Meandering In My RV: Lava Beds and Tule Lake National Monuments

We’re on a road trip again, finally. With health issues waning and the roads and places to see calling, we are off mid-summer in spite of high heat and maximum travelers. It’s just great to be back on the road again. It’s always a preference to take different roads when possible but after all these years, those options become harder to find. That said, we drove two days on familiar roads to get to our first sites of interest and new roads to travel.

Devils Homestead lava flow

After an overnight in Klamath Falls, OR we headed out early to try to beat as much heat as we could with a forecast in the upper 90s. Just a little way into northern California, about 30 miles due south of Klamath Falls, is Lava Beds National Monument. This is one of those National Park Service locations that protects both earth history and human history. Relating to earth history, the park is home to the Medicine Lake Volcano. It is the first “shield” volcano that we’ve visited in our travels. It does not have a classic cinder cone because it has a lot of vents that released pressure so there were no massive eruptions, just flows coming out of the earth over and over again causing massive lava flows and “tubes”. This volcano is the largest “by volume of lava flow” in the Cascade Mountain range. The park is home to over 500 lava tubes, a.k.a. caves, some of which you are allowed to explore. Learn about all of this and more on the website. On the human history side, we learned that the area was the home to the Modoc people for thousands of years until, of course, being forced off of their land to reservations. Yet another sad story of human unkindness which included the “Modoc War” which took place in the lava flows that are within this park.

Schonchin Butte

On our drive to Lava Beds, we drove through the Tule Lake National Wildlife Refuge. It is the remains of Tule Lake which was drained long ago to make farmland. During our visit, it was home to a 5-10 mile drive through droves of grasshoppers which caked the front of our vehicle. It was a sight not to behold.

Near the little town of Tulelake, CA is Tule Lake National Monument. This is a very new NPS location that gives the long history of an on-again/off-again community, not of a necessarily good kind. It was originally Camp Tulelake, a Civilian Conservation Corp (CCC) camp where hundreds of CCC workers lived while building roads and buildings in Lava Beds NM (which had become a monument in 1925). Then in 1943 it became the Tule Lake Segregation Center, a high-security camp housing over 10,000 Japanese Americans who were forcibly removed from their homes on the west coast of the United States. And then, between 1944 and 1946 it was a prisoner of war camp holding German prisoners. After the war most of the buildings and land were sold off but a few remain and can be toured with advance reservations.