Butte Lake Campround and Lassen National Park

We left our Harvest Host, Hemphill Ranch, on Saturday morning, heading toward Lassen Volcanic National Park. 

Most Harvest Host locations have some product to sell, and one of the benefits to the host is that the HH members who stay there are asked to spend $20-30 on goods that the host sells. We talked with Jeff on Saturday morning (it had not worked out for us to meet up with him on Friday evening) and asked how he got involved with the program. He has a friend "on the other side of the mountain" who is an RVer and had contacted Jeff last year to find parking when an evacuation order was issued for his area due to wildfires. While evacuated, the friend told Jeff about Harvest Hosts, and Jeff signed up. Right now, all they have for sale is honey that another neighbor harvests from hives that he locates on Jeff's ranch. Jeff said he has enjoyed meeting RVers from all over the country passing through his area and all but a couple have been great! Jeff also said that he hopes to be able to offer some other goods (maybe beef from his steers) from his ranch in the future.

Some information about the ranch's history

Looking across ranchland from where we were parked -- you may not be able to tell it in this picture, but the hills over there were burned last year by the Dixie Fire.

We had a few options of where we thought we might stay near Lassen -- we decided to stay at Butte Lake Campground, located in the National Park, but... not really near the main part of Lassen!

A picture of our campsite -- it was a grey day -- you may just be able to pick out the red Jeep amongst the trees...

A better picture to see the Jeep and Gracie - and also the huge number of large pine cones on the ground!

The weather forecast was pretty iffy... so we weren't sure that we were going to stay more than one night. We decided to drive over to the main part of Lassen to see what areas were open and to decide if we would want to stay more than one night.

At the Visitor's Center, we were able to see a lot of information about last year's impact of the Dixie Fire to the park:

Note that this information indicates that it was human caused (by a power line) -- I found more information here: https://www.capradio.org/articles/2022/01/04/massive-dixie-fire-started-by-pge-equipment-cal-fire-investigators-conclude/

Since we weren't in California at the time, although we heard about the Dixie Fire, and how large it was, it wasn't real to us until we visited... and we didn't visit the whole extent of area affected by the fire. But... this google map shows where it started (Cresta Dam - marker at lower part of the map), the area near Hemphill Ranch (right marker on the map), and Butte Lake campground and Lassen Volcanic National Park (upper marker on the map) (click here to see this in Google maps). The article that I linked above indicated that it was the first known fire to burn clear across the Sierra Nevada range.

These information boards were at the Lassen visitor's center:

This is a map of Lassen Volcanic National Park - the pink areas are where the fire had some impact. Butte Lake Campground is in the upper right corner.

Though the fire burned at Butte Lake Campground, the impact was relatively low on that area of the park. Other campgrounds, like Southwest Campground, Warner Valley Area and Juniper Lake Area, evidently had much greater impact.

This shows an assessment of impact on vegetation after wildfire - the green areas are unchanged or low, yellow indicates moderate, and red indicates high impact. Butte Lake, in the upper right, is generally green.

We thought about driving through Lassen, but... the weather was grey and rainy, we had each visited the park before, and we decided we'd just head back to the rig. We thought we might return on Sunday if the weather was nicer. Along the way, in Old Station, CA, our phones "pinged" and we realized there was cellular signal - so we stopped and I did the quick text-only post on Saturday evening that you may have seen.

The road into Butte Lake Campground was through Lassen National Forest (on a 6 mile dirt/gravel road that was, ahem, not recently groomed...). There was an information board in the National Forest area on the aspen:

Interesting information about the aspens within the conifer forests!

Unlike many National Parks, we were allowed to gather downed firewood for a fire in our firepit - so we enjoyed a fire on Saturday evening.

It was chilly - so we enjoyed the warmth of the fire!

You may notice that you don't seen other campers in the campground -- there were two tents - you may see one blue one to the right of this picture, but we really could not see any other campers from our site. There were many other nearby sites, but they weren't occupied. The campground had just opened on Friday, and when we talked with the campground host, he said that it commonly is pretty empty during the week and only comes close to filling on the weekends. They are changing to an all-reservation system, though, which we really don't like, as it is difficult for those of us non-planners to find sites!

By the way, the folks in the two tents to the right of our site had not been there all day. Evidently they returned just before 8pm Saturday night. The camp host told us that when they pulled up to their site, there was a mother bear and two cubs browsing along the forest floor and their headlights caused the bears to divert over closer to Gracie! We were sorry we didn't see them (we'd gone in by then), but we were also glad to be sleeping in a hard sided RV rather than tents!

As I mentioned in the earlier post, we had no cellular signal in the park, so the fact that I'm posting this means we've moved on (we're now in Oregon, more information on that in a later post once I get all of our Lassen experience documented!).

I thought I would post one picture of the campground from Monday morning as we were leaving when the sky was a brilliant blue. It is still hard to see the Jeep and Gracie in the shadows of the trees - I guess they are well camouflaged!

We stopped on our way out at an overlook (Hat Creek Rim Scenic Viewpoint) - I will have pictures from there on a later post, but there was a signboard with fire information that I thought might fit well with this post:

"Historically, fires burned through these forests every 10-15 years."

So, a lot of information about fires and the impact to one area where we were visiting... hopefully you've found some of it interesting!