Mt Lassen Volcanic Park

Lassen Volcanic National Park is about 50 miles east of Redding, Ca where we are staying.

The seismograph used in the early 1900's that recorded the volcanic eruption of Mt Lassen.

The eruption of 1915 was captured by a photographer.  The cloud of ash reached  7 miles in the stratosphere. Lassen became a national park in 1916 because of its significance as a volcanic landscape. 

So true...

So after visiting the museum, we found out most of the trials were closed due to snow.  Go figure; currently, there is  still 25 feet of snow covering half of the park's roads; thus,  most of the park was out of our reach.  The ranger said this trail was open and would be worth the hike, so we took off.

Maybe the ranger should have asked if we had snowshoes.

It was hit and miss locating the trail at times.

Then we got to this section...hmmm...where does the trail go?  Wayne scouted it out for awhile but too much snow, and visions of headlines.."Two Texas hikers have been missing since June 15..." kept echoing through our minds...So after 2 miles of trudging up to this beautiful spot, we turned back.

The view from where we were forced to turn around at. So after carefully descending the snow laden trail...which is much more difficult than most will realize, we decided to tour the rest of the park that was open by vehicle.

 Mt. Lassen.

another view

This is directly across from the volcano and is known as the "devastated area".; there are still visible signs of the devastation from the eruption ( when there is no snow, of course)  This is the trail head for a self-guided tour of the area...no, we did not even attempt that one!

Even though we were limited in our exploration, it was a beautiful day.  You could spend an entire week in this national park. 

View leaving the national park area...maybe we will come back one day.  There are suppose to be some killer waterfalls further into the park and about 130 miles of hiking trails yet to explore.