After some weird late night noises (bigfoot or deer grunts?), we awoke to our quiet and calm spot in the woods, a little damp from overnight rain. We detoured briefly to Trillium Lake and waited for a few minutes hoping for the shifting clouds to miraculously disappear and give us the famous view of Mt Hood. Below is the best I did as brief narrow windows shifted across the mountain, requiring your brain to fill in the gaps to paint the collective view. Oh well.
We drove on to Newberry National Volcanic Monument in central Oregon, which Heather and I were both looking forward to checking out for the day. Though it doesn't get the same attention as almost any other Cascade volcano, this complex shield-shaped composite volcano has a half million year history of eruptions spanning the full range of compositions from basaltic to rhyolitic and eruptions from explosive tephras to effusive toothpaste lavas and is actually the largest of all the volcanoes in the Cascade arc. It's most recent eruption was about 1300 years ago. Key features today include two caldera lakes, shoreline hot springs, cinder cones, obsidian lava flows, and flood-formed waterfall gorges. Our first excursion was to drive to the top of Paulina Peak, which offered a commanding view over the obvious expanse of the double caldera rim and of its lakes, lava flows, and craters over a thousand feet below. Like the Spirit Lake area of Mt St Helens there were no specific drone restrictions here so I reveled at the opportunity to get some nice vantages over the Big Obsidian Flow and its interesting spring-fed lakes at its toe. This provided just enough time to dry out the tent before we returned down the hill.
After some navigational confusion (we managed to drive to the end of the campground northeast of East Lake and started hiking before I realized we were not on Paulina Lake!), we parked at the Hot Springs Boat Dock for a quick jaunt over to the lakeside East Lake Hot Springs. There were two distinct hot spring areas, the second one more appealing than the first but still a little too hot, shallow, and algae coated to linger all that long. Still it was a nice spot with an osprey calling from a tree above, ducklings floating past, and fisherman lazily casting offshore.
Next we continued over to Paulina Lake to hike to the more popular Paulina Lake Hot Springs. Annoyingly rules had changed so there was no hiking parking in or beyond the !0.75mile long! campground so I dropped Heather off at the end, drove back to the start, and got a casual run in through the campground. With that nonsense out of the way, we then had a very scenic 1.5 mile hike along the lakeshore. The clear and colorful waters were very memorable, even if they would be overshadowed the following day by the incomparable Crater Lake. We jaunted across the rocky trail, rock hopped a brief swampy section, then crossed the base of an obsidian flow to gain the bay with hot springs. We saved checking out an isolated deep pool for the way back (people in it), and continued on another 0.3 miles to the main hot spring beach.
The hot springs were busy with a half-dozen groups that had boated or hiked over to the springs, but thankfully there were nearly twenty pools to choose from along the shore, hand-dug into the rounded scoria pebbles. We walked past the other groups to take up residence in a very nice log-lined pool furthest along. The temperature, clarity, views, lack of bugs, and pleasant scoria floor made for a world-class hot spring in my estimation. We enjoyed the pool for a good long while and I had a brief dip in the lake before we began walking back.
The day was getting on but we squeezed in a couple more short stops including the short hike onto the toe of the Big Obsidian Flow, a moody contrast between the rough glassy terrain of the flow, the calm waters and forest beyond, and the shifting shadows from clouds overhead. On our way out of the Newberry Volcano we stopped at Paulina Falls, an interesting twin cascade over an amphitheater into a bouldery gorge below.
Towards the end of the day we left Newberry Volcano, overall greatly impressed at the variety of recreational activities, scenic wonders, and superb geology. A short [in the scheme of many long drives we had for this road trip] 1.5 hour drive brought us to the windy shores of Diamond Lake. We were immediately relieved to notice the lack of an apocalyptic level of mosquitoes (as on our last visit here), and celebrated the day with a cold beer at South Shore Pizza, before navigating the maze of the adjacent campground to our reserved lakefront camp spot.
I'm sure there are some nice things to do around Mt Hood that we missed out on but overall we fit a lot of things into the day and really thought Newberry Volcano is an underappreciated Oregon gem. The wind settled through the night and once again I slept well in our cozy rooftop perch at the edge of Diamond Lake.
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