Chester, Part 2

Mt Lassen
Originally uploaded by hibiscusfire.

I’m nearing the end of my stay in this small rural town, and of course, I’ve been too busy “experiencing” everything to have time to write about it. I am usually at the clinic –or the ER if my doc is on call for the emergency room that day- from 9 am to 6 pm. After I get home, I join Dorothy, my 85 year-old host, for some sort of adventure before, after or with dinner.

For one of our trips last week, we packed sandwiches for dinner and drove to Lassen Park, where we toured every lake and stunning lookout point. Much of the south side of the park is still covered in snow. Soon after entering the park, just at the tree line, we saw steaming hot springs and boiling mud pits on both sides of the road – it appeared that the road had actually been built on top of them. I guess this was a testament to the volcano’s stability, though while standing there, I wouldn’t have been surprised if Mt Lassen had suddenly begun to erupt. Ten minutes (and a thousand feet later) we found ourselves standing in snow and looking over a valley that used to be the inside of an ancient volcano, Mt. Tehama, which stood as tall as Mt Lassen thousands of years ago. Apparently, it had erupted and then collapsed on itself. Thousands of years of weather, eruptions by other nearby volcanoes and the movements of glaciers had formed the valley I drive through every week on my way from Red bluff to Chester. Ten minutes after that view, we were standing next to a frozen lake, just below the summit of Mt Lassen, surrounded by 4 foot deeps snow. The view was spectacular, and had it not been evening, I would have jumped at the chance to hike 2500 feet in 2.5 miles to the top of the volcano. We ate dinner on the shores of a small lake, which would have been a very tranquil experience if not for the swarms of potentially West Nile Virus carrying mosquitos. We were home just before dark and just in time for the nightly soak in Dorothy’s hot tub.

On previous trips, Dorothy and I have gone canoeing on Lake Almanor and walking on the many beautiful trails in the area. One of my favorite trips had started innocently as a “picnic dinner” at nearby Butt Lake (yes, pronounced just like that). It’s another man-made lake very near Lake Almanor, but apparently far enough away to attract far fewer campers. There are no buildings within miles of the area, though logging roads abound. We had dinner on the shore of the lake, with beautiful views of the water and the tree covered steep valley walls around us. Not a person in sight. Afterwards, we decided to explore the dirt road that ran along the lake and see how far it went. Within twenty minutes we were at the damn, which rose benignly from the lake’s edge to drop precariously into a deep gulley on the other side.

Having serenely traveled this far, I took a quick glance at my tires to make sure they weren’t slowly deflating, and decided to continue our driving adventure. The car was covered in a thick layer of the fine dust, but it seemed to be surviving our off-roading adventure well. I had glanced at my atlas of California to confirm that the old, crooked signs sticking out of the side of this dirt road were correct in predicting that we would encounter the town of Seneca within 8 miles, and that it was only another 10 miles to a highway that would take us back to Chester. It sounded perfect.

The first 5 minutes of our newly initiated road trip consisted of dodging potholes, large bolders and unstable edges on a very narrow road with a precarious drop. Soon after, we found ourselves descending, at dusk, into the heavily forested gulch, and following a series of pink flags, which Dorothy said were used to mark logging roads. I started to question the wisdom behind this trip in my little old Mitsubishi, and I started to wish I hadn’t bought the second cheapest tires on the market. While Dorothy and I chatted away –and I tried not to think about scenes from the movie Deliverance, which my friends always mention at moments like these—in the back of my mind, I began to make little contingency plans. “Ok, if the car breaks down, we’ll walk to Seneca and ask the people there to help” “If the road is impassable, I’ll just slowly turn around and we’ll go back the way we came” “How often do cars even come on this road?” “Could Dorothy hike 8 miles?” I set my mind on reaching Seneca. Dorothy said she hadn’t been there in many years, but that it was a small town. I imagined a single paved road, maybe only one block long, with a gas station that was probably not open too late.
We finally reached Seneca at mid-dusk. It was at the bottom of a dark ravine. It consisted of four of five rotting shacks, including one that was surrounded by the remnants of fence on which hung a sign proclaiming your arrival at the “Seneca Resort”. Next to it, was a disintegrating RV that was actually being swallowed up by the forest around it. We passed a couple abandoned mines and a house surrounded by broken cars, which may have been occupied, but at that point, I was in no mood to check. It was getting dark, and this little trip was beginning to look like the beginning of one of those horror-suspense movies I don’t like to watch. Within ten minutes, however, we had again climbed out of the valley and we were looking at the remnants of the sunset. Far off in the distance, we could see Lake Almanor. The road flattened out and widened, my muscles relaxed and I took my first full breath of the hour. And then I started to kick myself for not staying in Seneca long enough to take pictures.

So this is getting ridiculously long (probably quite proportionate to the amount of time that has passed since my last entry). It’s also not really a blog, but who cares. I’ve been having a great time here, and I haven’t even mentioned all the exciting medical experience I’ve gotten in the last month of the interesting people I’ve worked with. That requires a new entry, maybe tomorrow.