake. The hike is listed as “moderate to strenuous” and it’s the worst kind, where you’re going downhill first. Meaning the return trip was going to be uphill. Even though I’m now of an age where downhills are almost as bad as uphills, I friggin hate those kinds of hikes. For me, it’s rarely about the muscle fatigue, it’s usually the breathing. Downhills don’t task my lungs.

But Daughter wanted to ride that boat, and the boat was, shockingly, only available at lake level.

We had looked up tickets beforehand, but I wasn’t sure how long it would take us to get there from the treehouse. Good thing, because originally, I was debating between the noon and the 2:00 tours. But after we added in Daughter’s 8:00 am horseriding and stopped for lunch right before entering the park, we were barely at the south side of the lake by 2:00. Still a drive around the lake and a moderate to strenuous hike away from our destination.

There wasn’t a ton of cell service around the lake, so even if I had a good gauge on what time we might finally make it to the dock, I doubt I could’ve ordered tickets. So when we finally made it there, we had pretty much given up the fight. I tried to remind Daughter that I gave her the choice that morning of riding the horse or riding the boat, but that was little consolation.

But there were two more boat rides on the day, one at 3:30 and one at 3:45. The 3:30 one was full, plus it was already pushing 3:15 when we got there. The nimrods in front of us had tickets for it and the employee told them they better fucking run to the bottom of the trail if they were hoping to get on it. They left at a brisk walk, and she yelled, “Faster than that!”

I asked if they had any more tickets available for the 3:45 boat, but she wasn’t sure. The internet was shoddy or communication was down or something. The list, a few hours old, showed a few openings, but we would have to walk to the bottom of the trail to find out for sure. I was disinclined to haul ass to the bottom, only to find out it’s full and have to come right back up. But the employee said we should totally do it and told Daughter that she could swim in the lake if the boat was full, so off we went.

I’m not sure if we passed the nimrods on the 3:30 boat, but we passed a hell of a lot of people on the way down. I’m guessing they all had secure tickets. If there was going to be a waitlist, I wanted to make sure we were at the front of it. “Oh, Frank Jones isn’t here? Yeah, I passed that guy three-quarters of a mile ago. Trust me, he ain’t making it. Gimme his spot.”

When we made it to the bottom, turns out they didn’t know if the boat was full, either. They had the same shoddy internet and the same hours-old list.

Instead, we were told to just chill out and wait until the boat was finished loading. Then and only then would they know if the boat was full or not. If not, Daughter could swim for a bit while I got annoyed that we expended energy and muscles to get down here ASAP.

After five minutes or so, they let us on the boat. Magically, the credit card machine had absolutely no connectivity issues.

Since we boarded after all the ticketed passengers, the only spots left appeared to be the jump seat in the back pf the boat. It was a weird setup – whereas all the other seats were on the left or right, with an aisle down the middle, ours was in the middle, right in front of the pilot’s dais. Daughter thought it was VIP, but all I could think was that we’d get the least amount of wind. Plus, in our haste, we hadn’t added any sunscreen and my knees were going to absolutely fry.

Fortunately for us, we had to give up the seats to a couple I’ll graciously call “The Doomed.” Because vulture candy is offensive.

The Doomed were a married couple who I will generously call “unprepared.” They appeared to be about ten years older than me and less than half as healthy. Bear in mind, I ain’t exactly Dwayne Johnson. More like Boris Johnson. Like I said, I thought long and hard about a moderate to strenuous hike at elevation. Clearly the Doomed didn’t.

In another ten years, when I’m (possibly) as old as The Doomed, I assume I’ll be even less inclined to believe I can make the circuit. Especially if, like these two, I don’t make these sojourns all that frequently. So if I was questioning whether or not I ought to be making this hike, then these two should’ve answered the query with a hard fucking no from the first inkling.

I don’t know what ship The Doomed were supposed to be on. I doubt it was ours. When they first appeared on the dock, we were already supposed to have left five minutes earlier, but because of people like me and a handful of others buying up the empty seats, we were still within shouting distance.

Doomed Dude’s shin had a ginormous gash on it. It was mostly scabbed over, but there was still a rivulet of fresh blood. So I’m guessing they had taken maybe an hour or more to hike down the path I’d done in less than twenty minutes. I assume he fell, they’d paused for long enough to it to coagulate a bit, then it had reopened when they started walking again. He also had dust and debris up and down his legs and his hair looked like the guy in Airplane! after he stops giving up sniffing glue.

As for the woman, I don’t think she was injured before approaching the boat. She seemed wobbly, but that might have initially been more a result of exhaustion than injury.

But not for long.

I don’t know where she was trying to go. There was a flat platform secured against the granite, then a long metal ramp descending down to the floating platform that the boat is attached to. On that flat platform are a few containers, kinda like giant ice chests, containing life jackets, making the platform a little crowded. When there were fifty of us heading toward the boat around the same time, some of us stepped off the flat platform, scrambling on the rocks to circumvent the congestion. I doubt that was her goal, since there were only a few employees on the platform at that time, most of them assisting her husband.

Regardless of her intent, she slipped on either a rock or dirt. With the entire boat staring at her and waiting, her upper torso seemed to lean one way while her lower torso went the opposite. Then her ankle rolled and down she went like the goddamned Titanic, rolling off the platform.

Well, shit, now the boat’s gonna be even further delayed.

Somehow all the kings horses and all the kings men were able to load them onto the boat. They asked me and Daughter to give up our jump seat, which was perfectly fine with me, and even better, somebody else moved so we could sit together. The Doomed got a couple of free waters that we had to pay exorbitant prices for.

Hilariously, when the boat finally started, the guide asked how hard we thought that hike down was on a scale of one to five. The woman put up all five fingers, but the dude, looking like something out of ground zero on 9/11, only put up two fingers.

Originally, I thought maybe The Doomed were going to be dropped off at the south end of the lake. There’s no pedestrian path over there (the spot we were at is the only public access spot), but I figured maybe there might be a way for official people to get where they needed to be. Maybe a helicopter pad or something.

But nope, they stayed on the boat for the whole two-hour tour.

The tour itself was kinda meh. Considering our last boat, less than 24 hours earlier, included multi-boat twirlies and free beer, it was always gonna be an uphill battle. I mean, what does stupid Career Lake have to offer? Unparalleled beauty of a natural masterpiece? The clearest blue water you’ll find anywhere? Big whoop! Not once did we catch air from another boat’s wake!

The tour guide left a bit to be desired. Not sure if he was running a tour for the first time or if the distracted, nervous demeanor was just his personality, but he left something to be desired in the excitement department.

He used a lot of “some people see this in the rocks, but I don’t see it.” Part of me thinks it was a shtick to get us to “find” it, but he didn’t fill me with confidence when he said that the volcanic eruption that created the Crater could be seen as far as Montana. “And even… British… Columbia? Is that right? Is that the one that’s in Canada?”

Evidently geology and geography are different practices. And we’ll ignore the fact that British Columbia is probably the same distance from southeastern Oregon as Montana is, so that revelation didn’t add anything to the wow factor. Sure, BC is in a different country, but I don’t think a volcano that blew 6,000 years ago was carrying a passport.

His knowledge of rocks was great, though. He explained how various rock structures were originally fissures inside the ginormous volcano that once stretched across the entirety of the lake. He knew so much about rocks that, when the tour ended, the captain said, “Are you going to talk about rocks some more? Let me run the tour. There’s a great fishing spot over there.”

Then again, his message clearly wasn’t getting through to everyone, since I heard another passenger confidently tell his family “It was a glacier that did it.” Dude, you’re thinking of Yosemite. How many friggin times have you heard volcano today, dumbass?

The best part of the tour was when we filled our water bottles. It’s, allegedly, the ninth cleanest lake in the world. “Allegedly” because the tour guide couldn’t tell us any of the other eight. They were probably in British Columbia.

Regardless of its place on the list, we were on the opposite end from the access point with all those peeing swimmers, so the water should’ve been totally safe to drink. At least before we stopped the boat and leaned over to submerge the bottles we’d just been putting in our mouths. So maybe now Crater Lake is the tenth cleanest in the world. Eleventh if The Doomed got his bloody gash near it.

Speaking of The Doomed, when we all piled out at the end of the trip, they were asked if they thought they could get back up under their own power. I think the answer might’ve been no even if they hadn’t both taken tumbles on the way down. Maybe the falls were all intended to get a free medical evacuation.

So as the rest of us worked our way back up the moderate to strenuous path (which felt much more on the strenuous side this time), we were passed by a number of EMT and paramedic types, one of which had a pretty cool looking gurney unicycle thing. Guessing the standard four-wheeled contraption can’t go up a rocky path of switchbacks. Of course, that meant she’d need at least two, maybe three or four, people to hold it steady as they pushed her back up the hill.

I would’ve paid money to see her rolling off it repeatedly. Especially after the East German judge only scored her first loop-de-loop a seven.

We never saw them come back up. Not because we were tearing the uphill. It was just as painstaking as I expected.

We were some of the last people going up, especially after a pit-stop at the restrooms and Daughter getting a brief swim in the lake. All the employees left around the same time we did. Our tour guide was jogging the whole way. Whatever, dude. Talk to me when you’re fifty. And know where Canada is.

My legs were fine, but my breathing and heartrate weren’t having it. Especially since my dumb ass decided to push it for the first quarter mile. And that water from the lake was now an hour old and not quite as crisp anymore.

We kept leapfrogging the captain. While we were resting, he would move ahead. Then he would rest and we would pass him. We always exchanged pleasantries. He convinced me there was no shame in going slow, even if I’ve got a ten-year old with me that could’ve probably ran the whole damn thing with the tour guide.

He might’ve been of a similar age to The Doomed, but was in substantially better health, which, again, makes me wonder if they had a shot in hell of hiking uphill, regardless of injury. After all, this uphill hike was the captain’s everyday commute. He knew which trees and rocks were best for leaning against, just like I knew which lanes have potholes. Can’t tell whose commute is more excruciating. Mine is mind-numbing, his is leg-numbing. His has a much better view than mine, no matter how creative those personalized plate are.

Eventually, we made it. Probably took about twice as long going up as down. And then, exhausted and out of breath, all I had to do was drive back to a hotel we’d booked in Weed, California. Which was still a good three hours away and, despite getting good online reviews, had soap but no shampoo in the shower and an air conditioner that I had to stand on a chair to plug in and wait another twenty minutes for it to cool down the room.

But, when given a chance, you’ve always gotta stop in Weed, amirite?

Family Rocky Mountain Trip

A.B. Kelly · July 15, 2023 · Musings · Colorado, Estes Park, family vacation, national park, Rocky Mountain National Park, Rocky Mountains, travel, travelblog, Vacation · One Comment

Finishing up some blogging from my recent family trip to Colorado. Last week I posted about the flatland stuff (because, no matter how many times I visit, I’m always surprised at how flat the mile-high city is). The focal point of our trip to Colorado was… Well, technically it was because my Angels were playing the Rockies. That’s what got us to the state. But once there, we decided to head up to Rocky Mountain National Park for a couple days.

Estes Park

Estes Park, the town just outside the national park entrance, was an odd little berg. You know those small vacation towns: Artists who can’t compete in a legitimate marketplace head to tourist traps where visitors spend boatloads of cash on tchotchkes to commemorate their travels. Not sure who’s shopping for Christmas shit in June, but Estes Park had at least three Christmas stores. Perhaps the pine trees put people in the mood? Not that I saw many people going into or out of them. Good news for the proprietors, though. If they can’t make it selling wreaths and ornaments, they can always open another ice cream shop.

Holy shit, there was more ice cream per capita than there was cannabis in Denver. I shit you not, there had to be at least ten of them on the three-block downtown. Salt water taffy, too. I’ve never really understood the draw of salt water taffy. I’ll have a piece or two, but they all taste the same and are a pain to eat. Can’t imagine there’s enough demand to carry an entire business, much less four on the same block. But clearly I’m wrong. Or maybe I’m not because, again, one never finds them in an actual city. In fact, prior to this trip, I always assumed they were only ubiquitous in seaside villages. You know, the whole “salt water” thing. But I guess salt can be added after the fact.

A mystery even bigger than the number of ice cream (and taffy) stores is their closing time, which for most was 8:00 pm. In a normal town of 6,000, I might expect them to roll up the sidewalks early, but this is a vacation town. The two ice cream shops that stayed open until 9:00 pm were spilling over with patrons for that last hour. I’m no economist, but it seems the extra costs borne from staying open one more hour would more than be compensated by the number of ice cream scoops sold. Hell, one of them could’ve opened until 10:00 pm and still come out ahead. The only thing waiting for us back at the hotel was the copy of Legally Blonde Daughter picked out from the DVD library. Even salt water taffy started sounding good.

At the other end of our culinary day, we found the most wonderful spot for breakfast. Well, not a full breakfast, but donuts! And not full donuts, but mini donuts.

What are mini donuts, you ask? Um… they’re donuts… but mini. Seemed a little odd at first, because the minimum order is four donuts, but they all have to be the same flavor. Wife and Daughter kept having issues with this, even on day two, trying to come up with four flavors for the four mini donuts, but if we wanted four flavors, the minimum number of donuts we’d be acquiring is sixteen. But once you get the ordering down, and once you realize that four mini donuts has about the same dough as one standard donut, it’s just a matter of picking the proper flavor.

But damn, those flavors were decadent. We went three days in a row and had everything from cinnamon sugar to Nutella to red velvet crumbles. Each donut is practically swimming in the flavor. Each is served in its own cardboard to-go container, the bottom of which is coated with the glaze or coating. After eating the cinnamon sugar donuts, Wife poured the rest of it into her latte to make her own cinnamon dolce. And to think we didn’t even make it through half of the menu.

Even better was the motif of the donut shop. It’s named Squatchy Donuts, complete with more Bigfoot paraphernalia that you can shake a stick, or point a shaky film camera, at. I never thought of Colorado as a big Bigfoot area. Always associated it more with Oregon and Washington, but I suppose he shows up wherever there are forests, mountains, and legal narcotics.

If only we could’ve had donuts and ice cream for every meal. Unfortunately, almost every other meal we had in Estes Park was the culinary equivalent of a Christmas shop in June. Our first night wasn’t terrible, as we found a pasta place with a messy baked pasta that was at least worthwhile. Daughter’s mac n’ cheese off the kid’s menu was probably the best part, as they put mini shells in an alfredo sauce and threw some mozzarella on top. She wasn’t thrilled, because it wasn’t her idea of proper mac n’ cheese, but Wife and I thought it was great.

The next two meals were lackluster burgers. On the menu, they sounded great, one with pulled pork and the other featuring bleu cheese and grilled onions. Unfortunately, the meat in both was subpar. I’d think they were frozen Costco patties except I didn’t see a Costco this side of Denver. The other problem was that both seemed to pass “medium” about an hour before they were taken off the grill. Scratch that. Neither was grilled. They were both griddled.

Wife’s options were similarly lackluster. She ordered a grilled cheese that seemed to have one slice of cheese between two pieces of white bread. The following day her nachos promised guacamole but instead had some “avocado” “puree” that again seemed like it came out of a freezer. I know, coming from California, we’re spoiled with avocado, but Colorado isn’t exactly Timbuktu. Half the damn residents were California transplants back in the 1990s and 2000s.

I know these touristy towns don’t have to worry about repeat customers. It probably behooves them to not waste effort on good food. Even if they’re the best in town, nobody’s eating there more than once. But sheesh, can we find the hockey puck store they’re all getting their meat from and shut it down?

Until we finally realized we should just dine at the only fancy place in town.

Stanley Hotel

Our last two meals in Estes Park were at its most famous locale. We went to Post Chicken and Beer, a franchise with a couple locations outside Estes Park (and with a name like Chicken & Beer, how can I go wrong?), for dinner, then returned to the hotel’s Brunch and Co the next morning.

Both times, we had to pay to park. It’s $10 to park, but you get a token that you can use for $5 off food or merchandise. Kinda like a reverse validation. Encourage people to spend money there and not, say, wander around in a certain hedge maze.

Allegedly.

The allegedly doesn’t pertain to the hedge maze, cause you’re damn right I did that, even if it isn’t quite as full in June as, say, the middle of winter when only the caretaker is there.

No, the allegedly deals with this token that might or might not take five bucks off one’s purchase. It’s not that Post Chicken or Brunch & Co didn’t take them. They probably would have. But there was no fucking way I was spending a token that looked like this:

And yeah, I went twice. Why didn’t I spend the second token at brunch? Cause I have friends who like The Shining, too.

I had always heard that the Stanley Hotel tried to distance itself from the fictional Overlook hotel that is based on it. Maybe I’m thinking of the Timberline Lodge in Oregon, which was used as the external shots in the movie. I know they’re the ones who asked room 217 to be changed to 237 in the movie because there is no 237 at the Timberline and they worried people would avoid 217. Then again, the Stanley Hotel didn’t even let the movie be filmed there, so maybe at one time I was correct and they weren’t leaning into The Shining.

Not so anymore. Holy crap, it’s like a Stephen King amusement park. In the gift shop, you can buy anything you want with the word Redrum emblazoned on it. Or ties, socks, dog leashes, you name it, in the iconic 1970s carpet that Danny keeps riding his tricycle on and off. And that hedge looks like it’s a recent addition. Maybe in a few years, it’ll be as daunting as the movie. Not the book, though, because I think it was animal hedges in the book.

Instead of worrying that customers would be hesitant to stay in room 217, they’ve renamed it the Stephen King Suite and charge twice as much for it.

Don’t believe me? Check out the menu at the brunch restaurant:

The brunch food, by the way, was decadent. I got the “Here’s Johnny.”

I also bought the 1970s carpet tie.

Rocky Mountain National Park

I’ve always been a big outdoorsy fan, and thankfully Daughter has followed in some of those footsteps. I used to camp in Yosemite and near Devil’s Postpile every year when I was young. Back in the good old days, if you stood outside a Ticketron at 6:00 in the morning, you were guaranteed a camping spot. These days, you’re put into a virtual queue with all the lazy asses who didn’t roll out of bed until five minutes before the tickets went on sale. I have yet to discover a magic touch.

We’ve taken her to Yosemite a number of times, but most of the time we have to stay outside the park. Unlike Estes Park, the towns “directly outside” Yosemite are still a good ninety minutes from the valley floor, so she’s never been to an evening ranger show or shouted “Elmer!” all night long (Do they still do that? I guess I’ll find out if I ever get to the front of the virtual queue). Still, she’s well versed in the major attractions and how fun it is to skip stones across the Merced River.

So why not branch out to National Park #2? And better the Rocky Mountains than shitholes like Joshua Tree and Death Valley, which qualify more as “Places to Speed Through en route to Vegas” than “majestic works of nature that ought to be preserved.” Seriously, was someone trying to develop Death Valley into a condominium complex? I don’t think the ghost of Teddy Roosevelt’s the only market force conspiring against that particular pipe dream.

Wasn’t really sure what to expect from RMNP, though. It appeared to only have one major road going through, and I didn’t see us backpacking with Canadian flags. So I treated it like Yosemite and looked up shorter hikes with lakes and waterfalls. That’s what national parks are for, is it not?

There’s good and bad news about those lakes and waterfalls in RMNP. Yes, there are plenty of them, and in fact many of them are close to each other with shortish walks in between. The bad news is we couldn’t get to any of them on day #1 because I’d made the wrong reservation.

Timed Entry

At Rocky Mountain National Park, you have to reserve your entry time to the park. A lot of national parks started doing this during Covid, because, you know, we don’t want to encourage people to go outdoors when there’s a disease that spreads indoors. Most of the parks have gone back to no reservations for daily use (including Yosemite, which is second guessing itself after being absolutely swarmed with people this year), but RMNP is still doing its Covid thing.

Some of the reserved entry times were released months ago, but when I checked back in May, only times after 11:00 am were available. I wasn’t opposed to waiting until lunchtime to enter, but if there are hikes and views and such, a morning entry time was more ideal. Fortunately they hold half their entry visas back until the evening before each entry date. Guessing Estes Park and Grand Lake don’t want word getting out that if you didn’t log in to recreation.gov three months ago, don’t bother coming to spend your tourist dollars here.

I was a little worried that I’d be out of cell range when 5:00 hit, but we left Denver at such a time that we would be heading through Boulder right around the prescribed time with an understanding that, if traffic wasn’t too bad and we were ahead of schedule, we’d stop off for some coffee and wifi.

However, while I hovered over the refresh button, I failed to notice there were two different entry passes. One said “Park Access Timed Entry.” Stupidly, I picked that option because, I don’t know, I wanted… park access? I didn’t realize that, for the same price right below it was “Park Access Timed Entry – Includes Bear Lake Road.” Want to guess where all the lakes and waterfalls are?

One last mention of the Timed Entry system. It’s extremely popular. As you can tell by this screenshot where it’s received over 12,000 ratings with an average of 4 stars!

What the hell are these people reviewing? It’s not the park itself, as most of the features and locations have their own listings, with much higher numbers and averages. So they are literally rating the process of making the reservation. The only other thing I can think of is using five stars or one star to show solidarity or opposition with the idea of limiting park access. I guess some people have to review everything. Maybe that’s why every minimum wage employee expects to be tipped now. The tablet’s “just going to ask me some questions,” huh? Boy that’s a nosy-ass tablet. At least now I know I can hit the skip button and just assume I’m the guy leaving a one-star review of a website selling entry times.

Regardless of the reason, I imagine that four-star rating comes from 80% of the people giving it five stars and the other 20% giving it one. Nobody is hedging their bets with a four or a three, right? Either you got your timed entry or you didn’t. Five stars or one. Unless, like me, they were stressing out about wifi availability. In fact, when we wanted to reserve our spot for day two, this time with Bear Lake Road access, we had to leave the park to be back in town for its precious 4G connectivity at the proper time. Maybe that makes it less than five stars? Better yet, how about I just get my park access and double back to the main page to tell the world about it.

Day One

Since we couldn’t go down their precious Bear Lake Road on day one, which was not only the (more or less) only road in the park besides the main road, but was also right inside the park entrance, taunting us plebs as we drove past.

There was another side road we contemplated taking which was closed during winter but which should totally have been fine because there wasn’t a ton of snow on the ground despite the elevation. But evidently it was closed to “prepare” it for the summer season. Totally fine because when we made it to the visitor center, I saw said road from the other end and holy shit, when they say it’s a dirt road, they mean a motherfucking dirt road.

The paved road was bad enough. Some white-knuckled fucking curves there. You don’t realize how tight your sphincter is until you round the bend and the sheer drop-off is now on the left side of the road, meaning a veer of an inch to the right would only result in a legal battle between my insurance company and the car rental company instead pf a legal battle between gravity and this mortal coil.

The views, though, were spectacular. I didn’t expect regular ol’ valleys and peaks to be breathtaking. Sure, the two biggest draws in Yosemite are valleys (okay, maybe Hetch Hetchy is third behind Tuolumne Meadows but I doubt Tuolumne Meadows will open this year), complete with peaks, but those peaks are distinctive. I can pick El Capitan and Half Dome out from an airplane while flying to Southern California. There’s also something to be said for driving down into that valley, skipping rocks across the river. And have I mentioned the waterfalls?

Editors note: Don’t drive down into Hetch Hetchy. Those environmentalists in San Francisco need their pure drinking water, which they can’t possibly get from anywhere other than damming up a pristine natural beauty. Oh, and you’ll probably drown, too.

The valleys and peaks in Rocky Mountain were magnificent not from their distinctiveness but from their lack thereof. Every time we faced a new direction, the myriad of points made the view different. A number of curves had pullouts, and although we didn’t stop at all of them (especially those on the left), each time we saw one, we said, “Wow, that must be the view that this road is all about. That must be what people come to the park to see. Can’t imagine anything better.” Then three miles further, we’d repeat the mantra.

I know pictures of wide-open spaces are as useless in conveying their beauty as it comes. Same goes with fireworks. But too bad, because I’m still going to sic some worthless photos on ya:

We finally came to a full stop at the highest visitor center in the United States. And not just from the drugs. Although one of the cashiers from Pennsylvania said she was having the “best time” with her summer job in Colorado, then proceeded to pontificate about George Harrison’s post-Beatles discography.

In her defense, I was wearing a Beatles t-shirt and she politely asked if I liked the Beatles first which seems an odd question for someone wearing a Beatles shirt. Then again, I can’t tell you how many of my students wear Nirvana, Anthrax, and Pantera shirts without being able to name a single goddamn song. “I didn’t know it was a band.”

No, the reason it’s the highest is elevation. Over 11,000 feet, to be… not really “exact,” but you get where I was going. I originally thought it was on the continental divide, but it was a fair amount to the east, so I didn’t get to drop some water and see which way it would flow. But there was a hike (a staircase, really) from the parking lot up to just over 12,000 feet. Wife made it about halfway, while Daughter and I mustered the courage to walk up some stairs, her with more gusto than I.

The hike isn’t hard from a usual hike-rating system, but at that elevation, everything takes on a different dimension. Some people get nausea and headaches, but fortunately those didn’t hit me. I got some dizziness and, according to my Fitbit, my heartrate rose far higher than on a normal flight of stairs, even a flight of stairs that goes on for a quarter-mile. One of the other symptoms is a lack of appetite, so with those two symptoms together, I should come here to diet.

When I made it to the top, just over 12,000 feet elevation, it was windy. It was beautiful, too. But first and foremost, it was windy.

There was a preteen girl at the top whose mom took her picture while she did a handstand. It took a few attempts before she got it. I guess she’s doing something called “Handstands Across America.” I hope it’s not as dumb as the Hands Across America we did in the 1980s. I remember months of buildup and then when it happened, it was a whole bunch of “that was it? No countdown or live satellite shot or nothing?” I think it was designed to raise money for something like homelessness, or maybe Africa, although I think Africa was saved by a rock concert and there’s been no troubles in Africa ever since. I don’t see how me touching a random stranger helped homelessness. Or Africa, for that matter.

On our way out of the park (in time to get the entry pass for the next day), we stopped by Sheep Lake. There were no sheep. There was a moose, though. We didn’t stick around long enough for the sheep to come home and be all, “Hey fuckface, can you not read what the fucking lake is called?” Then again, maybe the sheep would wisely step aside and let this big ol’ moose hang out where he pleases.

Day Two

On the second day in the park, we finally got to drive down the Hellfire Club of Rocky Mountain National Park. Still couldn’t park there, mind you. My dumb ass tried, though.

I didn’t believe the sign at the beginning of Bear Lake telling us that Bear Lake parking lot was full. It seemed like a very permanent sign and considering it was still before 9:00 in the morning, I assumed it was there to discourage people from driving on the road that they’d explicitly signed up to drive on. I’m sure there were a bunch of people who, like me, didn’t realize there were two options and accidentally bought access to this road. And the sign is designed to encourage them to make their way toward all those beautiful vistas I was relegated to yesterday.

The other option makes less sense, that they limit the entry to this road but still don’t provide enough parking for the number of cars they already know will visiting? It’s like the opposite of the standard used in suburban stretch malls, where they make a parking lot big enough to cover all the hypothetical cars that will show up on Black Friday, so most of the spots go unused 364 days out of the year. Meanwhile on Bear Lake Road, they know precisely how many cars are coming each day, yet the parking lots are all taken up before 9:00 am? Let me put on my skeptical face.

So I also blew past the “Park n’ Ride” lot halfway down the road. It said we could park there and ride a shuttle to the lake. Again, it was a permanent sign claiming every other lot was full. Plus we’d seen no shuttles and if they were anything like Yosemite, there’d be a good twenty minutes between shuttles. I’m not falling for their damn tricks.

A half-hour later, after passing at least five shuttles, we were back in the park n’ ride lot, waiting in a line that rivaled Disneyland. We’d taken the road to its bitter end only to be turned away by the parking attendant who let the car in front of us in for the “last spot.” Still, I think we only had to wait for the third shuttle, which were seven minutes apart from each other, so add that to the drive to the end of the road and back, and maybe my inability to read instructions only put us behind by an hour or so. Fortunately there weren’t any storms or scorchers due for later in the day. We’ll just call this a dress rehearsal for Death Valley, where such a minor setback might make us dehydrated mummies on the tail end.

When we finally made it to Bear Lake, it was beautiful. A simple hike takes you around the lake to view it from all vantage points that looked totally different from each other while on the hike but the pictures of are virtually indistinguishable. There were a few spots that the posted sign considered “treacherous,” which turned out to mean “about as steep as a driveway.” I think the sign’s designation was only meant for wheelchair-bound visitors, but after my disbelief of the parking lot signs, I wasn’t taking any chances. That being said, after circling the lake, I couldn’t tell you which spots were considered more or less difficult. It felt pretty steady to me.

When we returned to the shuttle spot, we had a few options. At least two other lakes seemed a short hike away. Nymph Lake, which would’ve led to all sorts of sophomoric jokes if Daughter hadn’t been with us, was only a half-mile, but it looked small on the topographic map. Dream Lake, which I assume must be pretty, was a farther jaunt, and there was another lake, Emerald Lake, beyond that. I was relatively certain we were on borrowed hiking time with the child. While I might’ve gotten a half-mile out of her, “Let’s go to lake numbers three and four” would be met with open revolt.

If there’s a waterfall at the end of said hike, though…

Alberta Falls, which an odd moniker unless we’d somehow transported to Banff, was less than a mile away. It had been my initial goal when researching Bear Lake Road the previous night. One lake, one waterfall, and I’m good. But all the stuff we read about the Alberta Falls indicated we should get off at the Glacier Gorge parking lot/shuttle stop, not Bear Lake. From Glacier Gorge, it’s less than a mile. But the trailhead at Bear Lake claimed Alberta Falls was a mile away.

I asked the ranger which route to the falls would be best. He said to start from Bear Lake, because it’s a half-mile down followed by a half-mile up, as opposed to Glacier Gulch, from whence it’s uphill the whole way. Then we can exit via the downhill, which allegedly is easier although try telling my knees that. Downhill at least leads to less Daughter whining.

Great info from that ranger. Maybe they should’ve posted one in the middle of the road at the park n’ ride.

What followed was a half-hour of “Are we there yet? Are we there yet?” I might’ve made it worse by telling her “This is the waterfall we’ve been hiking to” every time we passed a trickle. “Isn’t it beautiful and totally worth the effort to get here?” Once or twice she believed me. Hilarious until I try to get her to move onward again.

Look! Alberta Falls!

The actual falls were very pretty. You come at them from the side, so they appear to be coming out of the rocks. I kept moving around trying to find a better angle, but head-on wasn’t happening. We walked a little ways on, hoping the trail might double-back to see the falls from above, but nope. Off in a totally different direction. I commented that I might scramble up those rocks because they were totally climbable. Wife reminded me that, pushing fifty with a history of gout, it isn’t the rocks but the scrambler whose limits must be taken into account. Contemplated sending Daughter up to take a picture, because she could run up them without any negative consequences, but it would be a crapshoot whether she dropped the phone onto said rock or over the falls. No way was it coming back as unscathed as her.

In the end, I settled for this vantage point.

Final thoughts

Whereas Yosemite Valley is cozy and local, RMNP is vast and grandiose. Every direction I turned could be a park of its own. We never even made it to the Continental Divide or anything else west of the visitor center, partly because we felt the need to stop every couple miles to view an entirely new vista. There’s an abandoned town up near the headwaters of the Colorado River? Wow, I can’t imagine how many extra days of exploring it would’ve taken for us to make it that far into the park.

And how many daily reservations? At some point, I wasn’t going to have coverage until 5:05 pm, and I would be giving a less-than-five-star review.

I like that so many lakes and waterfalls are that close to each other, with seemingly simple hikes between them. While we opted for only one lake and one waterfall this time, I could totally see opting for three or four lakes in one fell swoop on a repeat visit.

Except for this lake. It was visible in the distance on the day one drive. Guessing it’s inaccessible, but dammit, I want a parking lot right the fuck there right the fuck now. I’d even reserve a different road access to get there.

Finally, we spent a ton of money while there. Must’ve visited at least four, maybe five, visitor and interpretive centers, and probably bought something each time. A National Parks passport. And a journal. And a water bottle. Plus rocks and postcards and those “smash the penny” machines that somehow claim to not be a felony. Two of the visitor centers are outside the park, probably to let those unreserveds still spend money lying about actually making it inside.

It’s easy to justify the purchases, since the money goes to a good cause of preserving these pristine miracles of nature for future generations. Not that they need our money, because it’s funded through tax money regardless of whether we buy a damn thing.

So here’s my question. Shouldn’t my national park souvenir purchases be tax deductible? It’s all going to the same place. The government takes income out of my paycheck and they also get my money for their stupid tchotchkes? It’s all going into the same “Congressional Hookers & Blow” slush fund. I feel like the government would rather us give the money to them than to donate to those whiny charities anyway.

While I’m at it, I also need to renew my passport soon. Where’s my W-2 for that?

Gonna leave you with the view from the back porch/balcony from our hotel in Estes Park. Not a bad place to read a book.

national park

A Great Basin and a Lonely Road

Summer Vacation on Channel Islands

Summer Vacation in Lassen Park

Summer Vacation at Crater Lake

Family Rocky Mountain Trip

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