After our lovely trip to Descend on Bend, Meowmy and I headed to Lava River Cave with our new friend Stavros whom we met at Descend. The Lava River Cave is part of the Newberry National Volcanic Monument in the Deschutes National Forest between La Pine and Bend in Oregon. No pets are allowed in this mile-long lava tube, so they explored it without me, which took about two hours. I heard it was really dark and cold inside and that they went so deep that when they turned the flashlights off, it was eerie and darker than one can imagine!
Afterwards, Stavros and Meowmy headed to Lava Butte, a cinder cone on the northwest flank of Newberry Volcano. They headed to the top of the cone where they had a 360* view of the land and enjoyed a stroll around the whole rim. I heard there’s a fire lookout at top because you can see for miles and miles!
Saying good-bye is always hard, but this is where we parted ways with Stavros, who headed North while we headed South. We spent the night in Hagelstein County Park near Klammath Falls, which is a great place to overnight if you’re looking for free camping in this area.
The next morning we headed to Lava Beds National Monument in northeastern California. It’s definitely off-season at the beginning of October because we barely saw another person or vehicle the whole time we were exploring this beautiful volcanic park. We stopped at Devils Homestead Flow and Fleener Chimneys, plus Meowmy did some easy caving, exploring Merrill Cave, Skull Cave, Sentinel Cave, and Valentine Cave. I even got to explore some of the lava near Valentine Cave before we headed out and made our way towards our next stop, Lassen Volcanic National Park, which I’ll be blogging about soon!
