While in Klamath Falls we took a day and drove up to Crater Lake.  We waited for more than a week to get a clear day instead of cloudy, but what we got instead was a smoky day due to fires burning around (but not in) Klamath Falls.

We still had a great time at several overlooks where the lake, the island and the formations at the rim of the lake were visible.  The rim road was not open the whole way around the lake due to road work, so we had to drive one way a little more than half way and then turn around and go back to the main visiters center and then drive the other way for a little more than quarter way and turn around.  It actually worked out good because there are formations that you can only see driving in one direction.  We missed them driving the other direction so if we had been able to circle the rim we would have missed several really cool features of the lake area.

We also took a side drive to a place called Pinnacles where there are many feet of ash that was sculpted by erosion into weird spiky formations.

Even though it was smoky and several pictures just didn’t come out very good. We got several good pictures showing the area.  Here they are:

While staying in Klamath Falls we drove down to the Lava Beds Natl Monument.  It’s a really unique place!  There are several volcano domes that erupted over a period of several thousand years.  It also has a very huge lava flow field and dozens of lava tube caves.

One of the volcano domes that erupted created a large crater that you can walk down into a ways.

Some of the caves are open for exploring.  Most people do self-guided tours of the caves and people are required to have a flashlight and hardhat and sometimes knee-pads and gloves in order to tour caves.  One is lighted and has a paved walkway but several are moderate or difficult – the difficult ones you have to crawl a lot.  Not for me!!  We didn’t do any cave tours because we had Chloe with us and didn’t want to leave her in the truck for any length of time.

There was also a cliffside not far from the lava flow area where ancient people drew lots of petroglyphs.  Unfortunately over the decades lots of settlers and modern people have put graffiti on parts of the wall.  There is a fenced off area now protecting the petroglyphs.

Here are pictures we took: