Steen's home of the certainly strange
This past weekend, we went up to go backpacking in the June Lake area. The idea was that we would hike over from the Rush Creek trail head to Thousand Island Lake, and then make our way back out the next day.
However, the hike was fraught with disaster, not least of which was taking the wrong turn to get to Thousand Island Lake. So instead we accidentally made our way up to Gem Lake. Continue reading “June Lake Debacle”
Near Inverness in Northern California along the Estero Trail, there is a secret little beach littered with cetacean fossils that are roughly 7 million years old. These cetaceans were the ancestors of the modern day gray whale, and this particular area used to be their breeding ground. The whole hike is only about 9 miles round trip, and there is only a minimal amount of bushwhacking necessary to get to the fossils. Continue reading “Gray Whale Fossils in Marin”
Some buddies and I headed over to Lassen Volcanic National Park last Friday, and we just got back. None of us had ever been there, and to be honest we barely did any research. We fell back to Lassen because we decided against doing Mount Ritter again (due to weather), and we were curious about the place. It is a relatively remote park in the Cascade region near Redding, California. We just knew that we wanted to climb Lassen Peak – a volcano, of course. Continue reading “Lassen Volcanic National Park: my debut, and my review”