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| National Park #13 |
We woke to
the scent of freshly-brewed coffee and sizzling bacon. Uncle Larry was in the kitchen making eggs to
order and serving up fresh California fruit, some from his own trees and some
grown by his younger daughter, Sarah. His
older daughter, Beth, and I went to pick up some fabulous cinnamon rolls from a
local bakery which completed the morning’s spread. We wolfed it all down hungrily before setting
out for Lassen Volcanic National Park located an hour and forty-five minutes
away. Josh’s parents, Steve and Lanita,
were joining for this park visit, and we all piled into the Volvo to get to
Lassen by 10:30 in time for the ranger program.
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| L to R - Lola, Sarah, Kinley, Beth, Uncle Larry, and Josh enjoy breakfast. |
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| Aunt Nancy and Steve |
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| Could these kiddos be any cuter? Roman and Addie eat their breakfast, too. |
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| I give Uncle Larry a hard time because I like him! |
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| Josh and Lanita serve up the cinnamon rolls. |
Josh had
called ahead and learned that this park had the most complicated and
time-consuming requirements of any Junior Ranger program we’d done to
date. The ranger on the phone was
actually sheepish about it, especially since there were only two ranger
programs a day and every Junior Ranger is required to attend one. The ranger also told Josh that our favorite
trail, Bumpass Hell, was closed due to snow.
Evidently, crews had been working on snow removal ten hours per day,
seven days a week since April, but progress was slow.
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| I got to use the heat gun to test the temperature of the bubbling mud pot. |
We arrived
just in time, and the young ranger taught us about the geology of the area
including mud pots and fumaroles that are common in the park. He even let us use his heat gun to test the
temperature of the soil surrounding the mud pots! After his talk, we drove up to the Bumpass
Hell trailhead to get some pictures of the remaining snow, and we certainly
weren’t disappointed. Huge walls of snow
lined the parking lot, and the kids and I climbed the drifts, throwing snowballs
at each other and posing for pictures of the spectacle.
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| This wasn't a pile of snow that had been plowed into place. It was an actual snowdrift. In July. |
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| Kinley aims for Knox. |
We returned
to the Visitors’ Center to pick up some lunch at the snack bar (which was fine
but nothing to write a blog about), and Knox spent some time checking out the
exhibits. The quality of exhibits in
national parks’ visitors’ centers varies widely, so he was excited by the
interactive ones at Lassen. The
unfortunate side effect of this was that his sister got really annoyed with him
for not working on his Junior Ranger book.
At every stop, Kinley is very focused about getting the booklet done as
quickly as possible, but Knox has to be reminded repeatedly to get to
work. And seeing as how this was park
#13, Kinley was super tired of her brother slowing down the whole process over
and over because even if she finishes early, we like to let the kids go through
their swearing-in ceremonies at the same time.
I’m pretty sure that on this day she got so sick of waiting for him that
she just told him the answers to get the whole thing over with.
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| Knox makes a new friend while learning about the geology of the park. |
The coolest
thing about this particular swearing-in was that the ranger got each child a
real ranger hat to wear! Kinley’s was a
little small, but it was still a really cute experience we’d never had before. Badges in hand, we loaded back into the car
to meet the rest of the family for a tour of the Sierra Nevada Brewery. Tour guests must be at least twelve years
old, so we dropped Knox at Aunt Nancy and Uncle Larry’s to swim while the rest
of us met up with Josh’s cousins at the brewery.
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| The kids got to wear real ranger hats while being sworn in! |
Let me say
this. I don’t like beer. I just don’t.
Neither does Josh. But we really
wanted to have time with the cousins, and this tour was what they wanted to do
so off to the tour Josh, Kinley, Steve, and I went. Lanita stayed behind to spend time with her
brothers and help out at the house. The
tour was unlike anything I’d ever done before, and our tour guide was incredibly
enthusiastic. The most interesting parts
to me were seeing the cold storage room full of hops and learning about the founder’s
tinkering at age 14 that led eventually to crafting his own beer. He was clearly a gifted child, and I found myself
wondering what would have happened to him in school if he hadn’t had a mentor
who encouraged his mechanical gifts and inquisitive mind. (You can take the teacher out of the
classroom for the summer, but you can’t keep her from thinking about gifted
kids!)
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| Sierra Nevada samples |
Our tour
ended up being a little bit of a Willy Wonka reboot. Steve got overheated on the tour and left to
go home, but the Sierra Nevada staff somehow didn’t get the memo. They were freaking out, and it felt a little
like when the Augustus Gloop character in Roald Dahl’s book disappears up the
chocolate pipe. Only instead of Oompa
Loompas singing we had security asking us if we’d heard from him every five
minutes. We eventually got in touch with
him, and he was safe back at Aunt Nancy and Uncle Larry’s house.
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| Just before Steve started feeling overheated, he sampled the non-alcoholic wort, part of the beer-making process. |
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| Word got around that our tour guide, Matt, had lost a guest. His colleagues gave him a seriously hard time about it. |
After the
tour, we had dinner together at the brewery, and then we returned to the
ranch. Josh, Beth, Uncle Larry, and his
brother, John, took some time to practice their barbershop quartet numbers
which would debut the following evening at the anniversary party while the rest
of us talked and visited. Part of the
family was staying at an Airbnb property, and several of us eventually ended up
there, talking, laughing, and even making s’mores until we couldn’t hold our
eyes open any longer.
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| L to R - Uncle John, Uncle Larry, Josh, and Beth squeeze in a barbershop quartet practice session. |
Being together
made me wish for more occasions like this one, occasions where we all converge
on one place and spend time remembering why we like each other. And intentionally forgetting the reasons we might
get annoyed with each other. Because families
are fun and annoying all at once. But
mostly fun.
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