We woke up in Crater Lake on Monday morning and the heat was already building. It topped out the day before in the high 90’s, which (I’m told) is unusual for Oregon in the summer and even more unusual at 6,000 feet of elevation. It was so hot that after we took our picture in front of the Crater Lake entrance sign, the old Pontiac sputtered and died several times when we pulled back on the road. Instead of letting off the gas, I held the pedal down, shifted back to neutral when it died and fired it, racing the engine as soon as it lit. The fuel was boiling—the same thing that happened on the way out of LA last summer. The engine was hot from the climb and the elevation brought the boiling point down that much further. The temptation is to baby it, but I decided to whip the horse—keep her running, get some airflow and get cool fuel from the tank running through the lines again. It worked this time, and we made it the rest of the way up the hill and into our campsite. It gnawed at me though—it was hot, really hot, but something wasn’t right.
Like the day before, Monday was shaping up to be another heater, and while Samantha slept in, Parker and I completed a two-mile hike through Annie’s Creek, which runs behind Mazama Village. By the time we got back, the sun was beginning to illuminate the tent and Samantha was ready to get moving. We threw our coolers in the back of the trunk in case we wanted to have a picnic and headed to the Visitors Center to get the kids’ National Park Passports stamped. When we pulled in, it was closed due to the coronavirus, but one of the rangers saw us looking forlornly at the big “closed” sign and opened up a window. We passed her our passports and she stamped them both right next to our previous stamps from August 2016 and handed them back with a wink and a friendly “welcome back!” I saw a poll recently about which government employees receive the most respect from the public and park rangers ranked near the top. It’s not hard to see why.
When we reached the Rim Village, all of the buildings were closed except for one—the gift shop. We took one look at the line though and decided that not only was it not worth the wait, the mask usage was spotty as well. Samantha, who’s become our guardian of safety, suggested we pass. What happened next though was really surprising. As we headed west on the Rim Drive, every turn off, every vista, every viewpoint, was… overrun. If we had wanted to get out to take a look (which we didn’t), we would have had to sit and wait for a car to depart or do like the others and park well beyond the turnouts and walk back. It’s the great irony of 2020. Anything that seems like a good way to socially distance is overrun with people.
Fortunately there are plenty of places to see the lake without leaving the car, and since we’d seen it before, we just motored on by the crowds and found a small unused picnic area to have lunch. It turned out to have an amazing view of the lake if you just hiked about 200 yards. We had it all to ourselves and it was spectacular. We idled the rest of the day away and hit the sack early.
Now at this point I need to warn all of you who don’t know us intimately that the Becks are bleeders. I refer you to my 2015 blog post entitled “Samantha With Your Nose So Bright”. There was the time I cut the tip of my finger off chopping basil, subsequently painting my entire kitchen red. And then there was the time I cut my foot open on the deck of a boat off Catalina and put so much blood in the water that we spotted sharks (ok, maybe that’s an exaggeration, but that cut should have received about 10-12 stitches). When the skin breaks on a Beck, expect blood, and lots of it. So when I woke up on Tuesday morning to Samantha gently prodding me and saying “Hey Dad, um… looks like Parker had a bloody nose last night,” let’s just say I knew what to expect when I rolled over. It was a crime scene.
I put Parker’s clothes and pillowcase into a trash bag and sponged the dried blood off of his face and out of his hair while I assessed his filthy-looking demeanor. The showers and laundry were both closed due to the coronavirus and I couldn’t let him go another day looking like a character from the Walking Dead. No, we needed to make some adjustments. Notwithstanding the fact that we had planned another night in Crater Lake, we called an audible. We needed to cut this leg short. By 10am we packed the car and headed north toward Bend, OR to find a hotel, and hopefully a washing machine…
The masked Beck gang rides again… iPhone XR
Our private view of Crater Lake. It pays to get off the beaten path. iPhone XR