Father's Day Camping Trip

This year we decided that it would be great to celebrate Father's Day doing what we love to do as a family, we went camping! We decided to journey over to Lassen Volcanic National Park, which is about 60 miles east of Redding. It took us about 4 1/2 hours so get there, it was so worth the drive. The beauty and splendor of this park is truly breath taking.
The weather was really nice on Friday and Saturday, providing lots of sunshine and a high of about 65, with the elevation at over 5,000 feet that is pretty warm for this time of year, when we went through Redding on Friday it was almost 85 and that was at 11:30! Saturday night rolled around and the weather became a much different story. It all started right as we got the dinner dishes washed up and began drying. The thunder started cracking and boy was it loud and close! Then the rain..I mean down poor of cats and dogs started. The four younger kids took cover to their tent. Royce and I scrambled to pick up the wood, chairs etc. and get them in the utility trailer to keep it all dry. About an hour later Elise and Royce made little trenches around each of the tents so the rain would roll off and away instead of roll under the tents and get us really wet. At one point Royce was yelling up to the sky "Is this all you got?!" all I could say was "stop it Royce, don't tempt mother nature!" he kept doing that for a while and it seemed to me that every time he did, it would start raining even harder. We finally called it a night around 9:30 and stayed awake for quit some time, the rain was so loud. We all slept really good that night and woke to no rain Father's Day morning.
We took the day and went up to the base of Lassen peak which stands over 10,000 feet. We had intended to do a trail hike out to one of the water falls, it was covered in snow. We then went up to an area in the park called Bumpass Hell to hike there and it too was covered in snow. We thought it would not be since that is were the mud boils and bubbles and the water streams boil as well due to the hypothermal basin that is prominent in that area, the molten is only 6 miles below us at this area of the park. It was a gorgeous sunny day much to our relief after the night before.
Here we are just before we did a little trail hike and read about the history of the park, the different types of rocks which some are less than 300 years old.
The first day of summer and we are all standing in snow! Deep snow, it was about 45 degree's at this point but hey the sun was shining!
This lake was beautiful, this picture just does it no justice. The ice was a really pretty blue with swirls of snow, the ice was way to thin to walk out onto it. They say that the snow gets to about 40 feet on this lake during your average snow fall year.
Royce and I both tried to take the little girls out on the lake with the Kayaks, neither of them are a two man kayak, so we were getting pretty wet here. All of us enjoyed the kayaks and time on both lakes that we took them out on. Janelle took one out all on her own, with Royce in his, she is a real natural at kayaking and did a fantastic job navigating herself around and paddling all on her own.
Both of the girls enjoying smore's. This was a third night of camping and it was Father's Day.
At Whiskey Town lake just west of Redding we stopped to play for the afternoon on Monday. These geese seemed to have a very limited amount of fear of us humans and were pretty friendly..for a wild flock of geese. They even brought four of their babies over to say hello, they were still a bit fuzzy on their necks and head from their baby feathers. Malia loves these birds and always looks for them in the Fall and Winter months at our house as they fly over in the morning. She thought it was really neat to see them up close like this.
We had a really nice time and enjoyed all that we were able to do on our trip. We plan to go back soon and do much more hiking and camping, we will go when the snow is melted off better.