lumensoutdoors.org - Page 4

• Lava Beds NM (August 28) - September 20, 2016

  On our last full day in California, we took the long drive from Reading up north to Lava Beds NM to see yet more volcanic stuff. It was a lot of driving, but we were both interested in seeing a lot more lava tubes after walking through Subway Cave and we got to see Shasta a lot more up close. I also had plans for doing one more SOTA activation.

• Lassen NP day hikes (August 26/27) - September 18, 2016

  After our backpacking trip, we spent the next five days doing much easier day hikes in and around Lassen NP. Sometimes all four of us went, and sometimes it was just one or two people. We saw a variety of things - waterfalls, summits, thermal features, and lava tubes. This post describes the last three full days we spent in the area.

• Lassen NP day hikes (August 24/25) - September 16, 2016

  After our backpacking trip, we spent the next five days doing much easier day hikes in and around Lassen NP. Sometimes all four of us went, and sometimes it was just one or two people. We saw a variety of things - waterfalls, summits, thermal features, and lava tubes. This post describes the first two days worth of activities.

• Backpacking in Lassen NP, Day 3 (August 23) - September 12, 2016

  Our third day of backpacking in Lassen NP ended up being our last day, thanks to a surprise car ride. This day passed through some of the strangest terrain of the entire trip as we followed the lava beds for most of the day and climbed the Cinder Cone. When we got to Butte Lake Campground, we were able to get a ride back to our car at Summit Lake instead of having to go through with our plan of hiking across the park on day four.

• Backpacking in Lassen NP, Day 2 (August 22) - September 9, 2016

  On day two of our backpacking trip through Lassen NP, Lon and I got up early to do an activation of a peak near our campsite. We then met back up with Sarah at the campsite, packed up, and hiked past several more lakes and through a big burned area, then down through a long valley before hitting Snag Lake. This desolate looking lake is on the east side of the park. We hiked along its shore for a mile or two before reaching our campsite just at its end. Along the way, we also changed our plans for the trip.

• Backpacking in Lassen NP, Day 1 (August 21) - September 6, 2016

  In the months before our trip, I’d spent an awful long time staring at maps and reading guidebooks to come up with a good backpacking trip that would satisfy everyone’s requirements. I was looking for something that was about four days long, covered about 30 miles, and passed by at least two peaks I could activate for Summits on the Air. For Sarah, I was looking for something that didn’t have any major climbs or descents and in general didn’t have a ton of elevation gain. For the whole group, I was looking for something that visited several lakes, the Grassy Swale, Cinder Cone, and the Fantastic Lava Beds. I was also interested in a loop so we didn’t have to do a car spot.

• Vacation in Lassen NP - September 2, 2016

  We were on vacation from August 19 to August 29 in Lassen National Park and surrounding areas. The beginning of our stay was a three day backpacking trip basically all the way across the park, while the other days we were based out of Redding CA and did a lot of day hikes and short little trips to see interesting things. Over the next several days, I’ll be posting reports from the backpacking and day hikes that we did.

  I’ll be giving all related posts a tag, so you can browse them all on the Lassen tag page.

• Beer recipes added - August 11, 2016

  Just a quick update to the main page here - I’ve moved all my old beer recipes over from my home directory on the old website to a more prominent position on the new site. I’ve also added a bunch of recipes I made since then, including some very recent ones (not that you can tell - there’s no dates on any of them). I will be looking at expanding this in the future as I come up with more recipes.

  These are all under the beer link at the top of every single page, but if that’s not obvious enough you can also check them out here:

  Beer recipes

• Latest photos uploaded - August 8, 2016

  I’ve finally got the new photo browser set up and all the photos put into it. I’ve also processed everything that was still on the camera or in a temporary directory from this year. One thing the new browser doesn’t have is an RSS feed (not that anyone was subscribed to the old one) so it can be hard to tell what’s new. I thought it would be worth a quick post to spotlight all the latest stuff.

• Hiking log now public - August 1, 2016

  For years, I’ve been maintaining private logs of all my hikes in addition to the lists I have up on this site. The difference has been that the public lists just show the first time I did some peak, while the log shows every hike, trails I took, who went with me, and so on. I didn’t really have any good reason for keeping my log private, and I’ve been asked often enough for details of some hike by other people, that I decided I should just make it public.

  It’s split up by year and is linked to from the hiking page, but you can also find it here).

  This probably isn’t the final format, though I expect all the URLs to stay the same. In particular I still want to add links to GPS tracks (which I only have starting in 2015, but still). A lot of older hikes don’t have any trail, distance, or elevation information because I didn’t keep good records then. I probably can’t do anything about that. I would like to add links to writeups I’ve done for some hikes and add more notes to all the others. And then I might change the formatting around a little bit.