Summer fun

On our way to Medicine Lake my daughter and I were so busy talking and looking at all the wild flowers, that I overshot the turnoff by 10 miles. Let me tell you that if you go anywhere in the forest and don't know where you are, you can feel pretty lost. I pulled over, called my husband, told him what highway we were on, and he say's "oh honey you better turn around." I was very lucky to get reception then because we had none the rest of the day. Found our way back to the turn off which was a nice relief.

After unloading all our things down to the beach area we sat and had lunch of spinach, veggie and meat rollups, a bowl of fresh fruit and drinks and then took in the sun, swam in the warm water and tried our hand at rowing the raft. Not an easy thing. My daughter would go in circles just two feet from the shore till she was exhausted. I giggled so hard I thought I'd wet myself. So I did the right thing and pushed her out farther so she could float.

We had the beach all to ourselves for about an hour and a half when  people with dogs and kids started showing up.

We stayed on until the water started getting too cold for us to get back in, then drove on over to the Little Medicine Lake.

  

We strolled down a path that led us to the back of big Medicine Lake and took a few pics. 

 It is just as beautiful from this angle, don't you think?

 

After wondering back up the path to the truck, I almost got lost again, we changed into dry clothes and decided to head out and see the Lava Beds and historical sites along the way. First stop was a hike up a steep hill to what is called A Mammoth Crater.

Is'nt it huge? I got jello legs just

looking down into it. I'm not much for heights.

 

Then we went on down the road to a trail called Crystal Caves, which took us about 20 minutes to hike, which I almost turned back to the truck as it went on forever.

We thought this was it (left pic), but saw that the path continued around another bend to the actual cave (center pic). You can barely see the opening to the cave (center of pic in shadows next to pointed rock) because I was'nt about to hike down the narrow steep path to it.

Can you see the path? Bottom of pic is steps to start down.

Once back on the road we came upon the Balcony Boulevarde Caves. It does'nt look like anything is out there except lava rock, but omg they were everywhere. It was scary to think that under our feet we were walking over really huge caves.

We walked around for awhile and took pics of a few of what I'm sure many more caves that were out there. You really need to stay on the paths or you could just fall down into one. These paths were'nt as easily seen as the others we went on.  The caves were really close together and you did'nt see them until you were over the top of them. Hence, the balcony.

They don't look like much from my pics, but they went very deep and far. You could only go down into one that we looked at that was safe enough to climb down to. It is just hard to imagine this whole area out here is above so many caves. From the road all you see is the lava rocks. This was enough hiking and exploring for one day for both of us, so it was home from here.

We are already planning our next trip which we hope to take a drive over to Gold Hill and see the Oregon Vortex, which I have wanted to see for years. I can hardly wait.