Bike and drive to Crater Lake days 3, 4 and 5

The best bike ride of the trip was from Mt. Shasta to the Oregon border.  The ride was on a safe road with rolling hills type scenery.  I spotted Calvin an hour lead and made it to the rendezvous spot at almost exactly the same time. A good bike ride road is not necessarily a fast driving road. We then drove to Medford for lunch and because we had a little time to spare we took a hike to the top of Upper Table Rock. It is billed as a 3.2 mile loop but it climbs 720 feet which made it seem a lot longer on the way up.  

This picture is looking east from the mesa. Mt McLaughlin is in the distance and somewhere in the rolling hills in mid left of the picture is where my 3rd great grandparents, Jacob and Hannah Myers finally settled in 1867 and secured a homestead after several decades wandering around the midwest.

 We spent Wednesday night in Medford and decided to move our visit to Crater Lake up a day to Thursday because snow was expected in Crater Lake on Friday. On the drive to Crater Lake we took a walk along the Rogue River Gorge which was spectacular.

This is a living tree stump.  The tree was cut down, but shared roots with a neighboring tree, so the stump grew new bark and is still alive.

There is really cool spot on the Rogue River where it actually falls into a lava tube and comes out a few yards downstream.  The water was high this time of year, so the river didn't actually completely disappear, but this is where it spews out of the lava taube

It wasn't snowing at Crater Lake, but there was plenty of snow on the ground and it was cold, so the bike stayed in the car.

We spent the night in a very nice B&B in Prospect, Oregon, which is really the only place to eat or spend the night in Prospect. 

The promised snow in Crater Lake arrived as rain on the next segment on the bike ride.  Calvin started out riding in the rain and rode about 15 miles on another very nice bike road, but I think he was happy to get off the bike when I caught up with him.

We stopped in Butte Falls to visit the falls.  I visited the falls on Calvin's last bike trip, but he rode another direction so he didn't see it.

From Butte Falls we followed the Volcanic Scenic Highway and made a short stop at Ft. Klamath Historic Site and on to Klamath Falls to spend the night. We made one last stop on our way home at Lava Beds National Monument to wander through a few caves.

These are not heavily visited caves and they warn you to take two light sources in the caves because they are really dark.  We saw the Ice Cave

Hiked a couple of miles to some less impressive caves with petroglyphs

And finished the day with a through hike of Labyrinth Cave.