PNW Road Trip, Day 2: Anderson, CA -> Bend OR - 328 mi

After a nice continental breakfast at the Fireside restaurant next to the Gaia Hotel we jumped in the car and headed off for day 2. We were both nervous about the state of the transmission, but again didn’t say anything about it for fear of jinxing it! We cruised north on I-5 past Shasta Lake and Mount Shasta which loomed in the distance from the start. It was the first volcano I’ve ever seen and it’s snow capped peak stands 14,179 ft tall. Pretty cool site since it’s also the tallest mountain I’ve seen “up close”.

We got on Rt 97 in Weed, CA just north of Mt Shasta and headed northeast into Oregon. There’s a lot of really neat topography for most of our trip, and we started seeing it as we left the hotel in the morning. The night before we arrived in the dark, so it was a bit of a surprise to wake up surrounded by mountains. Pretty much the rest of the trip we were in the mountains…or darn close to them. It was great.

In some little town we hung a left onto Rt 62 and headed northwest towards Crater Lake and ended up stopping at this tiny hotel/store/deli along the way. At Jo’s Motel we grabbed a turkey sandwich with fruit salad for me and a hot dog for Liz. It was a nice little stop in a town of maybe 20 people if it could be called a town.

After lunch we continued on our way, and about 5 minutes after getting in the car we spotted a bald eagle above the roadway. It was coming basically down the road towards us. At first it looked like a typical hawk, but as we got closer it’s white head was very apparent and as we cruised under it we got a great view. First time either of us had seen one in the wild and pretty darn cool.

Pretty soon after that we ended up climbing into a forest and we noticed a huge gorge to the right of the road. We stopped a couple of times, but we couldn’t see the bottom from the pullouts on the road. Finally we stopped at the Annie Falls pullout and saw to the bottom of the gorge where Godfrey Glen was with the small waterfall on Annie Creek. Very pretty. If you take a look at this map you can see where RT 62 goes by the park. Annie Creek flows through the gorge south of the park and it’s DEEP! 300 feet or more from Rt 62 according to google maps!

A little farther up Rt 62 and we hung a right onto Rim Drive and treated ourselves with an annual National Park Pass that’s good through next september. I’m sure we’ll try to take as much advantage of that as possible over the next year. It’s only $80 for the car. Definitely worth it.

We stopped at the Godfrey Glen trail on the entrance road to the park to get in a quick hike. We knew we weren’t going to have a ton of time to hang out at Crater Lake, so we planned on doing a couple of short quick hikes to get a feel for the place before moving on. The Godfrey Glen trail is a nice easy trail that’s essentially flat until the very end and it winds its way along the top of a ridge overlooking Annie Creek (which you can’t actually see because the gorge is so steep) over to an overlook on Godfrey Glenn which is a nice meadow at the bottom of the gorge were it gets pretty wide. There’s actually a trail that goes all the way down to the glen…it’s on our list for a longer trip!

Near the very end of the trail we were talking and looking at things and not paying that much attention to things when I got stung by a bee on the arm. It was then that I heard all the buzzing and I quickly looked over my left shoulder and saw an old tree stump completely consumed with bees. With a quick “Run, run!” Liz and I were off on a dash to the car, which fortunately was only 100 feet or so away. Unfortunately Liz also got stung on the leg. We ended up sitting in the car in a surprising amount of pain for a bee-sting. It has to have been 15 years at least since I’ve been stung, and even longer for Liz.

The bee stings did make us take a quick trip to the ranger station to get some health info and alert them to the nest right on one of their trails. In the end we were ok, although they sting sites stung and itched for quite awhile. Liz might still have a mark on her leg a couple weeks later!

Once we determined we weren’t in anephalactic shock we got in the car and headed east around Rim Drive towards the Sun Notch overlook trail. Oh, I should mention that the ranger station and visitor center sit outside the crater, and from there when you look at the crater it looks basically like the base of a huge mountain. Outside of the crater it looks like a giant wall of rock 800 feet or so high. How the heck were we going to get to the lake?

Well, it turns out that Rim Drive climbs both east and west up to the top rim of the crater. We drove east, as I mentioned, and stopped at the Sun Notch Trail. That trail was pretty short, but up a pretty steep incline to the rim of the crater. Once we got to the top we were greeted with one of the coolest views I’ve seen!

The rim of Crater Lake at that point sits at an elevation around 7150 feet. The lake itself however sits at an elevation around 6200 feet. So when you get to the top of the trail you are standing on a 950ft cliff looking out over this enormous body of water that happens to be the prettiest shade of blue you can imagine. The lake isn’t fed from streams or creeks (and no streams or creeks flow from the lake), so no sediment flows into the lake. Instead it gets all of the water from precipitation…rainfall and snowfall. It keeps the water really pure and quite beautiful.

While we were standing at one of the overlooks at Sun Notch a tour boat cruised over toward the island known as Phantom Ship which is visible from the trail. This thing must have had 15 people on it and been 25 feet long at least, but it looked like this tiny little toy boat down on the lake. Eventually I’ll put up some pictures, but the boat is dwarfed by Phantom Ship which I could hear the tour guide on the boat say was roughly 180 ft long and 150ft tall.

After hanging out on the rim at Sun Notch for a while we hiked back down to the car and drove back west around the crater. We stopped at a bunch of overlooks, including some over Wizard Island, but we didn’t have time to do any more hiking. We’re planning on going back for a long weekend so we can do some longer hikes and hopefully go out to Wizard Island which has a small mountain on it (700 ft tall or so) which has a 90 foot deep crater of it’s own!

From Crater Lake we headed up to Bend, OR for the night where we had our reservation. We just stayed at a Day’s Inn, which was fine. Nothing to really say about that. Unfortunately, we didn’t spend any time checking things out in Bend. Rt 97 takes you through the “strip mall” side of Bend, and we weren’t very impressed with it at first. We did drive across the highway to the nice part of Bend, but it was dark and we were hungry, so we didn’t spend time looking around. Instead we headed straight to the Bend Brewing Company which had been recommended.

I ended up trying their Black Diamond Dark Lager and the Metolius Golden Ale, both of which were quite good. Liz had the High Desert Hefeweizen which she liked. Since we were starving we ordered up some beer battered zucchini sticks which was really just a way for them to give you greasy beer batter without sounding so unhealthy, but that didn’t hurt. They were tasty. Liz ended up with the Lava Butte Turkey Melt and I had a simple Cheese Burger after which we split a hot fudge sundae.

Once dinner was done we headed back to the hotel and collapsed for the evening.

Oh, I should mention something about the car. I think the transmission likes the hills. We didn’t have much trouble at all on the second day of our trip. I do remember stopping once or twice to restart the car, but I don’t think we stopped just to do that. Instead we were able to do that when we were getting gas or food, and we never spent much time riding along in 3rd gear.