I have a really annoying camera. Its biggest flaw is that it doesn't automatically flip the pictures when you take them sideways (seriously?), but it's also really annoying to change the settings, which means that in most cases it's just not worth fiddling with them.
So, here are my vacation pictures taken with my cheapo camera!
On June 18 and 19, we visited Lassen Volcanic National Park, which is kind of a mini Yellowstone but not as pretty. Here is some boiling groundwater. There used to be a large stratovolcano here, a volcano that towers high and is composed of layers of ash and lava. The volcano has been blown apart, but there is still heat underground. While Yellowstone's heat is an enigma, Lassen's is not. The oceanic plates are subducting underneath the continent, and water in the ocean floor messes with the mantle and makes magma come up into the continent, feeding the volcanism of the Cascade Mountains.
We visited a lake called Emerald Lake. It gets its green color because it is shallow, thus allowing green algae to grow. The lake is in a cirque, a bowl-shaped feature carved out by glaciers.
This is the only picture I got of Lassen Peak. It is a plug dome, meaning that very viscous lava came out and just kind of piled up, creating a dome instead of a peak (like a stratovolcano such as Mount Rainier) or instead of a shield (like Hawaii). It erupted in 1914 and 1915. We saw photographs of that eruption, which was 100 to 200 times smaller than the eruption of Mount St. Helens but was still very big.
This is the only picture I got of all three of my nephews, Franklin (6), Nathaniel (4), and Preston (9). Nathaniel is prone to having funny pictures taken of him.
You're lucky to get pictures of Franklin, because he hates having his pictures taken and tells you to delete him. He's a cute kid. Last year I described him as an "adorable, shy five-year-old who sometimes gets possessed by the devil."At age six, I think he's a little less shy. The kids got little books to be junior rangers, and one of their requirements was to ask a ranger four questions. Some of Franklin's questions were, "How much do you sleep?", "How many naps do you take?", and "What is your mother's name?" I think he gets possessed a little less often, although he still has the same sense of entitlement. His speech has really improved. On one car ride, I had a funny conversation with him in which we spoke in weird inhaling voices.
We went and saw some waterfalls, although I can't remember what they were called. They were pretty waterfalls. Here, you can see where the water is falling from off the surface in some places, and where it is seeping out of the rocks next to it. The water coming out of the rocks seeped into the porous rock layer on top, but then it hit an impermeable layer and traveled underground until it came out here.
After Lassen, we went to see Mount Shasta, which is the largest stratovolcano in the Cascades in terms of volume. We couldn't get very close to it, however, because the road was closed.
On our way up, we saw some conical trees.
On Monday, we went to Big Basin Redwoods State Park. Redwoods are really big trees. Often the trees will grow in rings around where a previous tree existed.
One of the trees had a hole in the top of it! I think this one was actually dead, but a lot of them look like they could be dead but they're not.
A little bluejay kept following us around.
Later, we went to Fitzgerald Marine Reserve to observe the tidal pools. When the tide is down, you can see all sorts of interesting marine life. I was interested in the rocks, especially these limestone rocks that have little holes in them. While I'm not positive, I think that these holes form from shelled creatures taking the calcium from the limestone to incorporate it into their shells. I think it's pretty cool that millions of years ago, shelled creatures deposited the calcium from their shells as limestone, but today, they take it back.
We saw sea birds and their tracks.
I was interested in a distant piece of driftwood, not realizing that there was a colony of harbor seals right next to it. That's the first time I've seen seals in the wild.
Qi-en makes a lot of funny faces.
This rock outcrop here is some kind of mudstone. There is obviously a limestone layer underneath it.
On Tuesday, we went back to the tide pools. The tide was lower, but it was a lot colder. We saw lots of little marine life, including snails, hermit crabs, and anemones.
On Wednesday, my parents, my sister, and I left the kids behind to go see some cool places. We visited a Petrified forest. Not only was this a place of geologic specimens, it was also a place of grammatical specimens. Notice the unnecessary quotation marks around "concretions of iron." That's not a particularly unusual term. I mean, I would probably say "iron concretions," but I don't see why "concretions of iron" has the quotation marks. Also, I'm annoyed that it's all caps, because that makes it harder to read.
There were lots of trees here. During the Pliocene Epoch, about 3.4 million years ago, volcanic ash buried this forest. The silica content of the ash leached into the trees and replaced the organic structures, turning them to quartz and silica. There are lots and lots of petrified trees here.
This is Mount St. Helena (not to be confused with Mount St. Helens), the offending volcano.
This is an outcrop of the ash-flow tuff, with some large "concretions of iron" in it. (See what I did there?)
Here, a living tree is growing out of a rock tree!
This is another grammatical specimen. Notice number 3. There should be an apostrophe after "geologists" to indicate that the pick and brush belong to geologists. But without the apostrophe, it creates a sentence that leads you "down the garden path," because you think "pick" and "brush" are verbs, but they're actually nouns. You start to read the sentence one way, but it's actually going another way.
This shows a partially excavated tree, so you can see how much ash there was.
After the petrified forest, we went to the Charles M. Schulz museum. As a longtime Peanuts fan, I really liked the museum. They had lots of original Peanuts strips on display and had different Schulz factoids and artifacts. Even the restrooms had Peanuts themes; the tiles were comic strips. We also saw the giant mural of Peanuts strip tiles.
Outside, they had different Peanuts sculptures. One of them was supposed to be Woodstock's birdbath, and it had cool holograms of Snoopy and Woodstock playing hockey. I think there were six different holograms which you could see when you walked around it.
When we came home, we found the kids playing outside. Nathaniel stuck his scooter in the fence and stood on it. "I won't wall down," he said, still not able to master his consonants.
These are about all the details of the trip I have time for, but I've included the most relevant pictures.
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