Even more snow and tunnel crawling

A short trip up the road finds us at Crater Lake.  We’re a bit smarter than we were a couple of weeks ago and looked ahead to 

Crater Lake Lodge

Crater Lake Lodge

check road and weather conditions so we knew the road was clear with a lot of snow and limited visibility.  We just weren’t quite expecting this much snow.  Wow!

Couldn’t see the lake at all and, after talking to one of the Rangers, decided to stay an extra night at Prospect and come up again the next day.  This is what happened:



Saturday

 


Sunday



 



Saturday



 

 



Sunday



 

 

 

 

 

Such a difference.  Just fantastic.  Decided to go on a Ranger-guided snowshoe hike.  The usual 1 hour hike took 2½ hours mostly due to the weather conditions but also due to this kind of activity.

Yee Haa!

 

Human bobsledding

 Great fun as you can see.  Reluctantly left the mountain and headed north.  We were going to stop at Bend but, of the two attractions we were going to visit, the lava tubes were closed until the end of April due to bat habitation and two of the ice caves had been vandalised.  Headed straight up to the Columbia River where we overnighted in a car park overlooking The Dalles Dam then spent all of the next day travelling just 110 miles into Portland.  With scenery like this can you blame us:


Road we drove up



Columbia River



Mosier Tunnels



Sue & Jean at Multnomah Falls



Vista House

Jean taking another awesome scenic photo

Had a shopping day in Portland then it was off to our next state – Washington.  First stop was a town named Cougar (no innuendo please) and a visit to the Ape Cave and Trail of Two Forests.  The Ape Cave is an old lava tube that is open to the public to walk through.  There is an easy hike to one end and a more difficult one, clambering over fallen rocks to the other.  We did both. 



Inside the lava tube - the rock above us is wedged tight in the gap. 
The ceiling is quite low here. In other parts of the tube you could
drive a truck through.

 

The Trail of Two Forests is a short boardwalk hike where you can see remnants of the forest that was destroyed in an eruption 2000 years ago 

Entrance to The Crawl

with the new forest that has subsequently arisen.  It also includes a section known as The Crawl where a tunnel has been created by a tree trunk that got incinerated by the 


There is light at the end of the tunnel

lava with the lava cooling before the trunk broke down.  Aptly named, it is a crawl.  And dark.  We both survived though, just a tad dirtier than when we started.





Jean emerging from The Crawl