Day 55: Crater Lake National Park, OR to Lava Beds National Monument, CA, with a new RVmate

The morning is cold, and we wake up slowly. Red opens her eyes and says:

“ Man, you made a mess in the bathroom during the night!
- What do you mean?
- There are a bunch of tiny pieces of toilet paper on the ground…”

Yellow knows right away what she is talking about. Of course, he didn’t make a mess. And here he sees it, still messing around the toilet paper: a freaking mouse! We have goose bumps writing about it right now. Slowly, Yellow tries to go toward the mouse, but the rodent runs, jumps very nimbly to an opening and hides in the bottom space of a cabinet, between the bath tub and the stove. There, we discover that the mouse started to nest with the toilet paper. We figure out rapidly that it came through the space under the bath tub, as there is an opening from there to the nesting space. Yellow, cleans the nest area and block the access to the bath tub – and the outside – with some plastic bags. At least, we can hear something if the mouse starts to dig through. But hopefully, the mouse got scared and left the motorhome.

We try to get warm with breakfast, and get out of here. We stop for gas and drive back to Crater Lake. There are no rivers flowing into or out of the lake; the evaporation is compensated for by rain and snowfall. On the basis of maximum depth, Crater Lake is the deepest lake in the US, the second deepest in North America, after Great Slave Lake in Canada.

We stop at Cloudcap Overlook, and hike for a bit to check out the Pinnacles. It is sunny but chilly with the blowing wind. The road is very bumpy.

We stop at several viewpoints along the east rim, when Red realizes that the gas cap is missing. Yellow probably forgot to put it back at the gas station. It is not the first time it happens, but it is the first time that we haven't noticed before we left the gas station. Anyway, Mazama Village is on the way out, so we stop there, find the gas cap where it was forgotten and drive away from Crater Lake NP on the Volcano Legacy Scenic Byway.

On the way to Klamath Falls, OR, we drive across flat, large valleys. The fields are filled with stumps and the dry, scarce grass doesn’t prevent cattle ranching.

We finally arrive in Klamath Falls, county seat of Klamath County, in Oregon, named after the first known inhabitants of the area, the Klamath tribe. There, on this high desert plateau at an elevation of 4,000 feet, we get back on US-97, that we shortly used to cross the Columbia River. There, we stop for a couple of hours to go to our favorite Northwest spot – Fred Meyer and McDonald’s – and buy a new camera at another road trip favorite, Walmart. We were just planning to check out some cameras, but, as Oregon has no sales tax, we end up buying a new Panasonic camera. Before buying it, of course, we checked online to see if it was worth it. It seems so, but we will see in the long run.

Back on the road, we leave Oregon and enter California. The area is very arid, with lots of potato and onion fields in the irrigated areas. We arrive in Tulelake, CA, and get a little bit lost looking for the visitor center in this small town. After seeing some signs and looking for more information on Wikipedia, we learn that Tulelake happened to have two World War II internment camps in the area: the Tulelake camp was an Italian and German prisoner-of-war camp to the east. The other internment camp housed nearly 18,000 Japanese Americans and Japanese alien residents and was in operation from May 1942 to March 1946. The Tule Lake War Relocation Center, renamed Tule Lake Segregation Center in 1943, was the largest and most controversial of the ten Japanese internment camps in the United States.

Tulelake, nowadays, seems to have a high percentage of Hispanic people, probably working in the surrounding potato fields. From there, we drive on the edge of Tule Lake National Wildlife Reserve, part of the larger Klamath Basin National Wildlife Refuge Complex, supporting diverse and abundant populations of resident and migratory wildlife. Historically, the Klamath Basin was dominated by shallow lakes and freshwater marshes. 75% of these extensive wetlands have been converted to agricultural lands since 1905.

South of the NWR is Lava Beds National Monument. Driving across the desert landscape with lava fields and other weird basaltic landscapes is beautiful with the sunset. Wild wild west it really is, with nobody around except a warm breeze.

We arrive at the campground in the evening, and have dinner in this very enjoyable environment. That is until we go to bed. We hear noises. Noises of the wind playing with the trees. Noises of dripping water, may be from the fridge. Noises from the mouse trying to get through the plastic bag wall. Yellow, hopeless, builds an aluminum barricade with duck tape. And we try to get to sleep with or without ear plugs. Around midnight, we are finally asleep. For how long? Wait until next blog entry.