Calli and Calvin Smith: The Volcano Road home

We drove from mile 0 on the Pacific Coast Highway to Vancouver the day we finished our kayak trip. Vancouver might be a nice place, but all we did was sleep there. We got up early the next morning and headed to Seattle. We chose to drive on I-5, which is usually the most direct and fastest way to travel, but Seattle area traffic is a different beast all together. A drive that should have taken just a few hours ended up taking all day. We did get a little break when we stopped in Renton for lunch with my Aunt Marley, niece Carrie and her son Steele. I loved visiting with them and wish we could have stayed longer. We ended up spending the rest of the day driving to Castle Rock, Washington which is where the road to Mt. St Helen's intersects I-5. It was after 5 when we got to Castle Rock but we did a drive through at Burger King and hit the road for Mt. St Helens. The Visitor Center was closed, but the mountain was open and we spent the evening taking pictures with a number of photographers watching the changing light to get just the right picture.

We asked one of those photographers to take our picture.

It was interesting to me that the first signs of life to return to the mountain after the blast were wildflowers.

This was a major geologic event in our lifetime and I'm glad we got to see the result in person.

The next day we stopped in Beaverton, Oregon to visit Judy and Scott and Rachel and Marco's family. It was a household full of busy, happy people. Rachel and Marco had just gotten back from a visit near Mt. St Helen's and suggested that we might enjoy a side trip to the Lava River near Bend, so we left I-5 and headed east through some really spectacular country to the Newberry National Volcanic Monument.

Mt. Washington

Three Sisters

We arrived at the monument just in time to take the last tour of the day. This is a mile long lava tube that feels as big as an underground metro tube.

The stairs go down and down...

Phone pics don't do it justice, but you can get the idea.

After that we took one more detour before arriving Klamath Falls for the night. Our geology guidebook directed us to turn off on a little forest road for some "spectacular views." It was absolutely right, the view was spectacular.

Calvin started the last day of our road trip on his bicycle. He had been on a really good bike path before in Klamath Falls he wanted to take it again. Unfortunately the bike path didn't go where he was going and he got drenched in a morning thunderstorm and then eaten alive by mosquitoes while he waited for me to catch up the car. That is why he was riding and I was driving when I saw a turn-off to "petroglyphs." We might not have taken the turn if Calvin had been driving. Our last unplanned stop of the trip was to Lava Beds National Monument. We entered on a back road and came to a sign that said trail head parking for Petroglyph Bluff. We parked and hiked straight up the hill nothing but a little modern graffiti. If you look down in the lower left hand corner you can see Calvin waiting patiently at the car while I scour the rocks looking in vain for rock art, but the views were pretty nice.