Wed 21 – Thu 22 Aug 2019
Inadvertently, Dave and I seem to have almost agreed to think about the girls maybe having pets when we return home after our travels. How we got into this situation, I’m not entirely sure – it is certainly not conducive to any future long-term travels. Nor am I wholly convinced on the girls preferred choice of pet: a pair of rabbits.
I mean, bringing up children, public speaking, travelling the world (by bus with pre-schoolers or with strong-willed pre-teens, getting ourselves into one scrape after another, floundering and unable to speak the local language) ... yeah, sure, anytime, we'll take that in our stride. But looking after two soft, harmless, little cottontails? Eeek!
Unfortunately, the mere lack of a forceful ‘no’ was enough that, when we last managed a brief spell of internet a week ago, the girls had launched themselves straight into vigorous research on every aspect of housing and caring for pet rabbits. They had even found a couple available to collect a few miles from our home in the UK and had started discussing names. Knowing that the rabbits were completely unattainable from this far away (in the western reaches of the USA), the cute photo began to melt even my heart.
The topic of pet rabbits came up again in the cabin last night and I inwardly recoiled at the knowledge that, once the initial excitement was over, I’d be the one left with the drudgery and with having to find complicated ways for us to work around the restrictions in any future plans.
After a severely disturbed night in which my dreams were haunted throughout by enormous rabbit-like creatures, I awoke today in something of a cold sweat. I forced myself to lie still and calm down, reminding myself that the girls would likely have forgotten all about it by this morning.
There was a gentle rustle from the sleeping bag next to me: Poppy was awakening. She rolled towards me, gave me the most enormous, happy grin I can ever recall, and excitedly greeted me with a single word, “Bunnies!”
With a lot of rain about, we were cabin-bound most of the day, apart from a walk of a couple of miles in the late afternoon. We were glad of the extra space and weatherproofness afforded by having a cabin, however compact and basic, compared with being in our small, leaky tent that an adult can’t stand up in, even in the very centre.
Ah, that’s how it’s done – so easy! (Girls’ own video.)
Dave set to work on improving his mastery of smartphone photography. By this, I don’t mean lighting, exposure, composition or editing. I mean how to operate the camera button without inadvertently ending up with 63 near-identical ‘burst’ photos. We played some family games of cards and the girls had their usual fun styling each other’s hair into unfathomably complicated networks of plaits and other styles (May’s specialism). But what they most enjoyed was drawing up one after another of possible rabbit hutch and pen designs. And so the day passed.
[ASIDE: So, here we are, nine months on, and what has been the progress on rabbits? Initially, we had to get sorted at home after so many months away, May settled into her first year at secondary school and Poppy into her new primary school. Then it was winter, so we thought we’d wait for spring. Then COVID-19 happened and who knows what the pet care or travel situation will be this summer?
Alongside this, I’ve been brought up to believe that any caged pets should have really decent-sized quarters, and my Dad had offered to make the hutch and pen. But it seems that rabbit quarters need to be so very large that we’d be better off simply fencing and roofing our entire garden with wire net, going right over the top of the house, and having all four of us encased in a giant cage for evermore along with the two rabbits.
I’ve now tried migrating the girls onto smaller-sized, shorter-lived pets – guinea pigs? hamsters? a beetle in a matchbox? – but we still haven’t reached an agreement.]
On the Wednesday evening, we didn’t embark on any long walks, and instead set a fire in the cabin’s woodstove. Starting the evening with a warm cabin, combined with having cloud cover for much of the night, meant we slept soundly and woke up not too cold on Thursday morning – even though the skies had cleared again apart from a few scarves of cloud around South Sister, Broken Top and Mount Bachelor. We were moving on today, fully recharged and ready for a new adventure.
After emptying the cabin and repacking the car, we first hired two kayaks (for the adults) and two paddleboards (for the girls, although I also had a quick go) and spent a sunny hour on the lake near the cabin – enjoying the beautiful views, paddling gently through patches of little pink flowers close to the pelicans, and watching an osprey dive into the water with an enormous splash and fly off with a large fish over 30 cm (12 inches) long.
We then took the scenic route north to Bend (where we bought groceries) and drove on via a long-winded stop in Sisters (to seek out, first, the Information Centre and, when that was the wrong place, the Ranger Station, so that we could investigate and purchase the right hiking permit for the Belknap Crater area of the Mount Washington Wilderness, immediately north of the Three Sisters Wilderness). Finally, we reached Lava Lake campground, the last part of the journey being on an incredibly rutted, potholed, dirt road that required painstakingly slow, nerve-wracking progress to avoid grounding the car.
We pitched the tent in an idyllic spot at this almost uninhabited, basic, beautiful campsite (comprising a small lake set amongst trees, but no drinking water supply and only a long-drop toilet) and cooked an early tea, whilst the girls practised circus-trick walking on a cylinder of fallen log – wearing flip-flops!
Once the heat of the day had reduced, we set out for the five mile Little Belknap Crater walk, employing the same technique we’d used for the Green Lakes walk – that is, allowing only just enough time to complete the walk in daylight hours. The timing was crucial as we would be marching across a shadeless, old lava flow: lava rocks absorb a lot of the sun’s heat, making daytime walking temperatures uncomfortably hot, yet lose their heat rapidly as dusk falls, becoming very cold at this altitude (around 5000 feet).
[Use arrows or swipe to scroll photos.] Walking the sharp, crackly lava path of the Pacific Crest Trail towards Belknap Crater with North and Middle Sister behind, past features such as lava tubes and skeletal tree remnants in the wide lava field.
The path towards Belknap Crater was a partially flattened path pressed into a wide, barren area of small, dry, light and very sharp lava rock, visible as far as the eye could see. Belknap Crater itself was brown and bare, and not at all impressive (despite being where all the lava originated from), but the wider landscape views were striking, with numerous volcanoes, many showing patches of rock tinged a deep rust-red in colour. The path we took through this desolate wilderness forms part of the Pacific Crest National Scenic Trail.
[Use arrows or swipe to scroll photos.] Each to her own on Little Belknap Crater. May leaps from top to top of the scratchy protusions, whilst Poppy cautiously peers into a nearby lava cave with a sudden, huge drop just inside.
A sharp right turn shortly before Belknap Crater brought us to Little Belknap Crater, the furthest point of our walk. From this pimple, the close-up detail of the landscape was remarkable and there was also a 360 degree panoramic view of many volcanoes, including North and Middle Sister to the south and Mount Washington, Three Fingered Jack and Mount Jefferson to the north.
We hadn’t seen a single other person during the walk until just before the final turning for Little Belknap Crater, at which point a chap appeared briefly from nowhere. He said he was doing the entire Pacific Crest Trail from Mexico to Canada, 2650 miles, of which he was already four months in, and was hoping to get to the other side of the lava flow to pitch his tent for the night. He was amazingly odourless, and carried the smallest of rucksacks, bearing just the essentials ... plus a foam sword strapped to the top.
We reached our tent just before dark, and got ready for bed. On this occasion, that meant putting on plenty of layers to cope with what we expected to be a very cold night at 5000 feet. We were not disappointed. I wore thick trousers and socks and a couple of T-shirts, Dave a bit more than that, and Poppy two pairs of trousers, two T-shirts, a fleece and a hat (with gloves at the ready) ... and even May, our cold-blooded reptile of a daughter, wore both a T-shirt and a fleece (although she claimed, next morning, to have overheated during the night).
[Use arrows or swipe to scroll photos.] Poppy takes no chances about staying warm overnight, and even May wears a fleece in bed.
Some unthinking idiot thought the few, well-spaced campers on the site would enjoy a bit of tinny, horrible pop music screeching out into the deep stillness of the night. Thankfully, they quickly saw sense and switched it off again ... and we were able to enjoy the silence and a feeling of solitude as we drifted off to sleep.
