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!

Just a quick note...

Just a quick note to let you know that we are in a location (Butte Lake Campground in Lassen National Park) with no cell service or internet... We should be back in civilization by Monday!

Friday back into California

We finally tore ourselves away from Nevada and the beautiful Water Canyon area on Friday morning.

A couple of last pictures from Water Canyon:

The hill up behind where we parked - those small black dots are cattle.

Sunset on Thursday evening

After stopping to fill up on diesel before we left Nevada, we started up US 395 into California.

US 395 in northeastern California

We had scheduled a Harvest Hosts stay on a ranch near Janesville, CA.

On our way to the ranch, there were sheep out on the road. We couldn't seem to get by them for a while, they seemed to think Gracie was herding them.

At the ranch, we were greeted by several of their dogs... this one wanted to come in to visit!

A picture of an old pickup truck...

Gracie in her spot...

JD Hemphill Ranch, est 1938

At Water Canyon Recreation Area

We decided to stay our maximum allowed 3 nights at Water Canyon Recreation Area.

Right where we are parked is the beginning of the Water Canyon Interpretive Trail.

We decided to walk it yesterday...

The BLM fellow was by in the morning and had run the weed-eater along the path to make it nice and clear for walking.

The only disagreeable part were these crickets or grasshoppers.

<<< whoops, sorry -- I am not having success getting the video uploaded... will have to try when we have better internet service.... I don't know whether you'll be able to see all the crickets / grasshoppers jumping as we walked...

I was looking down a lot as I walked -- I didn't want to step on the bugs, but they were all around, and I *really* didn't want one jumping onto me!

We think that they are Mormon Crickets (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mormon_cricket).

Looking back downhill toward Gracie

Looking uphill toward Gracie

The clouds made a beautiful sunset!

We have enjoyed our two days and three nights here. Carl has gotten some projects completed. We're prepared to head out on Friday, working our way through California toward Oregon.

Moving west again

Our plan was, when we left Welcome Station, to head west a little ways and then north toward Crater Lake in Oregon. We are on our way to an appointment at Henderson's Line-Up in Grants Pass scheduled on June 7.

Dwayne and I had visited Crater Lake in July of 2018 and it was beautiful; Sue and Carl had also visited Crater Lake in the fall of 2014, but unfortunately it was overcast and the views were not of the picture perfect variety. Carl had expressed that he would like to see Crater Lake in the sunshine. We had thought that if we went to that area, staying a little outside the park (boondocking) for 5-6 days, there bound to be at least one nice day. Well, we checked the 7 day forecast and it was all cloudy and rainy!

I didn't feel like doing a different plan on Monday, so we decided to go just as far as Winnemucca, Nevada on Tuesday, since that would be the place that we would turn north to go to Oregon or continue west if we decided to go up through northern California instead. I had researched some boondocking areas for the Oregon trip, and had a couple of places identified in or near Winnemucca, so we decided to try that.

Amazing clouds and sky as we drove west on I-80.

The places in or near Winnemucca -- a casino that would allow parking in town (but the parking lot looked rather small), and a BLM campground in Water Canyon a little south of the town. I was a little concerned that, since we had had some wet weather the last few days, that the roads could be difficult heading up to the BLM campground, but we found good hard-packed dirt roads as we drove up about 1000' above Winnemucca.

The information we had read about the campground indicated that the first 4 campsites had decent Verizon service, so we were happy to find that the second campsite was available. We pulled in and set up.

However, the site was not very level, and we were concerned about how much we had to jack Gracie up... so we decided to drive further up the road to see if other sites were available. We drove all the way to the end of the road (and campground) -- there are about 10 sites in total.

As its name implies, it is a canyon with a stream running through it...

Beautiful views (Winnemucca is way down there in the middle of the picture)

Cattle pastures on the east side

We found that the site just above ours (site 3) was available, and appeared that we may have better success at getting Gracie level. This was the view from site 3... the Verizon signal was better... so we decided to move Gracie.

We left the Jeep to hold site 3 for us and walked back down to site 2 to pack up Gracie and make the short move. We commented as were walking that the last time we decided on the spur of the moment to move from one site to another for better cell signal was when Gracie broke down a couple of weeks ago... surely that would not happen again!

Site 2 was a beautiful site -- not with the far-reaching views, but right by the creek with babbling water right outside our door.

But... we decided to move, got Gracie down off the jacks, aired up, and successfully drove the short distance up the hill to site 3.

Information about camping at Water Canyon Recreation Area.

Gracie in her new spot at site 3

View up the hill from site 3

Looking down at Gracie parked in site 3

We had also read that the view of the lights in Winnemucca was pretty -- and it was! You can also see a tiny, tiny sliver of the moon up in the sky.

We are happy to have found such a beautiful spot and decided to stay at least 2 nights. The internet is good enough for me to be able to do planning about what route we should take to get to Grants Pass... we have 4 days to get there... and should be able to see some interesting things along the way!