Crater Lake & Redwood Trees
After Bend, we drove to Crater Lake, Oregon. (To Corey’s grand amusement, this is when I saw three black blobs by the side of the road in a forested area, exclaimed “bears,” only to find out that they were good old cows.)
Crater Lake was formed when the volcanic mountain Mount Mazama erupted violently around 5700 BC, losing 3,000 feet/1000 meters in height, destroying its peak and collapsing in on itself, creating the current crater that has been filled with rain water and snow melt over time.
Our plans to take a hike around the lake were thwarted due to early snow turned to ice by sub-freezing nights. Nevertheless, we were able to drive to a scenic point on the lake and take in the lovely view.
While driving through beautiful fall foliage in Western Oregon and Northern California, I learned a bit about the State of Jefferson Movement after seeing a number of road signs. The movement (https://soj51.org/) aims for 23 counties in this region to secede from California/Oregon and form a 51st state due to the perceived tyranny and unconstitutional behavior of these States, mainly based on grievances about gun carrying regulation and taxation. I found it quite baffling that their newsletter discussed two white men complaining in a lawsuit about California’s open carry licensing because it gives discretion to any local law enforcement (for places under 200,000) to grant the license or not - this seen as too restrictive obviously. I would like to submit an amicus brief to the court saying I agree with their complaint, that type of discretion is probably discriminatory against Muslim ladies of the Middle East who may want to acquire licenses in California, do they not see that this discretionary system particularly benefits white men?!!! 🤦♀️⚡️⚡️ Instead, I’ll just leave a photo of fall foliage here.
We then arrived in Redwood National Park, which I had been wanting to see for a long time after having read about it. California redwood trees are the tallest living trees on earth, reaching up to 380 feet/115 meters in height and up to 29feet/9 meters in diameter. Living 1200 to 1800 years, they are also amongst the oldest things alive on earth. Imagine - some that we saw were alive when the western Roman Empire collapsed or when the Chinese discovered gunpowder! What the statistics cannot tell you however is how overpoweringly magnificent and humbling they are. Words fail. And images too, since it’s really hard to capture their scale. But I tried anyway. We hiked two trails (Damnation Creek trail and Tall Trees Grove trail), both of which were beautiful and awe inspiring. To be a small fleeting human in the land of ancient giants.
We stayed in a KOA in Crescent City - which apparently suffered significant damage due to tsunami waves after the 2011 earthquake in Japan! More of the sense that the world is big and powerful and we as humans are small and at its bidding. And with that, we find ourselves driving to San Francisco.
