You haven’t had any of my photographs to delight you in awhile, so I browsed through my gallery over at Flickr and picked out an old favorite to share.

This is a huge tangle of driftwood near Lake Manzanita in Redding, California. We visited Lake Manzanita once when Richard’s brother came to visit and he wanted to go up the volcano; Mt. Lassen. Yep, Lassen, and the more well known mountain, Shasta, are both volcanos.

Mt. Lassen actually exploded in the early part of the 20th century; I believe it was around 1920. One huge side of the mountain at the top was practically sheared off in the blast.

We saw the blast area and the dead zone; a barren part of the mountain where nothing has yet grown.

It’s an eerie site seeing that torn up side of the mountain and just below it is new growth of trees and plants, and of course lots of animals making their homes at the foot of the volcano. Can you believe that we only lived two hours away from an active volcano? The first few months we were there, I kept thinking the mountain might blow; especially after Mt. Saint Helens blew its top off.

Most fascinating of all, and what really made you understand that we were walking about on a live volcano, was when we visited the sulphur springs and mud pots area. Mud was oozing out of the ground, boiling hot and gray while pockets of sulphur spewed forth in smelly, yellow gas clouds. Very cool, and yucky at the same time.

I love to visit places like this, and rarely get to do so since neither I nor the hubby drives. Since moving here to Spokane, I know there are equally some spectacular sites around us and I have decided, it’s high time to find a way to get to them.

What natural wonder sits in your backyard?

Tags: Photography

This entry was posted on Saturday, April 15th, 2006 at 10:07 am and is filed under Artwork. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.