Trip to Ashland, Shasta Caverns and Lava Beds National Monument

Sept 2,3, 2007

This labor day weekend we decided to travel up to Ashland Oregon. In Ashland the Oregon Shakespeare festival is quite famous and Aparna being of literary sorts was the one to come up with this idea. Ashland is about 6.5 hrs from Sunnyvale and we started Saturday morning. We booked a room in Motel6 in Yreka - about 35 miles south of Ashland in Oregon, as it made both strategic and economical sense given that we were planning to go to Lava Beds National monuments the next day. By the time we reached Yreka it was 5.30 in the evening and then after taking some rest we drove to Ashland. We had no time to take photos as we were getting late and photography is not permitted inside the theater.

The play we saw was Tempest. I have not read even a single Shakespeare play. I tried once but found it hard to go beyond the first page. Aparna nevertheless is quite well read and thus I decided to rely on her for the translation from Shakespeare's English to the one I know. Well actually it wasn't so bad when I actually saw the play. I found that I did understand most of it. Aparna filled in the rest. I thought not all the actors did a good job.

Next morning, we decided to take little known route to Lava Beds. We would take Montague (4) and drive through and through the Klamath forest to 97 instead of taking 5 S and then 97N. The drive proved significantly adventurous that we had thought it would be. Inside the jungle we were throughly lost and the road was very hard to drive as it was unpaved and full or fallen rocks. There were quite a few bifurcations in the road with no signs at all. Soon we realized we were completely lost. We had to back track several times upon reaching dead ends. At each bifurcation we would take a mental note of landmarks to help us in back-tracking.

One thing we knew was that if we headed east we would eventually hit 97 at some point as it ran north-south. Until we could see Mount Shasta we drove east by making sure that the mount was always to our left. After sometime the jungle grew very thick and mount shasta was not visible anymore. Now we used the sun (the direction of the shadows) to figure out that we were going east. Finally, after 2.5 hours of driving based on reasoning and faith when we finally emerged our of the forest and saw civilization we were quite thrilled. We were not quite sure where we were until we saw the sign 97 and realized that our plan had indeed worked. By correlating the towns with our map we eventually figured out where we were. I will always remember this drive since I have never ever been this lost inside a thick jungle.

We stopped to have lunch on 97 and then proceeded to Lava Beds National Monument. The drive beside Tule Lake on 161 was amazing. The huge lake was studded with thousands of aquatic birds. Once again we were running late and I never stopped to take photos. We entered the park through the North Entrance. The visitor center is however, in the South Entrance, about 10 miles from there. We decided to see the park on our own without first visiting the visitor center and in retrospect this was a wrong decision. This is because we vastly underestimated the time it would take to explore the caves.

The Lava flow beds were nothing like we had seen before. The path of destruction that the Lava flow took looks like a river of charred stones and the enormousness of it is astounding. There was lava flow on both sides of the road and we parked aside to collect some rocks.

On the way we also saw the black crater, which was one of the location from where the lava erupted. Our next hike was up a volcano, its a steep 3/4 mile hike all the way to the top of the volcano to a fire observation deck - a place from where rangers look for forest fires. In retrospect however, these were not the most interesting things to see here and we should have skipped these given our short time.

The most interesting things to see here were the caves. These caves are actually pathways of the lava as it emerged out of the earth and later cooled down. The caves are simply amazing. As they are very dark (in fact its pitch dark in most places, you will not be able to see your own palm if you held it in front of your eyes - there is no light!!) and torches are needed. The torch is provided at the visitor center but is available only until 5:00 P.M. Given our short time, the guy at the visitor center advised us to visit the sunshine cave and the sentinel - in retrospect that was a perfect advice for us.

The sunshine cave was amazing. We could see all the lava flow patterns and formations. It was unbelievable to think that we were actually walking over frozen lava flow inside the earth.
We could not take too many picture inside the caves since they were very dark. After the sunshine cave we went into the sentinel cave, which was simply flabbergastingly huge and indeed a long hike. After the sentinel our time was up and we had to return the
torch. We then visited an artificially lit cave which was an educational cave, with lights and labels that indicated what the different formations were like and some explanation about them. In retrospect this should have been the first cave to visit since after this cave we know what to look for in the other caves. After this we visited the skull cave with the help of torches from two Indians who we met in the park itself. The skull cave is simply immense. It could hold a large boeing 747 easily. The cave descends about a 100 feet (I think) into the earth to reveal ice. Apparantly here, the ice never melts even though lava beds area itself can get very hot at the surface. It was quite cold under there.

After the lava beds monument we drove back to a motel we booked in Dunsmuir. The next day we went to lake Shasta caverns. The tour starts with a boat ride on lake shasta to the entrance of the caverns. It a small nice trip. The caverns were amazing. This was the first time Aparna saw stalactites and stalacmites and she was quite thrilled. For me this was the second time since I had seen them in Lury and Murray caverns in Maryland.
Its hard to explain the amazing sights in the cave, you have to see for yourself.