Wednesday - We are enjoying our quiet little campground here in Tulelake, although Joe got up sneezing and continued that all day long. Don't know if it is the grass, the hay all around us, or a combination of everything green here, but his allergies have really kicked in. This morning we took a drive out of town, first to the National Wildlife Refuge. Along the way, Joe stopped to check out the crop that he couldn't identify in a field along the way. The leaf smelled like mint, and we confirmed at the Refuge that mint was grown in the area, along with potatoes, radishes, strawberries and onions.
After a brief film in the visitor center, we headed out to the lake. Tule Lake is huge, probably not very deep, and is home to many waterfowl. "At least 489 species of wildlife visit or live in this volcanic wonderland," including bald eagles during their winter migration. Before we quite reached the lake, we saw our first deer.
Once we got to the lake, we saw lots of birds, ducks, geese, seagulls, most of which we couldn't identify.
Ducks with babies.
We watched a gaggle of Canadian geese march up the road in front of us, then dive into the lake.
During most of our drive today, beautiful Mt. Shasta showed herself -- sometimes peeking over the tops of closer mountains, sometimes standing out by herself. The mountain is so pretty it is hard not to take advantage of photo ops.
We even saw a pelican on the lake. And some other bird that I couldn't get a photo of -- Scientific Joe named it "a black, long-neck pointy nose" bird.
Joe scared up an owl too, right beside the road. I didn't get a picture of that either, and he said I should have, it was practically sitting on the radiator cap! (But I was in the back seat) Anyhow, that was exciting, as well as several hawks we watched swooping low over the marshes.
As we left the lake area, we saw our second deer. At first, I just saw his ears sticking up; then he moved a little and we could see all of him.
We saw one more deer along here, and it was the most cooperative. Joe stopped the car and got drinks out of the back, and the deer stayed in our sight the whole time -- I think he liked the sound of Joe's voice because he would look up every time Joe said something.
We drove out of the Refuge and headed to the Lava Beds National Monument. The Visitor Center was at the far end of this drive, but we stopped along the way and read some of the interpretative signs. We stopped at one called "Hospital Rock," and Joe took a group picture, although he chopped part of his head off when he settled the camera on the Rock.
There was a nice view of the lake area from this high point.
This area has more than 200 caves and lava tubes. We decided not to do any cave exploring, so we stopped at some of the viewpoints, checked out the visitor center and watched the film there. It's nice to have the American the Beautiful pass, which gets us into National Parks and National Monuments free.
We drove back out of this Park and headed to Camp Tulelake, the Camp built by the CCCs and used as a War Relocation Center (like the one south of Bishop that we toured), and then as a POW camp to house workers to relieve the shortage of agricultural labor . Unfortunately, the Camp was closed so we only got to see the barracks from the road.
We got back to our campground around 3:00 and decided to try for pizza again tonight. We regrouped a couple of hours later and headed out, and the pizza restaurant was open tonight. So we had dinner in Oregon (Malin, Oregon). The state line is just south of this little town, so we weren't sure which state we were in. On our way back to camp, we stopped to get pictures of some beautiful blue flowers at the corner of the fairgrounds where we are camped. We do not know what kind of flowers these are, but we really liked them. They had some other pretty flowers here at their entry.
California poppies.
The school is right across the road, and their mascot must be a goose because they are "Home of the Honkers."
After our nightly card game (the girls won handily again), we called it a night. This is an interesting area -- lots of history, lots of agriculture, lots of mountains. It was worth the stop. And the weather was beautiful -- 60s at night, 80s during the day. Sorry, Arizona.
No comments:
Post a Comment