TULELAKE, CALIFORNIA, U.S.A.
2013-10-03, 15:10, JASON
STAY: LAVA BEDS CAMPGROUND
This is the last place we decided to go to in California prior to moving to England. We figure we did a lot of camping elsewhere so we wanted to go ‘all out’ and camp somewhere that was a little further away. Turns out, for just about 3 days of camping a whole car-ful of supplies were necessary. 9/12 was the last day of work for us which was such a relief, so we were definitely ready to go.
On 9/13 morning at around 6 A.M., coupled with some late night preparation on the 12th, we took off for Lava Beds. To orient ourselves here, Lava Beds lies on the northern border of the Sierra Nevada, and is closer to the town Klamath Falls, Oregon, than it is to any other Californian city. As a result, you end up driving through most of northern northern California. The story begins at the drive, of course:
We take off, and we drive past Davis. A little bit of nostalgia here since I went there for undergraduate (shoutout to the Old T as well as CJ at Shanghai Town.. more on this later). After we pass Davis, we’re driving down the 5 somewhere after Davis but before Redding, and I see these two balloons go off into the air slowly. They’re drifting for a while until I realize that they are hot-air balloons floating! I don’t think I actually ever seen one before, so that was a plus. There were two just floating by and as we were driving, they approached us. Now, what happened next I can’t quite explain why it was so funny, but the moment was such that you just had to be there, I swear. I’m focused on these two balloons while half-driving down the 5, which is just as agricultural as the central California bit. Thorin then points unassumingly to the left and says, “Look, Jason” in a very serious tone, almost unassumingly. And then, I burst into this rage of laughter. Off to the left, while I was too focused on the two balloons in front of me, were about 5 more balloons getting ready for lift-off. Again, not sure why that was so funny but it was a classic “try-and-see-the-bigger-picture” scenario.
Driving, driving, we pass by Redding which has not much to do anywhere, but we end up in the most awesome redwood growth alongside the mountains. The weirdest part about the drive is driving through the mountains with redwoods next to you, and the next second ending up in a valley that has been completely domesticated for agriculture. If you take a look at the pictures, you’ll see shots sometimes that have mountains in the background but are very flat around us. Weird..
A lot of the entertainment along the way was just getting to visualize northern California. As we were taking pictures out of a moving car, a lot of the captures were either missed, or half of the desired visual object was captured within the visual field. Of course, looking at the pictures it just looks like bad photography but it took real skill in the end to get a good shot haha. For one of the pictures.. I think it was the Klamath National Forest one.. I swore entirely on my life that I missed it and I was so bummed out but upon cycling through my image gallery, I just again (you had to be there!) burst into laughter cuz I caught it right along the left edge of the picture!
Of course, when you pass by also the town of Weed, California, you can’t help but just bust out that camera and snap away. Upon entering, a large sign that greets you:
WEED LIKE TO WELCOME YOU
which was L-O-L funny. And, the overemphasis on the fact that they actually came from a town called Weed. Upon driving up, you pass by at least 5 signs that say you’re approaching either central Weed, southern Weed, weed, weed, weed, weed! And, coming from California, you can’t miss a photo opportunity like that :). The town itself is a little bit shanty. The best way I can explain a lot of northern American towns is this. For those of you that have seen Disney’s Snow Dogs, when the man passes into that nearby Alaskan town and there’s hardly anything to do but a few shops around, that is what immensely reminds me of Weed and these other northern California cities. If you’ve ever been to Seattle and were taking the SEATAC shuttle from the airport to Wash-U, you pass by some run-down houses built upon the hill with the chipped wood? Weed was just like that. There was even a nice little — what do you call it — “gate” or “arch” above the small downtown that just boasted the word WEED. We get it, we get it.. let’s move on.
We drive a little more and then take a pit stop at Mt. Shasta City. Apparently, there’s a city and a mountain, who knew? It’s about 11 so we haven’t really done any grubbin since the beginning of our trip and we figure it’s about time we grab a bite or two to eat. Okay, fine. We watch the posts on the freeway for some nearby food and they say that there is a nice little diner in Shasta City.
Upon getting there, again, the town looks just like Weed. There is one single strip of road running through the city. We get in and order our breakfast shenanigans, and Thorin orders some scone and a wrap. A side note here after working in ophthalmology for a long time: the girl helping us had a pterygium (Google it, it’s grozzzz). Anyway, we asked her what is around here and she says if we keep driving down we’ll hit the main part of town where supposedly there is something to do. Although we are incredulous, we take her word for it at the risk of actually driving out there and facing boredom. “Oh, cool.” The wraps were not that tasty, they had drenched my caesar wrap in ranch and Thorin’s oriental chicken wrap in that fancy dressing sauce they usually use for the oriental chicken salad. So, we just popped in the car and left.. overall, a nice way to kind of freshen up you know.
There comes a point in this story that I must elaborate on something that seemed so insignificant but ended up playing a huge role in how the vacation turned out. I shit you not, okay, I would never take the time out of my day to write about food but I absolutely had to after eating at this Mt. Shasta cafe. Read the above paragraph to see what Thorin ordered. Got it?… I’ll give you one more minute……okay.
THAT SCONE WAS FUCKING DELICIOUS!!!!!!
my GAWD OOOOHhh that is one mighty fine SCONE we ate on the car ride up after the cafe. We didn’t get a chance to eat it in the cafe since we were so full from that nasty ass wrap. But upon getting into the car and eating this .. misleading scone of a bitch, we were both like O_O then like O.O for hours on end over this scone we had bought from the shop. When we bought it it didn’t even look that good, kind of like one of those pretzels left over at a Disneyland station or a churro hanging in that hot-box. Like, okay, we’ll take a scone under the impression that it won’t be that great, and sure it might be a bit expensive since it’s a small town, but at that point in time we invested our money into that scone, and boy did it pay off. I usually don’t really care for desserts, but honestly I wouldn’t even mind driving up with a friend up to Mt. Shasta City just to buy out all of their scones. I’m really serious
Anyway, enough about that. Writing about it just makes me want it more ;_; so I’ll move on. we stop by this random gas station in a place called Ducoel or something, not sure. It was the scariest gas station but it was still name brand (Shell). The card machine didn’t even work so the attendant had to come out to help me with it.
Driving past Shasta City and the gas station, there are signs for a town called Dorris. We didn’t think there was going to be much to do there but when we get there… it is the scariest near-ghost town we have ever seen. It’s literally a one-road town with some Mexican food restaurant/stands set up, and apparently — according to Wikipedia — home to previously America’s tallest flagpole west of the Mississippi. I remember seeing it and it wasn’t even that impressive. The town itself reminded me of Cars, the movie, though. I bet a lot of people passed it by since that’s the only road through onto the freeway, but there’s kind of a silent, eerie, peace to the town. It seemed dead/stagnant though. This was a trend: we noticed a lot of towns in northern northern California that were kind of small gatherings as opposed to suburban cities. Coming from a suburban town and feeling like I needed a more worldly experience, I can’t even begin to imagine what it’s like for these folk to actually go out to places like NYC, etc. Take a look at the demographics for Dorris .. there is not much going on.
Whew, okay, still on the journey up. There is one highway that we are on where, while driving, Oregon is on your left and California is on your right. Of course, you wouldn’t be able to distinguish this because it all just is agricultural farmland. Nevertheless, it’s actually a rather cool freeway to be driving on. There’s actually a picture of us driving towards the freeway away from Lava Beds on California side staring into the Oregon side (taken on the way out of Lava Beds).
On the 161, there were literally 100s of these little white butterflies that were just flying around the place. They were fluttering and doing their thang but since we are going like 70 MPH down the road, we must have at least killed about 100 or so of them. It was definitely a bad day to be a white butterfly. I think Thorin and I joked about writing a narrative from the butterfly perspective called the “Great Massacre of 9/12″. It never came to fruition, but we jostled around with the idea with titillating lines such as “..it was just another ordinary day but we didn’t know the Machine had come to ravage our population again” and “.. Grandma was just crossing the road to get meet the family but she never made it that day..” hahah. Ah, lovely butterflies. They were cute.
Somewhere, 8 hours later, we finally make it to Lava Beds and we are relieved after a days worth of driving. we pitch up our tent in our cute little campsite and the guy at the visitor center debriefs us about Bat White-Nose syndrome that disrupts its hibernation cycle. They ask us if we’ve ever been in a cave the east of the Rockies since 2005 and we both say no. I’m not quite sure if going into Mercer Caverns in Missouri counts (it was a really touristy cave and it was also ages ago, not sure of the year). Anyway, don’t tell anyone. They approve us to go cave hiking which we will do the next day.
It’s about 3, and if you recall from our post in Joshua Tree, last time we started a hike at around 5 and ended up having to climb a mountain. We just have this kind of luck with hikes, right.. and , somehow, we never manage to get it right. It’s 3 so we decide to leave for a 10-11 mile hike. Bad Idea!!
We bring a bottle of water each which clearly isn’t enough, but we begin our hike on the Three Sisters (what we call the Three Sistas Trail). Well, actually maybe five sistas including us two, anyway. Taking off the hike is really cool, along the way you can see these giant holes in the ground and if you approach them, you’ll see a hollowed out cave that was formed by lava flows thousands of years ago. It’s so cool to see a remnant of history and to be reminded how powerful nature is. These holes popped up occasionally throughout the hikes in random areas and was a totally diff kind of hike environment that we were used to. Also, a lot of the hike didn’t have a nice, marked trail (it’s one of the less well-funded state parks I’m guessing) so at times we would have to loop back on ourselves and trace our footsteps to see if we were going in the right direction. In terms of a hike difficulty, I would say this one was harder than the Sempervirens hike that we did in Big Basin park. This is attributed to the fact additionally that we were walkin on loose sand most of the time.
Anyway, we finally get back around 8 and we are all annoyed at the trail and what not, so we just head back to our campsite. Some creepy old man from Texas comes and chats to us saying that he was supposed to meet his friends here but they never showed up. Okay, maybe not comes and chats, but he walks around looking lost and then unsuspectingly approaches us as if to ask directions. Instead, he strikes a conversation. He asked us what we do and started telling some story about something or other (I forget what, the creepiness shrouded his verse). Turns out he was a pretty nice guy but he was still weird. Anyway, it was nice to have company but he caught us just as we were about to eat with the daylight we had left so after the hike and his convo, we were like doubly Ughghhhhhh.
We get the fire started and take out our still frozen fish from our cooler. Looking online, a lot of people cook with bundles of foil in the embers of the fire, which turned out to be a genius of an idea. I called them hobo-bundles since, well, I don’t know, thought it was catchy. Could’ve sworn it was from a website or something though. We bundled up dem fishes and some bell peps up and threw them into the fire. I also threw some onions in, and, upon taking out the vegetables and fish to taste them, they were de LICIOUSSSSS. All we needed on top of that was a Shasta Scone. A lot of other websites recommended pot cooking which worked a little bit, however, the major soot-age that collected on the bottom of the pot seriously hindered any effective cooking strategy. For all the people wondering how to cook, bring a whole roll of aluminum foil, put what you want in there, and then just toss it in the fire for about 10 minutes. The rest of the logistics are for you to figure out but more or less, that’s how you do it — well, the cheap, lazy, easy way at least. We ate like kings that night following a stressful hike, and day of driving. And, the old man? Sleeping in his fucking Prius. CLASSY!!!
There is one more bit to the story prior to ending it. We were joined by some visitors during our stay that night. We were eating and we set up a lantern, and for the longest time this bat just kept flying around our campsite making circles about what to do. I don’t think they ever decided but they just flew away in the end. It’s cool to see how they fly though, their flying is a little more aimless than the normal bird flying, and it’s a silent flapping that just occurs. It’s like a drunk bird, only it’s.. a mammal. And, the second visitor came when we were cooking fish. So the little thang crawled into our campsite and Thorin jumped up an said it was a rat. It was pretty ruthless in its attempt to do whatever it was doing so it just stayed at the bottom of our picnic bench all quietly, even when we flinched to make it move. Nearby me, there was a long stick available. I don’t know why this was my first instinct but I grabbed the stick and said to Thorin, “My god.. I can’t believe I’m about to do this.” and I take one huge WHACK at the rat and, luckily, I miss (not sure if I wanted to hit it.. hahah it was too heat-of-the-moment) and the rat is started and scuffles off into the wilderness. I, again, burst into laughing due to the absurdity. This ends 9/13
Saturday was meant to be the all-day for cave hiking, so we went on our way. We bought these cute little helmets from the National Park (Ok, we’ll contribute to the Park if it’s mandatory) up at the visitor center. While up there, we also take a look around the Center to see if there’s anything interesting. Turns out, that ‘rat’ I tried to kill the night before was actually a Pika, and they were endangered…which caused me to just about die of laughter, not because it wasn’t serious, but well, at the fact I went so fucking feral.
Lava Beds’ claim-to-fame is some serious cave hiking, and thus we needed to borrow heavy duty flashlights from them to navigate into the dark. Apparently, some of the caves used to have a heavy sheet of ice near the very back of it (which made it very cold), but the native Modoc peoples used it as a steady source of water until, you know, the white men ruined nature for everyone? Actually, a tidbit here and an aside before we get to the cave business:
A lot of how we remember history is written by the winners. Lava Beds site itself was actually a site of the Modoc War, which was one of the last wars to occur between First Nation people and invaders in California and Oregon. So, per our Thumbnail image, these images were pictures taken/drawn of Native Americans with “American” names given to them by early pillagers. Even how Americans memorialize is Ameri-centric: the site of the ‘last stand’ near Lava Beds was given the name “Captain Jack’s Stronghold” when in fact Captain Jack was called Kintpuash and the ‘common name’ Captain Jack was given to him by invaders. It’s a shame to see the last bit of their land and history be attributed and scribed by people whom the history never belonged to. More on this topic later.
Back to the fun, caving part: the Ranger suggested that we go into the beginners caves since we haven’t been there before but, we decided to challenge ourselves. I don’t even remember the names of the caves, but let me tell you a little bit about these caves. Firstly, there aren’t a lot of people there which makes it a bonus, you really get to explore the cave in silence. Second, the entrances are very inconspicuous: you walk, walk, walk, and then suddenly there is a tiny ladder for you to crawl down through and enter the cave. Whoever discovered and set up the cave for hiking, I thank them. You head down and the cave light illuminates you for about 20 feet but as you turn each corner the cave gets so dark that, without a flashlight, you can’t see anything at all.
Click, we both turn on our flashlights and we see the coolest things: rock formations in the bottom of the cave only possible through time. There was one cave we went into: Indian Wells cave, that was just this huge dome and you climbed from one end down the abyss to a tiny hole exit out the other, only to look out into more caves. I freaked out when I looked up cuz there were two bees just buzzing so I chickened out to climb out and do some more exploring. The cave was HUGE though, I wish we could’ve gotten some better pictures had it not been for the lighting.
Another cool cave we went to was called Golden-something, I forget the name. This one was cool because it moved in a figure 8 so going into it was like a maze (hug right!) But, at one point I remember crawling into a space that could practically only fit my body to see if there was further openings. You tend to get pretty claustrophobic at these moments and say to yourself in silent prayer that you hope the cave doesn’t collapse in on you. It’s quite daunting when you’re surrounded by rock and realize you can be crushed any second hah. There were times as well when you were duck-walking (not walking like a duck, but ducking while walking. This one took me a while to figure out) into the cave and moments where I was on my hands and knees as well. Overall, it made for a great caving experience. Another standout mention was the Hershey Cave (which was intermediate, but a couple of old folk told us it wasn’t that bad and they didn’t even have helmets). When you get far enough into the cave, you can see the roof of the cave and it actually looks like Hershey’s chocolate dripping off the top. Near the entrance, you see one of the explorers (white explorers, I should say) of the caves do some graffiti on the entrance wall. Of course, the site calls him the “Father of Lava Beds” since he “discovered” it. I guess all you really need is to put your name on it to claim it.
The caves were definitely a blast though, anyone who wants to do some light caving and some good sight seeing I would recommend it to them. The thing is, we were planning to do caves all day and we could have, however, they strongly strongly recommend elbow pads and knee pads for the very extreme caves and thus, we didn’t go into the “strenuous” caves, only the intermediate and beginner ones. Maybe in another life. What we thought was going to take all day ended at 12 noon, so the caves hike themselves weren’t particularly long like the Three Sisters trail, they were more of a “oooh, ahhh” kind of hike!
That leaves us now with the rest of Saturday with nothing to do though, so what did we decide to do? Look up some maps about what’s nearby. The closest city? Tule Lake, California (Pronounced Tooly Lake). Onward!
We had no idea that Tule Lake was the place of one of the Japanese Internment camps during World War II. Famously, George Takei was held here for a brief period of time while he was younger. We wanted to check out some of the representations and memorials for the WWII peeps to see how well they’ve remembered the history.
Driving into Tule Lake, this town is just as dumpy as Dorris, California. It’s literally a couple streets that are pretty run down and traffic lights that are hanging from wires suspended across the buildings. It actually puts a nice kind of small-town California vibe on it, although growing up here I’m sure you’d be dead bored. There is a local high school that bordered the WWII memorial museum, and then we went on in.
First thing we noticed? They’ve called the place “WWII Valor in the Pacific Monument.” So, likely, this is already slightly problematic and Ameri-centric, but we still decided to go in.
We go in and its’ kind of like walking into one of those old forest lodge cabins.. there is a man that is watching the station and only two other people there. The atrium area is relatively nice with books written about some Japanese-Americans who have experienced the internment and written their experiences down (history, written by the people the history belongs to?? no way!) We then get to talking with the guy at the desk. He’s this relatively young guy, looks pretty friendly so we strike up a conversation..
..a conversation that turns into about an hour of us learning about Japanese internment as well as sharing our experiences of learning history from an American school system. An interesting bit was using the correct terminology to distinguish between internment, concentration, segregation, and evacuation camps. What was funny though, was upon asking the guy why some of the more official boards in the museum had incorrect terminology, he said that he isn’t allowed to change that portion because it was a nationally-funded board. As a result, they have to adhere to what the government has written regarding the board.. politix! Turns out, this guy is some educated guy from Maryland who got stationed in Tule Lake (God, why on earth?) for a ‘rotation’ of some sort to help restore parts of the area. A lot of the museum was community based and funded, and he spent a lot of his time making posters, designing the museum, fixing stuff around, etc. Very interesting character to talk to, actually. Although, I don’t know why really you’d want to go from Maryland to Tule Lake.. well, unless maybe you’re from Baltimore.
In any case, the museum fee is about 3 dollars for us. We squander to collect the money and only end up paying 5 and, after our conversation, beg our way in for 5 dollars. Since, like I said earlier, the museum was community-based and funded, again Thorin and I were curious to see how they would memorialize certain aspects of the internment:
The good: how they understood native american history, sympathy towards Japanese
The bad (or weird, however you want to call it): overly patriotic representation of Vietnam, Korea, and Iraq, which was interesting especially in comparison to the Native history.. maybe it’s still too close to home.
Anyway, we go to the backyard and see some more stuff that they were displaying. They actually had one of the original barracks that the Japanese used to be interned with (well, it’s about 1/2 the length but the full width) and they also had an original watch tower used to patrol the Japanese at night. A funny two tidbits here are:
1) In the Japanese internment camps, there were baseball fields stretched throughout the main intersection (30 or so fields)
2) Nearby, there was a German and Italian internment camp, but the conditions there made it so that they were treated a lot better (could wander around, looser patrolling). Interesting play along ethnicity vs. racial lines.
After the museum, we decide to drive more into Newell, California to see the actual internment site. A lot of the buildings have already been bulldozed down due to the government trying to erase its shame, but there were some original structures there, including the original police station, some of the old barracks (which have been actually converted to houses for families, and have been painted over I”m sure), and some of the storage silos used for food. While approaching Newell, the drive is largely agricultural — like driving down highway 5 towards southern California — and barren. When you get the memorial site, there is no one there, there is no crowd gathered nor is there anyone in site. It’s in the middle of a large plain, and there’s a silence and sadness to the place. We drove through and there are people getting on with their lives. You think of the memorials in D.C. (currently shut down, haha) that get a lot of the attention, but for certain sites like these that were deliberately set out-of-sight, they seem to be out-of-mind to a lot of the general public. Thorin and I took the chance to take some pictures in front of the main erection for the memorial site.
Not like interns, but interned. The museum turned out to be far better than we had imagined,and the site was impressive, but since we had a morning of hiking on top of about 4 hours spent in Tule Lake, we decided to return home.
Back at the campsite, creepy man came to talk to us again and he told us about his day of caving. We mentioned to him about Tule Lake and he was surprisingly very sympathetic as well to the Japanese, and he harshly criticized the American government for treatment of the Japanese. Turns out, he was a history teacher in Michigan. At least there is someone doing good work there (or, any work at all really!)
We ate like KINGS again, bundling our food and cookin it like it wasn’t no THANG. Sad to say this was our last day here, and we had no fun animal visitors, but we had such an educational day. The next morning, we drove back early on so that we would make it back in time for a Sunday dinner with my family. I convinced Thorin to stop by Davis because I wanted to eat at a Chinese restaurant that I always used to eat at.
I got there, and it was the same. Shanghai Town was still there. Old Teahouse was still there, and my order was still the same. God, what a good way to end the vacation. Shout out to my boy CJ at Shanghai Town in Davis!
Bless California and all it has offered for us this past year, from camping in Joshua Tree, Big Basin, Lava Beds, to going to Marin, S.F., the beaches, the forests, etc. I will truly miss this state!
And, so glad we did this before the shut-down.