2/22/25 to 3/1/25 – Lassen, Redwoods, Crater Lake National Parks (CA & OR)
Crew – Mominah, Nori, Anna Smegal, and I.
“I literally failed step 1. I’m a failure” – Mominah and Nori
“No, you didn’t. It has a 94% pass rate, you passed the practice exams, and you made it this far into med school.” – Anna and I
“No, you don’t understand. WE FAILED”
“Ok, you both failed, and your future as a surgeon is gone.”
“HOW COULD YOU SAY SOMETHING LIKE THAT TO US???”
(For accuracy, please repeat this conversation seven days and 200 times. I write this in jest. Or well, at least in 90% jest.)
This trip came about because of a much more exotic trip to Everest Base Camp, which got rescheduled because it’s hard to find people with the funds, PTO, and general lack of sanity to want to do it.
Before anyone gets concerned, Everest Base Camp is much more of a long hike than a true mountaineering trip. The odds of death are incredibly low. I’ve also read “Into Thin Air” and would recommend it to anyone who wants to read about an Everest trip that turns into a disaster.
But long story short, that trip didn’t work out, so here was the replacement! It involved us road-tripping around the West Coast and stopping at some national parks. Which is fun, it’s easy, and honestly, I don’t vacation much within the US, so it’s a nice change of pace. I love international travel, but the flights are easier and I ain’t paying extra per day for cell signal. I also started out this trip with a turnaround that would induce anxiety in people who get nervous at airports. I had a friend’s art show the night before so I went to it, convinced my friends to drive me to the airport 15 minutes before boarding, then got to enjoy a layover in LAX because of how late the flight was.
(First time doing a layover when flying from Phoenix to San Francisco. Must say, it felt a little silly.)
The group itself was 4 people: Anna, Mominah, and Nori.
Anna, I mentioned quite a few times on this blog. Or well, it’s Anna Smegal. I have 5 Ann(a)’s so it can be confusing. I have a post about those five, but I thought it might be better if it never sees the light of day. Either way, I went to the same elementary, middle, and high school as her. And ended up at the same college. Despite our best wishes.
Nori and I met in college through a mutual friend in 2021. The fun part of COVID had died away, and we were left with the depressing part. Through a long string of events, I met her.
Ok, details are I knew two guys named Bill and Jake from Baja. They had roommates and were fun to hang out at their house, honestly, when there was very little else to do. Two of their roommates are named Sandy and Greg. Sandy’s (actual) roommate at the time was Nori, but Greg took a bunch of classes with her. So I was introduced to Nori through Greg.
Funny enough, at the time, I knew her because I was working as a barista at the student center. And honestly, with so many kids living at home with their parents or not coming onto campus due to no in-person classes, business was pretty slow. And Nori lo and behold, was the single highest spender of any person at this coffee shop. I can say this with certainty because we checked the financial logs in the back one day.
Lastly, Mominah was Nori’s friend in med school and ended up getting dragged onto the trip. So here are the four of us. I knew 2 of the others, Nori knew two of the others, while Anna and Mominah only knew one of each of us. And we all decided to spend a week in the car together. The premise of the trip was simple: just reach three national parks in Northern California and Oregon. We met in front of my dad’s house and got on our way!
Lassen
Hey, it’s the first park! I’ve often heard Lassen described as a suitable introductory national park, and I can see the reasoning behind it. It’s got numerous volcanoes and the associated geysers. Comfortable hiking. Stunning views. Assorted Wildlife. I can agree with that premise.
Nori wanted to rent snowshoes, so we rented some from the nearest sports store while picking up dinner (Trader Joe’s frozen food, my beloved). It was a suitable concern. The national parks don’t tend to keep everything unrestricted in the winter in the places where it snows, and a lot of the reviews said snowshoes might be necessary. That or cross-country skis.
The difference between summer and winter at a national park is dramatic. And sure, we all comprehend there is a tourism on and off season, but you would be shocked at how empty a park is in the winter. (And the flipside of how crowded it can be during the summer).
We were the only people at Lassen. There’s only one entrance to the park during the winter. We went up that entrance. And we were genuinely the only car in the parking lot beside the ranger’s car. By the time we had finished our hike, about two hours later, and came down to the lodge, other people were in the park. But before then, it was deserted. And by other people, I mean, like, we saw a dozen other people total. In contrast, in the summer, the largest protest against the national parks is that people say there are too many other people, and you don’t get any respite. So, exemplary news, I got a solution!
So if you ever want to see an empty national park, go in the winter. And sure, there are reasons they are less popular. Firstly, it’s cold. And that a lot of the roads and trails are closed due to a lack of snow, and that it’s not economical to plow them. But it’s just a separate experience from the summer. And now I want to do Yosemite and the Grand Canyon in winter to see what it’s like.
The park itself is pretty. Our hike wasn’t too long to reach the geyser, but it was icy and uphill to give us a half-decent fight. If you have never had the pleasure of crawling into a sewer or seeing a geyser in life, they give off sulfur. Which has the distinct smell of rotten eggs. It’s quite helpful how accurate that description is. I’ve learned people instantly know what I mean. And you’ll certainly smell the geysers before you see them. Which was true here.
Afterward, we stopped by the largest waterfall in California. Which I frankly had no idea existed until Nori asked if we wanted to stop there. But it was solidly breathtaking and once again deserted. I got to walk right up to it and grab photos while hoping my hat wouldn’t fly off into the water.
Also, something you probably put together from the photos so far is that quite a few of them are not… shot on a phone. Or a digital camera?
For someone who travels a lot, I never took that many photos. Bunch of reasons. There’s a definite argument that no one wants to see a pile of photos that every person takes online. And often you kinda don’t ever go back and look at them. Like you would take 1000 photos, but no one ever will scroll through that Google Photos album afterwards. And certainly good damn luck editing and curating them if you have that many to sort through.
With that said, I went too far the other way and have entire friendships and trips that have come and gone without me taking a single photo to remember the event. The latter is an issue, the former is something I’m sad about. And at least for me, part of it is that the photos you can take on your phone while high-quality just aren’t that interesting.
(I’m not frankly into the technical side of photography, but because phones don’t carry much of a lens, they have to compensate through pretty savvy editing and photo stacking in the background after you take a photo. Which is super cool. But if you look at the duplicate picture taken on an iPhone and an Android, unedited, they will look dissimilar. Recommend testing it out if you ever have two of those phones in a group. iPhone (what I use), photos just literally look distinguishable.
So I’ve been trying different ways to take more interesting photos.
First, I tried out using a DSLR. Which I still own and use! I bought it before Peru and Chile last year, and it’s a lot of fun. A hell of a lot more of a learning curve than a phone, but it’s interesting to play with. I barely know how to use it if I don’t have all the settings autofitting themselves, so we’ve got a ways to go. I just hit up someone I knew from High School to get her input on the DSLR she was shooting with because the photos turned out too damn cool.
(Thanks, Maria! And screw you for getting an electrical engineering degree at the Coast guard academy and making the rest of us look stupid!)
The problem with this is that to own a camera that will blow a phone out of the water means you gotta own a pretty damn pricey camera. And my DSLR was like $300 with the lens included. You’re just not going to get incredible results with that kind of device. Not poor results, mind you, but nothing astonishing.
Second is that, as I kinda mentioned, you need real skill to use a DSLR well. Skills that I lack and honestly don’t have the will to put into learning. The people I know who love it love it, and there’s nothing wrong with that, but I just aren’t there.
So I tried another option. Which is shooting on film.
Which is dumb sounding, I know. I tell a Gen X person this, and they are shocked that young people even shoot on film. After all, we did spend all this R&D time and money fixing the massive flaws the film has, and therefore created the digital era.
To that, I say understandable, and for 99% of functions, digital is, 100%, unquestionably, superior, and I thank them for that. Examples include
- CCTV videos for sewer inspection, so I at least know what I’m looking for before I crawl in
- Scanning in your homework instead of losing my statistics homework awkwardly into the void of my backpack
- Providing pictures of a restaurant’s menu to post online so I can see if they offer vegetarian food, and then pretending that I haven’t looked up the menu when I get there with friends.
Not to mention, there aren’t any development costs, or that you need quite toxic chemicals to do it.
But the film has such a charm to it because of how hard it is to use. Between loading and unloading the rolls without light leaking the entire thing, wishing the photos turn out, and development going ok, there are just a ton of steps where the process can go amiss. So when the photos show up, I actually can associate a memory with each one, not just the event. Half-frame cameras can fire 72 shots as well before requiring to be reloaded, so you get enough shots where you can take multiple photos of an event, but still don’t have to edit and curate through hundreds.
And yes, you can make fun of us young people, but every friend who has seen me shoot on film has also appreciated the process and the photos that came out. So that’s invariably delightful. Everything is easier when people are just eager.
So anyway, here we are for the moment. That doesn’t mean it’s not an anxiety-inducing way to take photos, though. When I swapped out the first roll for the trip, the back was cracked open a little bit in a non-pitch black bathroom (although it was dark), and I thought the entire roll got light leaked into oblivion.
Oh, furthermore because it was winter, we decided against camping or sleeping in a car. It’s surely possible, but we wanted to minimize the odds of us killing each other. So we just ended up renting Airbnb’s. All three Airbnbs were in the middle of nowhere. One was near a Mormon summer camp, one was on a little road about 25 minutes south of Crescent City, and a third was in the middle of nowhere near Lassen. But after splitting them up by night and person, it only averaged $50/night. Not too bad at all.
The peacefulness of all three was great. Finding food was never particularly easy, but you could drive to it. Trade off of it all. I’m a city kid through and through. I hear the arguments for living in the country, and I do get a lot of them. You have space. It’s quiet, and you can see the stars if you’re far enough away. Not to mention financial benefits.
But also goddamn I like Thai food and relish being close to a restaurant for it. And an airport. And things to do on the weekends. Maybe a smallish town like Ann Arbor (~100k) could be perfect? Those summers were still great. Or what we glimpsed in Eureka. But you can never tell. There are some things in the big cities that just can’t be matched.
Redwoods
The one park I had been to before this trip. This and the nearby similar park of Sequoia rely on the simple appeal of “Big Tree”.
And I mean big trees. Not Sequoiah big where you are driving through them but pretty damn close. And they’re endless. With beautiful plants growing in between and up the sides of the redwoods.
(Quick sidetangent here. Hah, I say that like I do anything else on this blog.
Look, the early national parks were not named very creatively. Redwoods are named after the tree. Yellowstone is named after the yellow sandstone that permeates the park. You get exactly one (1) guess on what the main attraction of the Grand Canyon is.
I will say the trend was broken later on by some of the later national parks being named incredibly well. We got The Badlands in South Dakota, The Great Smoky Mountains of Virginia, and my personal favorite: “The Gates to the Arctic” up in Alaska. Great work, America, that is a much cooler name.
Even more entertaining, a ton of the rivers in England are named Avon. This is because when the Romans showed up to the native Celts and asked, “Hey, what’s this river called?” and pointed at it, the Celts replied “Avon”.
Avo, of course, just means “River” in Celtic, but that got lost in the translation, and now England, Australia, and Canada are full of rivers named Avon because the English really couldn’t admit their mistakes.
This all culminates in Nori being incapable of pronouncing words on the trip. Palisades became palisodds
The place we were staying in Redwoods lacked central heating. Instead, there was a fireplace inside the house where you could light a fire to heat the house. Here is where I sheepishly admit that I’m pretty bad at starting fires. I can do it. But after years of scouts, I’m still not actually that good at luck. Helpfully enough, Anna’s current house she rents in has a similar lack of central heating, so she just did it while I drank about five feet away.
At the Redwoods, Nori wanted to do a longer hike. Reviews said 13 miles, the trail said 11 miles. Either way, not a short distance. And at the halfway point, we reached the beach of the Pacific Ocean. And needed to cross back into the redwood forest to walk back to the parking lot.
Turns out the trail had flooded in the winter season. Which wasn’t great. So we spent about an hour walking back and forth trying to find a path, and for the life of us, couldn’t find a way to cross without getting wet. And we even got wet a few times trying to find a place to cross. And not a nice rainy day, wet. A muddy, sandy, kinda wet. Navigating is a bitch. I’m not good at it despite my best attempts. I can memorize routes, but it takes time. Anna has a remarkable skill at it. But she wasn’t here, so I did a less ingenious solution.
During our wandering, we ran into a lovely family with a small child who was on the other side of what seemed like a crossable marsh. And they had just come from a parking lot right behind them that was near our trail. So at least, we knew where to end up.
Honestly, I’d like to say we were clever or made a decision, but at some point, you just kinda gotta admit the only way through is nasty, so I just walked through the marsh then yelled at the other two until they came across and joined me. Hell, we were already dirty and weren’t getting any worse at that point.
If anything, I should’ve just done that 45 minutes before once we realized the situation. It took 30 seconds. There’s a life lesson in there for sure. I’m probably not going to remember it. But there is a lesson!
We still had about five miles to go, but next up was Fern Canyon. Somewhat ironically, the coolest part of the park to a lot of people is not the redwoods themselves but a canyon covered in ferns… helpfully called fern canyon. Albeit your shoes get soaked walking through it, the water is bone-chilling cold. The water itself was very clean, though, and was a nice change of pace from the marsh.
The hiking overall wasn’t flawed at all, though. Arizona hiking for anyone who has had the unhealthy type II fun pleasure of doing it is commonly poorly maintained, while you use your energy to hop between rocks as you hike up the mountain. The other option is stepping up the rocks, but trust me, you’ll prefer jumping. At the least, you can carry your momentum forward. It’s, unsurprisingly, in Arizona, sweaty work as you go up, and if you go later in the day, there’s always the chance of creepy crawlies.
In contrast, the redwood dirt was fantastically soft to walk on, but still wasn’t muddy for most of it, and the trail was shaded. Even the steep parts were easier on the legs than the Southwest. And of course, it goes without saying that the views are nicer to look at. So we walked uphill for the remaining few miles, shoes pretty soaked.
Anna found us in the parking lot, only mildly concerned for us since it took us so long to get through the canyon. But hey, we made it.
The Car
More than anything else on the trip, we spent time in the car. We spent time walking through stores in Eureka, took photos at viewing sports we never had thought about before, and tried to stitch together four friend groups’ worth of drama. For what it’s worth, Michigan might’ve been a massive school, but there is more overlap than one would expect. And Mominah went to UCLA, so a lot of the memories were somewhat transferable. Course, she’s devoutly muslin and doesn’t drink, so there was a limit to what I could relate to her on.
One of my favorite photos of the trip came out when we crossed into Oregon and stopped at the sign. Only because on the other side, the California sign is less impressive in every way. I’m a little disappointed in my home state. (It’s the photo that’s the banner of this post.)
To pass the time in the car, we resorted to discussing more or less everything. We tried to explain to Momimah about football.
A huge part of the trip for two members of our group was the Step 1 exam. It’s an exam you have to take after your second year in med school, 8 hours long, and overall not fun. They had just taken it as mentioned earlier and were panicking about their results.
Mominah realized she passed during the trip, so that was fun. Nori found out she passed a week later. But both of them were so damn paranoid about failing that every 15 minutes they would discuss how they had failed. Or that they would fail. So Anna and I started responding sarcastically every time they said they failed. They didn’t appreciate that.
The week after I got back from the trip, I walked out of a testing center after taking a seismic exam, and I was chatting with another test-taker who was grabbing their items from the lockers. They were in a surprisingly cheery mood after taking an exam, so I asked what they’d been taking.
His answer was the Step 3 medical exam, and he had just finished two straight days of 8-hour testing. Props to him for being in a good mood. My brain was jelly after taking the 8-hour PE exam, and that’s a magnitude less stressful.
Anna drove the vast majority of the trip. When she was done with it, or we had to perhaps drive to dinner, she would have someone take over. But in reality, she was terrified one of us would crash the car. A lesson I learned long ago was to let Anna drive and be a passenger princess.
Crater Lake
Crater Lake, like Lassen, is a volcano that then became a lake. Except this one is truly massive, with decent-sized islands having formed inside the lake within the volcano.
Also, as my friend Sade pointed out, after this trip was done, but before I wrote this up, Crater Lake is the deepest Lake in North America. At a whopping 1,900 ft deep, it’s even deeper than the Great Lakes by a significant margin (probably 600 ft) to my absolute surprise. Like, I genuinely had to fact-check it myself because I didn’t believe it.
(If you’ve never been to the interior of Northern California, you’ll learn that wooden statues of bears are just kinda sold… everyplace. A lot of other wood statues as well. Just one of those delightful quirks of the land.
Crater Lake also had a decent group of people wandering around it. The prominent thing about Crater Lake is that you don’t need to walk far to get to the crater itself. You might’ve been able to see it a quarter mile from the parking lot. There were absolutely trails that went farther out, but it was unneeded to see the crater. The national parks I’ve visited have had a sizable variance in how friendly it is to the casual hiker. Denali wins for least friendly due to the strict restrictions on how to even get to the coolest spots and how remote it is. Zion has Angels Landing, which, while the most famous spot, is probably 40 ft wide with a good 1000 ft+ drop on either side of you. And some vary. Sure, at the Grand Canyon, you could just go to the rim and stare into the canyon while saying “swell” and call it a day. You could also spend multiple days hiking to the bottom of it and coming back up. There is not much in between. And that camping skill floor, I think, does detract from the park for a lot of visitors because the overwhelming number of people just stare over the edge at the Grand Canyon and then go home. Which is a shame.
Crater Lake was also the second park in which we rented snowshoes, then I scrapped them and stuffed them in my tote bag 10 minutes in. I know better safe than sorry and all that, but alas, I could’ve saved $37.50 in rental fees if I had just put more faith in my snow boots and increased my arrogance by 17% or so. Modern snowshoes ain’t even that inelegant to walk in, I just personally find them particularly cumbersome and for no good reason drive me up the wall. I’m stubborn and I know it. At least give me some recognition for being self-aware, please.
The Epilogue
But afterward, that was more or less the end of our trip. We had one last driving day, which was six or so hours. On the way back, we stopped by a fire station that one of Nori and Mominah’s fellow med school students used to volunteer at. A rural town in the middle of nowhere, California. He encouraged us to stop by and ask for a tour, and sure, why not we had the time.
They were nice about it. The place was covered in taxidermied animals. Including an honest-to-good grizzly bear. I thought it was just a pretty cool and painfully on-brand statue for somewhere in Northern California until we walked over.
And the trip ended where it started, in front of my dad’s place. We said our goodbyes, Nori’s parents picked up her and Mominah. Anna drove off. Hoping to see the other two again in the future whereas Anna and I vaguely waved at each other. Nothing I’ve ever been worse at than heartfelt goodbyes.
Cheers,
Sam
(Photo credits go to Anna, Mominah, and Nori for the non-film photos. The film ones are my own)
(Well I hope for your eardrums you never hear me sing, despite what my friends at Karaoke claim.)
Dead Man Travelling 