We are nearing the end of our Northwest trip. Our last stop was Crater Lake National Park. It is a long drive from the Olympic coast to Crater Lake. To make it easier we broke the drive up into two sections. Our first stop was at the Colombia Riverfront RV Park. Even though it was just a one night stop over this was a beautiful stop. We had a river view campsite and the kids enjoyed the large grass area and river boats.
The next day we drove to Broken Arrow Camp on the north side of Crater Lake. This camp was not waterfront but it was great in its own right. The sites were large and the weather beautiful. We enjoyed our last night around a campfire reading, drawing, playing, and telling stories. Since it was our first clear night in a remote place we set an alarm and woke everyone up at 1:30am to do some star viewing. The interruption of sleep was well worth the beautiful night sky. Every kid should see the Milky Way as often as they can.
We set a new alarm and awoke at 7 to get an early start. The plan was to drive through the open rim section of Crater Lake, enjoy lunch at Rim Village, and then drive until we reached home. our first stop was the Pumice Desert, a “dead soil” area due to the large amount of pumice rock from Mount Mazama’s eruption 7,700 years ago. We were surprised to find some very hardy pioneer plants working to reclaim the area. Maybe it will be full of trees in another 7,000 years.
We drove the rim from the north entrance to Rim Village stoping at every turnout for views and photos. It is an amazingly blue lake the lack of access has kept it clean and undeveloped. It is easy to see it as the native Americans did hundreds of year ago. Since there was still lots of snow many of the trails were hard to follow and the road was not open all the way around. We enjoyed our time there and hope to make it back someday and get down to the water.
We finished our last badge of the trip and loaded up for the long drive back to California and our non wheeled home.
Our 6S Full Life 