Black Butte Circuit

Okay, that was a fun stint of present day blog posts, now back to… October!

After I returned from Alaska, I immediately went to uploading the Oregon Fun Run race photos. I told them they’d be up in a week, and for sure, less than two days later, I got them online by Wednesday morning. Xavier flew in later that day and we headed out at 4:30am (delayed due to car troubles the night before and morning of) the next day on a road trip down to California. We drove the scenic route where we stopped along the way for some small day hikes, which we dubbed our “black butte” circuit, and a break at Crater Lake.

We started off with a hike up Black Butte, outside of Three Sisters, OR. We followed that up with lunch at Alpenglow in Bend, OR (my favorite place to eat there) and a (hot) afternoon hike up Mt. Tumalo. Both hikes had great views for the easy effort required. Afterwards, we risked running out of gas to drive the Cascade Lakes Scenic Byway where we found a $$$ functioning gas pump at Lava Lake and a sunset spot by Davis Lake.

On this trip, I was on a mission to make myself comfortable with using the wide angle 14-24mm lens. It was a major change from my usual telephoto preference, so sometimes I traded cameras with Xav for his super zoom.

The day afterwards was spent around Crater Lake and a hike up Mt. Bailey (Baldy), which I didn’t summit due to time constraints and my lack of speed. Crater Lake was awesome, so it’s getting its own post. The following day we finished the drive to California. We stopped at Black Butte, CA to complete our circuit (we also stopped to watch the Steelers game). We got to the summit of Black Butte in pretty good time (I was feeling especially motivated) where we saw the amazing view of Mt. Shasta…. covered in clouds. There we were, right next to the huge thing, and there was no evidence that a mountain existed. Bah!

On the way down we did see it, so we snapped a shot and finished the drive to the Bay Area.