We have our Alaskan photos up on something resembling a website now. Rather than send you all to the full set of photos - about like staring into the sun - I'm going to run through day by day and pick out some highlights photos. Contact me directly if you really want the "staring into the sun" variety.
On the 13th of June, after work, we left San Jose for the great north. The FJ Cruiser was packed up with care. The little MaoMao bird was carefully deposited in her own home cage, which we moved to "Bird Camp" (Yifun's parents' house). Our plan was to make Redding or thereabouts by nightfall. The plan worked out.
So on the 14th of June, we made our real departure from Northern California, turning off I-5 north and heading Northeast up through the northern California wilds. It is very curious country up here. Lots of rocks everywhere, just lying around on the ground...ostensibly these are ranches or farms but I pity the man who tries to plough it. Some enterprising ranchers had taken to piling the rocks on palettes, with chicken-wire columns to contain them. It looks like these "Bales" of rocks were up for sale, and many of the farms (usually what looked like horse pastures) seemed to have 3' wide stone-piled fences surrounding their compounds. I have to admit, it's a really nice look. Up past the farms, we found Mt. Shasta was out with nary a cloud to be seen. Since we normally drive through here in the Winter to my parents' house in Seattle, this was a pleasant surprise.
We stopped not long after at a small rest stop, and prepared the first of what would be many savory lunches. We really had some good ideas for making quick road food without paying for every meal. This was one of our better ones, and we kept returning to it. Tortillas are great; they keep well, they pack flat, and they're tasty. Combine with any kind of meat and sauces and you make an instance lunch wrap. Today we had some freeze-dried (camp food) onions and chives, so we just put some water in the baggy to let them soak. Drain that, add some mayo, salt, and pepper, then the tunafish (from a foil pack). Lay down some salad greens, then the tuna, and you've got an instant wrap. We switched in some Salmon, some chicken breasts, throughout the trip.
As we continued northward, Yifun found a reference to a local park near the road in her map. Lava Butte national volcanic monument. There's quite a lot of this sort of thing in northeastern California, Oregon, and thereabouts. Here at Lava Butte, there's a cindercone, built up from years of smaller eruptions. Below the cindercone there's massive piles of black volcanic rock, spreading out in a sea of black amongst the pine trees. Every so often you see an enterprising pine tree that thinks it can grow in the middle of this sort of thing. If you're lucky, like we were, there'll be room to drive up to the top of the cindercone. It's a long spiral drive, on a road only just barely wide enough for two cars. It's quite a view from up there, so it's no surprise they put a fire control station here.
