Lava Beds National Monument and Indian Well Campground

Lava Beds National Monument is in north-eastern California, close to the Oregon border. It covers a portion of the Medicine Lake shield volcano, which is still potentially active but has not erupted for 900 years. The southern half of the park has many lava tube caves, a couple of dozen of the over 300 are named and have trails to them. I spent over two days in the park, and still had to skip some of the caves. The northern portion has other volcanic features and battlefields from when the natives where removed from their land.

Indian Well Campground is near the visitor center and cave loop. It has 43 sites on two loops, picnic tables, fire rings, flush toilets, trash and recycle cans, and water. There are no RV hookups, and 30 foot is the recommended maximum RV size. Each site is $10/day, (half price with senior or access pass) bring exact change. While the sites are reasonably large, most are not very private. There is a 0.2 mile trail to the visitor center from the upper end of the B loop. I used site B18, near that trail and nicer than many of the other spots. There are no reservations other than the single tent-only group campsite.

Mushpot cave is the only artificially lighted cave, it also has signs explaining various cave features. It is a good first cave to explore, only a little stooping is needed. Indian well cave had some interesting ice features in the bottom, where scrambling over rocks was needed to see them. A practice rescue was going on when I visited Valentine Cave.

It took me a full day to do most of the caves on cave loop that were not closed, skipping most of the crawling needed to explore some of the caves. My motorhome was left in the campground, and I walked the loop.

Hepe Cave is the only one that is off of a dirt road. The trail in the cave was slick with ice. There were ice features in this cave as well. Most of what was though to be permanent ice in Merrill and Skull Caverns has melted, and there are locked gates to protect what remains. Merrill Cave was used as an ice rink before the site was declared a national monument.

Big Painted Cave and Symbol Bridge, on the same trail, are the only two marked caves with pictographs. The ones at Symbol Bridge are much easier to see. I did not visit Pictograph Point, where there are more pictographs on a hillside.

South and west of Lava Beds is national forest, and to the north is Tule Lake Wildlife Refuge. There are more caves and other volcanic features in the forest, and the refuge has many birds.

Modoc National Forest

About 50 miles north of Susanville, California I camped one night in the Modoc National Forest. I took one of the gravel roads from highway 139 for about a mile and parked at a wide spot in the road. Not a good spot for solar panels, too many trees. It rained in the evening, then snowed as I was leaving in the morning. No Verizon signal.

The campground not much further down the highway was still closed for the winter. As I drove further north, I parked for a while since the snow was building up on my windshield. (More than the windshield wipers and defroster could deal with.) I check my email and continued on after half an hour or so.

Carson City -- State Museum, Capitol Building, and Nugget Casino

The Carson Nugget Casino allows overnight RV parking in their lot #4, which has lines marked for 35' RVs. You need to ask for a parking pass from their security office. The casino is in downtown Carson City, near the State Museum, Capitol Building, various state offices, two smaller casinos and at least half a dozen restaurants. There was no buffet when I was there. I ate breakfast in their Cafe, reasonable but not exciting.

The old Carson City Mint building is part of the State Museum. It is catty-cornered from the Nugget. The museum admission is $8, and it has displays on mining, minting, a ghost town, slot machines, natural history, minerals, native americans, and other things as they apply to the state. I was unaware of the border war between Nevada and California. The display on atomic testing was disappointingly small. It took me about 3 hours to see the museum.

The Capitol building has a free small museum in the old senate hall, mostly about the building itself and the politics of the state.

Terrible Pahrump

(This post is out of order, I stayed in Pahrump, Nevada between Lake Mead and Palmetto.) While there is reportedly much BLM land around Pahrump, exactly where to spend a night or two was not obvious, so I decided to stay a night at an RV park. Terrible's Lakeside RV park is a couple of miles from the highway, but not hard to find. (Terrible's is a chain of cassinos.) I forgot to check if they took Passport America so I didn't get the cheapest rate, but I did join their club to get a better discount than the Good Sam one. You can also turn in recipts from Terrible's other businesses including their gas stations (the "Country Store" one had better prices than anyone else in town, but the ones at the casinos were significantly more) to earn benifits like meal discounts and free days in the RV park.

The "Lake" was more of a manmade pond, but the RV park was nice with grassy areas between sites. I noticed a lot of Rexhall RVs, and found out that a Rexhall club was meeting there. No cable TV or TV reception, verizon signal was good. The casino itself was quite small, the buffet had little in the way of selection and the pie slice I had was not very good. Most buffet restaurants offer a better value.

Buckeye Creek

Distributed camping is allowed allong most of Buckeye Road in the Humboldt-Toiyabe National Forest. There are some nice sites not far from Buckeye Creek, and a pay campground about a mile away. Hot water flows from the side of the hill over the creek in several places, and over a boulder into several volenteer-built pools beside the creek. The day I arrived was apparently the first day of fishing season, and there were many people around. It got much quieter by Monday.