At the end of the year, David's grandfather passed away after a long and active life. He lived in Hot Springs Village, Arkansas, and we quickly found out that getting…
After much delay and anticipation I have finally found time to sit down and publish photos and some posts about our road trip to Colorado. We were on the road…
And now for something completely different.
Last month I traveled to Arkansas with my In-Laws to visit David’s Grandpa in Hot Springs Village. We made a week of it and got in some valuable outdoor time at Petit Jean State Park and in the Ozarks along the Buffalo National River. I wasn’t sure what to expect in Arkansas; while getting ready for the trip I sometimes felt like I was preparing for a more foreign destination than my regular work trips to Germany. However, I ended up having a great time enjoying the green forests, rocks, rivers and waterfalls of northern Arkansas.
Check out the tabs below for a sampling of some of the fun things we got to see – a departure from the typical scenery we get here in California.
One of my favorite places to visit in mid-spring is Lava Beds National Monument, a remote pocket of land at the California-Oregon border. It is covered with the remains of…
I’m going to let you in on a secret. It comes in two parts. The first is this: Lava Beds National Monument. The second part is this: Easter Weekend.
Lava Beds sits just south of the California/Oregon border. The nearest town big enough for a Walmart is Klamath Falls, Oregon, about 40 miles to the north. Getting to the park from the major population centers of California involves a long, long drive, made even longer in winter by closure of the southern route due to snow. It is surrounded by horseradish farms, the Tule Lake National Wildlife Refuge, and the flanks of the enormous Medicine Lake Shield Volcano and related lava flows.
Lava Beds offers a unique experience. The main attractions are the hundreds of lava tube caves formed by the different flows off of the Medicine Lake Volcano. The labelled caves on the Lava Beds park map are generally developed. This means that they have ladders, cleared sections through the jumbles of rock, or walkways. They do not have lights – bring your own! The backcountry caves, however, are not developed and usually require a bit more scrambling or technical skills. Lava tubes in general are fairly easy to navigate, so advanced caving skills are not usually needed. Good lighting, head protection, and a lack of fear of the dark and tight spaces are the most important things to have in a lava tube.
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We spent the first couple days of our trip exploring the southernmost side of Anza Borrego (along S2), basecamped at Agua Caliente Hot Spring. It was nice to camp there…
Our third day in the desert was a simple and relaxing one playing tourist in Mojave. We kept our camp at Mid Hills and took a short hike straight from…
We headed up to Lava Beds for the cold easter weekend with Paige and Dave and their kids. It was a fun and simple trip - car camping in the…
Dave and I spent the weekend at Pinnacles National Monument. The park recently acquired a large parcel of new land and this land includes the old campground that used to be just outside the East entrance. The land needs a lot work since it has missed out on the preservation done within the park, and we were happy to be a part of a volunteer crew that contributed a few hours to the park through a Geocaching CITO event.
There were two tasks that our group contributed to: the first was to pull out invasive horehound plants from the old ranch lands that are now part of the park. Thousands of plants were cleaned out by the crew – great job! The second task was to build a fence and work on trail re-vegitation in the campground. There was a big open meadow that had been stomped down by people over the years. We built a rustic wooden fence around it while others mulched up the old trails to prepare for re-vegitation. It was hard but fun work. It was quite interesting to learn about the park’s expansion, and also get some education about the park’s condor program (we watched them soaring far above us near a roost on a ridge).