lakes – Page 9 – The MoHo and Other Traveling Tales

Smoky weekend at Medicine Lake

California was incredibly smoky this weekend. When I left home in Jamestown it was reasonably clear, but by the time I reached the interstate the smoke was thick and only got thicker as I drove north. Here is a photo of what I-5 looked like north of Corning. But I had a goal, and drove through all that smoke for 380 miles to reach this perfect little gem of a lake in northern California, where Mo was already camped with the MoHo.
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1216/is_n3_v181/ai_6607000

Even Mt Shasta was invisible to me as I drove the usually magnificent McCloud HWY 89 to Harris Spring Road and the final 33 miles to the lake. Once I was there, and settled in, it was worth it. Mo arrived earlier in the week on

Wednesday afternoon, and managed to get a perfect spot right on the lake. Number 45. Each time we have camped here, we have been in the Hogue Campground, along the northern side of the lake, and each time we have managed a lake front site. It gets a bit more challenging with the bigger MoHo, but still at only 25.5 feet, she managed to slide in to this lovely site, and with a bit of additional leveling we had a perfect lake view, room for the awning between the trees, and amazing privacy, even though the campground was more than half full over the weekend. For bigger rigs, there are nice roomy level private sites farther uphill, but the lake view is well worth the juggling. We saw some fairly big rigs in these sites, easy and comfortable.

The best part about Medicine Lake is how uncrowded it is, even on sunny Saturday afternoons. The water is clear, and the lake rules allow speedboats between the hours of 10 and 5, so there are quiet times for kayaks and canoes and everyone is happy. We saw people doing lots of fishing, and one happy person said the fish were fairly easy to catch, they just jump on the hook when you put it out there. It is one of the few places that Mo and I really enjoy returning to when there are so many new places to visit. It’s clean and open and the camp spaces are far enough apart that most of the time it feels private and spacious. We take the boats down to the beach and leave them there for the entire visit, kayaking in the late evenings or early mornings when the winds are quiet. On this trip, there was more wind than usual, even early in the day, so our paddles were a bit restricted, and the air wasn’t as perfectly clear as it usually is, but even so, it was relaxing and a great way to spend a week, or a weekend. We hiked along the lake to the tiny little Medicine Lake and Abby thought the entire trip was just so that she could swim every day and often. Mo brought along plenty of firewood from home as well so we had some truly lovely roaring fires night and morning . Back to Jamestown Sunday evening, and just another week of work and a weekend to get ready for the Spokane trip. I can hardly wait, but in the meantime, the Medicine Lake trip was a wonderful respite from the daily dig.

Medicine Lake Highlands

This is the lovely lake that awaits our next trip, nestled into the Medicine Lake Highlands of northern California. The serenity pictured here belies the rumble beneath the surface that may one day become part of the landscape. Geothermal energy is here, part of the very recent volcanic activity that created some of the magical features in this area, and it’s development is a controversial subject.
http://vulcan.wr.usgs.gov/Volcanoes/MedicineLake/Locale/framework.html

For now, here’s a photo of a quiet evening spent in 2006. I guess the campfire proves I am a true camper, or at least Mo is, since she is usually in charge of the fires. Recently, Laurie of the blog “Semi-True Tales of Our Life on the Road” http://laurieandodel.blogspot.com/ said one of the differences between fulltimers and campers is that fulltimers don’t build fires. Read her very funny story about campfires and mosquitoes and Odel in a sweat shirt at 78 degrees! I have never met either of them, but Laurie’s wonderfully descriptive sharing of their life on the road is a delight and an inspiration to me. I hope to one day be a full-timer as well, and will learn much from all that she has written.

Tent camping at Medicine Lake

Written in April of 2011.
Mo and I have been camping at Medicine Lake, located just a bit south of the California border, for several years now, and this story is about the first time we traveled there together in 2003. In those days I didn’t have a blog, and would try to keep track of our shared travels in a thick red leather journal. At the time, I was still working soil survey in Klamath Falls and lived up on Pacific Terrace in town. Mo lived in Rocky Point, and we had only known each other for a few months when we embarked on this trip.
We left for Medicine Lake from my house around 4 in the afternoon. It is only about 2 hours from Klamath Falls to the campground, so we knew we could get settled in before evening. Mo pulled the sailboat with her Chevy van, but had a little bit of trouble with the hitch because it was too high to track properly until we added all the weight of our camping gear to the sailboat. We drove south to Tulelake and then west up the hill to the lakeside campground. We immediately found a great site on the north side of the lake on a rocky promontory by the water. It didn’t take long at all to set up our big tent and cook a great supper. The campsite wasn’t big enough to store the boat, so we parked it in the lot down by the boat launch about half a mile away on the east side of the lake.
Friday morning we woke to a brilliant, sunny sky, but the wind was blowing too hard for sailing so we decided to go hiking instead. We drove south to the lava caves and tubes, walked the obsidian flows, and explored Glass Mountain where we found some huge chunks of snowflake obsidian. In the afternoon we drove the narrow dirt road up to the Hoffman Mountain Lookout with views in all four directions, with Mt Shasta to the west, and Klamath Falls in the northern distance. We saw the beginnings of a large forest fire that we learned later started that afternoon at Hagelstien Park north of the Klamath Lake. Our evening was topped off by a nice supper cooked over a lovely campfire and sleeping to the sound of the wind outside the tent.
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On Saturday, we got up to another perfect sunny day and drove to the caldera rim for another long hike on the obsidian flows. Finally by afternoon the winds died down to reasonable breezes and we launched the sailboat. We were the only boat on the lake and the winds were perfect for practicing our come-abouts. We laughed a lot on this day about our morning plans, with Mo saying, “Well, first we can eat breakfast, then we’ll do something, then we’ll eat, and then do something, then we can come back and eat”. In the late afternoon we took off exploring again with the boat in tow behind the van and laughed a lot about how funny that must have looked to the few people we passed on the high narrow dirt roads miles away from any kind of water.
Sunday morning after our campfire breakfast we went for a little hike to a tiny hidden lake where Molly could swim and followed the trails back around the lake to our campsite. We packed up camp about mid day and traveled home by way of Mt Shasta and the tiny logging town of Bray along Highway 97, with it’s little matching houses lined up in cute little rows. Back in Klamath we stopped in to Old Town Pizza for supper. Mo dropped me off at home before she headed back to Rocky Point.