Flutterby™! : Still more Oregon trip

I'm posting these backwards in small chunks. To see the whole thing in sequence (kinda), you can check out the November 2003 Oregon Trip topic once it's all posted.

We're descending towards route 395, just crossing Hat Creek, and Charlene says "Is that a cave?" Big spray of gravel as I drop the car into the shoulder and brake (yes, I got danged good at braking hard on gravel...), whip the car back around, and find that the county has put a nice little fishing park across the creek from the road cut of... We think it's "diatomite". It's this seam of a very soft chalky rock, lots of graffiti scraped in it, and as you can see by the picture of me holding it extremely light. The cave has square sides, so I'd guess it was a quarrying operation of some sort, but the rock is really cool, and now we're hooked on cool rocks.

So the next sliding to a stop (actually a fast U-turn and then an "oh darn I hope I can turn sharp enough to not blow a tire on that rock...") happened at this pass above an incredible gorge. So I wandered across the street to stare south at Mount Lassen and the northern Sierra while Charlene looked at the striations and patterns in the rocks on the road cut. Then I notice that beneath the slide on the far side there's an old road of some sort. And looking upstream I see a beautiful falls with a little old bridge right below it. I think there's some hiking to be done here at some point. And above the north end of the parking lot this huge bird wheels and turns, and combined with the earlier visit to the Delevan wildlife viewing area, we're hooked. Unfortunately, I forgot the 300mm lens, so we're stuck with the 200mm lens for birding. Not optimal, but enough that we've got some memory assistance.

We drop down into Alturas, the junction of 395 and 299. Those of you who've known me for a while have heard me rave about 395 further down. Just south there's a wildlife viewing area, so we drive south, check it out, see this bird that's so spectacular that we don't realize until later that there are deer in the picture. That prompts us to look a little further at our maps, notice that there's another area just to the west of us, which leads to more "wow, look at..." moments, most of which we didn't get pictures of because it was just too spectacular to be worried about.

395 north to Lakeview is beautiful. More spectacular roadcuts, some things that looked like tufa towers. Alas, in our rush to get to Lakeview we didn't stop for pictures of those few, thinking there'd be more of it.