The morning view

  

 

 

And right down the road there is an ocean view.

 

 

 

 

 

Twins.

 

 

The weather cleared today

 

 

The mountain came out a little.

 

Then it came out a lot.

 

We drove on to Crescent City and found a campsite in the redwoods.

 

2026 Summer Trip Map

 

 

So secluded we didn’t need to put up any of the window curtains.

 

It’s a wonderful forest.  Some of the trees that remain are big.

 

Some of the trees that were here before were Really big.

 

Logging started as early as the 1850s, but the biggest trees were relatively safe.  It took an entire crew over a week to fell and process just one tree, so they focused on the more manageable ones.  With modern machinery though, the old growth in this area was logged out mostly in the 1940s and 1950s.  Some of those big trees were two thousand years old.  Some forest has been preserved and we can expect it to return to mostly normal in another thousand years or so.

 

We did not pay $6 a gallon for gasoline today

 

 

We did pay $5.999 though.

 

2026 summer trip map

 

We came to Mount Shasta to get a close-up look at it.  A cold rainy cloudy day, this is the best we got.

 

Looking back down from as high as we could drive, we got this shot of Mount Shasta’s mini me though.

 

Our next-door neighbor.

 

Lassen Volcanic National Park

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Some Huge pinecones.

 

And Jesse got to play in the snow.

 

 

 

 

A drive through Northern California forests

 

 

A viewpoint where we could stand in one spot and see Mount Lassen

 

and Mount Shasta.

 

A few wildflowers.

 

 

And a camp spot in the trees.

 

We did a stopover at Eagle Lake along the way to see if it was still as nice as we remembered.  Yes.

 

2026 Summer Trip Map

 

 

 

Reno, Nevada

 

 

The end of the desert section of this trip.

 

2026 Summer Trip Map

 

We could have driven straight to our camp for the night, but diverted to Virginia City, then Carson City, then back up west of Reno for the night.  As soon as we saw Virginia City on the map we started humming the Bonanza theme song and reciting the names of Pa and his three boys, and had to go there.  Bonus points if you can remember the name of the cook/housekeeper.

 

 

We picked off a few more counties in Nevada by spotting birds in each.

 

 

 

Only five more counties to go, but still a lot of Nevada to cover to get them.  Not this trip.

 

Ely, to Eureka, to Austin

 

 

It is a lonely road.

 

 

A series of north south ranges interrupting long flat stretches of an otherwise great desert basin.

 

2026 Summer Trip Map

 

Drove as far as Cold Springs Station, a stop on the Pony Express Route.  An ambitions endeavor, it delivered the mail 2,000 miles from St Joseph, Missouri to Sacramento, California in just 10 days.  It only ran for 18 months before the telegraph lines were completed, making it instantly obsolete, but forever a part of American lore.