I haven't slept since yesterday! and I went back to the volcano!
Why? What?
Because... I wasn't sleepy last night... and then it was dawn... and it was beautiful and cool... so I went for a drive to the volcano that ate my van, and it tried to swallow my Subaru, but I escaped!

Part of why I got a Forrester (named Jim) was because I wanted to see the volcano again. And, two years after getting my car, I finally went!

Short Version of the first trip: Quite a few years ago, my good buddy (IRL friend who moved away and now is mostly an online friend, but we manage to visit again sometimes) Alyenbird and I took an overnight camping trip where we drove out to Mountain Home, and then through the Owyhee Canyonlands, camped overnight, and then continued on. As we were getting out, we saw a sign for "Jordan Volcano X miles -->" and we looked at each other and decided to go!
We were in my old minivan, named Judy. The road was a "dirt road", but Oregon's idea of 'dirt road' was unpaved 18 inch deep ruts with 6 inches of sharp rock shrapnel for the top layer. Although I tried to keep my tires on the tops of the ruts, I kept falling down into them and CHUNKing my undercarriage against them. That rock shrapnel did HORRORS to the underside of poor Judy, including bashing in her oil pan plug, and punching a hole in her gas tank, plus the heat of the desert day and steep incline and long drive completely dried out her radiator and she overheated and we almost didn't make it out! Fortunately, we'd packed a big 7 gallon jug of water, and let the car cool down, and just kept adding water until her temp guage was back to normal, and then babied her out... while she dripped oil and gas all over Oregon and Idaho. (I didn't even KNOW about the oil and gas until much later!)
On top of this, I'd accidentally only packed a tank top and short shorts and no sunscreen... I fried my left arm (the one towards the car window) to blisters and the blisters popped, and then blistered again on top of the mess! I am certain that if I don't kill myself on some adventure first, I will die of skin cancer later...

This time, I'm not sun-burnt, and I'm not dehydrated or heat exhausted. Other than not getting any photos, and almost getting swallowed up by the ground, it was an incredible day!
Never mind having a car designed to put up with scary rock shrapnel roads, the road was in MUCH better shape today than it was the first time. Almost no ruts, and only an inch or two of shrapnel, which Jim (the Forrester) easily cleared. The weather was also BEAUTIFUL! Sunny, but lots of big, puffy, white clouds and the temp never got over 72F with a lovely cool breeze the entire day.

I didn't get any photos because... um... well... I plugged the camera in to the charger, but the charger was not plugged into the outlet!! *face plant* So, needless to say, the camera was completely dead.

Now, most of the time, around here, when someone says "that's a volcano", it's just a big pile of rock covered in sage brush and cheat grass, we mostly got "shield" type volcanoes, and most of them are so ancient the desert has pretty well reclaimed them. This one... Is absolutely surreal. You drive 20 miles through the usual slightly rolling, rocky, sage brushy desert. There is one spot almost all of the way in where you can catch your first glimpse of MILES and MILES of lava field. You really can't see anything else until you're there. And then, there is this black rock wasteland, just a few desert plants starting to grow, and a lot of the old tubes and gas chambers and what not have collapsed now, allowing people to see in. According to a sign I saw the first time, the volcano is believed to have last erupted only 200 years ago! You can see how liquid the lava was, and when it was cooler and stickier and more viscous. You can see all the different layers of lava running over lower layers. You can see many places that spewed out lava, not just the main cone, and you can see where lava splashed around. And then there is Coffeepot Crater, the main cinder cone, although it's slowly eroding down. It's absolutely incredible!

After visiting the volcano, we (we being me, my dog Rosco, and Jim the car) continued down the CRAZY PSYCHO STEEP DIRT ROAD

... I'm going to have to stop here and pick up later, I'm falling asleep.

***

Continuing after 10 hours of sleep and washing the mud off my car. Lol!


After visiting the volcano, we (we being me, my dog Rosco, and Jim the car) continued down the CRAZY PSYCHO STEEP DIRT ROAD down into the Owyhee Canyon down to the river. It's the spot where rafters get out of the water, and it's very slow and mellow right there. I threw the ball for Rosco and he went swimming for it, or raced through the alfalfa/weed field to retrieve it until he was pooped and it was feeling hotter. There was a dirt road continuing along the river, so I decided to drive and see where it went. It just dead ended, so we turned around...

The dirt road track I saw I drove on to- not realizing it was NOT the road we came in on. By the time I realized this, there was nowhere to turn around and go back. But this road was neat because it went right by the sheer, high rock cliffs, so we stayed on it. It had rained the day before so there were mud puddles in the ruts, and we made it along just fine. I was keeping my tires along the edges where it wasn't watery... until we slid in!

I tried to nudge Jim back up to the ridge, but he had no traction! All-wheel drive is great... except when you're bottomed out and the tires are just sitting on 6 inches of slippery clay covered by 4 inches of muddy water! And we were sinking! (don't panic, just the bottom inch of the hubcaps, plus the tires was under water/ in the mud- we didn't start out bottomed out, but ended up that way after he sank). I got out and tried just pushing the car- I couldn't hardly even rock it by myself. So I wandered through the field and found some rocks and sticks to try digging into the mud right in front of the tires to give Jim something to get traction on- not helping. I wandered some more and found some old fence post logs and grabbed a couple of them... still no use. At that point, I was hot and tired and stressed, so I sat in the car with the AC on and cried for about 2 minutes.
We were the only ones down there, we'd only come across one other vehicle on our way down and they were leaving, it was almost 30 miles of steep dirt road through hot sun just to get to the main road again where I might be able to flag down help. If I stayed with the car, we'd probably get some other nut down there... tomorrow. No cell service.
For a moment I entertained the notion of waiting until the water dried up out of the puddle. lol.
And then I remembered that only a mile or few up the road were a couple of houses. I had NO idea if anyone would be around, but, it was better than sitting in the car stuck in the mud with no way to get myself out on my own.
With that, I decided we were hiking. I didn't have a hat, but I brought water with me, and we set out. Turned out, we didn't have to go very far before we found a house (that I'd forgotten about) that did have someone home! A lady named Louise was staying there to help cut down on vandalism for the BLM with her nephew Joey (he was visiting for a week), and she didn't have a tow rope, but she had a good Nissan SUV! *I* have a tow rope. Dad once got mad at me for buying the 30 foot tow rope instead of a "normal" 15 footer. Mwahahahahaaaa, I knew there was a reason I got the 30 footer! At first, we were going to try to pull Jim out by pulling him forward (less mud ahead than behind) but by then Jim had sunk until he was really bottomed out, and there wasn't anything in front for me to attach the tow rope to. (he has a plastic bumper and a plastic skid pad thingy under neath to help protect his insides from stuff like this- lol.
So, instead, we decided to pull him out from behind and to the side, and just drive in the field (now with someone 'in charge', I didn't feel bad about driving off road.) It took some working to get the hook attached to something solid under Jim, and then we had to tie the other end to the Nissan's tow hook, but it worked out perfectly. A tug from her, and some gas from me and he was right out! And then I followed her back to the house, and we sat and chatted for a while and just enjoyed the beautiful day.
Finally, around 4:30pm, Rosco and I decided we really should head back homeward.
There's a sign that says "Silver City -->" and decided to take THAT dirt road. I've been to Silver City twice... there is nothing there. There's people there, but it's basically a ghost town, it's not even a very good tourist trap! But the two times I've been there, I've found it by accident. The three times I have TRIED to get there (including yesterday) I have failed!
We were on a road called Cow Creek Road, and it Teed off into Trout Creek Rd, and we actually had to wait for a bit white pick up truck to go by, and then went north because I knew home (and Silver City) should be north east. Not even a half mile down that road we came across the truck with its nose in a ditch! The two ladies were only just getting out, a bit shaken up. They'd gone around the turn too fast, spun out and blurp! I thought I was going to have to return the rescue favor, and was getting out my tow rope again, but they were able to just back the truck up on their own. WHEW! They told me that the direct we were headed just dead ended at an old mine, and they didn't know where Silver City was.
So, we went back, but continued on Trout Creek which they said turned back into the city of Jordan Valley, OR (which is near the Jordan Craters, which is where we'd just been) It was still a beautiful drive and I'm glad we went.
Finally, back on the main road, we just went straight home with out any more detours (construction aside, lol).
Because I hadn't slept in so long, there were a few times during the whole trip where I started to nod off at the wheel. So I just pulled over and closed my eyes for a few minutes- little 5 to 20 minute cat naps. Worked perfectly! I tried one of those 5 hour energy things... it probably helped. They claim to be berry flavored... the first moment it was on my tongue it was like "Hey, that's not bad", but before the thought was finished it was replaced with "VILE!", but not so vile as to not be swallowed. lol!

Stuff we saw:
Cows, cows, cows and more cows! And Rosco was FACINATED by them! He didn't know what to do with them, but he couldn't get enough of watching them. lol.
We saw several pronhorn antelope, including two moms with younglings, and one off by itself who was REALLY thin, probably sick.
I saw and heard several prairie falcons, and we saw red-tailed and swainsons hawks.
I saw a Great White Heron- they are amazing, and I've only seen a few in my life!
I saw a chuckar (another bird I've only seen a few of), some quail- including two little bitty fuzzy quail chicks.
Going through one of the small streams (only a few inches deep, and rocky, not a big deal) across the road, I saw two little fuzzy killdeer chicks (they are freaking adorable!)
I saw- and almost ran over!- some horned larks, and we saw tons of meadow larks.
There was some kind of owl that was probably a burrowing owl, but it had a really dark face, and I need to look it up.
We saw two kinds of chipmunks and some kind of ground squirrel. I saw a badger trotting across the highway.
Rosco found another rattlesnake (much smaller based on the sound of its rattle, than the one we came across at SwanFalls). I didn't see it, but I did hear it, and told him to leave it and come to me. He was good, but it was scary because I didn't realize what he had until he'd been sniffing around it for a few moments! The snake had been under a sagebrush (both I've come across now have been out in uzubuklund, nowhere with very very few people around, under sagebrush, and slithered away the moment they didn't feel they were in imminent danger) and then slithered into a hole in the rocks where it rattled a little from hiding.
Oh! along the long dirt road to the volcano were two dead things... One was just SICK and the other was freaking funny.
The sick one... what had once been a BIG beautiful rattlesnake had been skinned and gutted, and the head, rattle, meat and bones draped over a cattle grate. *growls*
The funny one... A dead badger (no idea how it died, it wasn't flat or anything) had been draped over a fence post made of fence mesh in a cylinder and filled with rocks, looking up the road... with a beer can in its paw! It was horrible, and hilarious.

Oh yes... and then the more spiritual things we found. In my experience, many of these out of the way places have 'ghosts' or 'spirits' or what ever you want to call them. I've come across quite a few of these not-visible-to-the-eyes-but-know-they-are-there things. In this instance, I will call them elementals, because the two that I 'met' most closely resembled my idea of what an earth elemental is.
We found both while walking over the lava field, appreciating the surreal and incredible forces of nature that God set in place.
I felt something underneath me notice me walking over. And it/he realized that I had noticed it/him. I paused and put a hand one the ground right there, and said "hello", very friendly-like, and that really piqued his interest. What I got next was the feeling/ impression of a grey, slightly humanoid, rocky, blocky form coming up to chest-hip level, the rest still under the surface, from where I was looking, and it circled around behind me and sank back down again on my other side. I had the impression that it had been noticed by very few, and most of what had seen it before had been native Americans- and more recently, people who mistook it for the ghost of a native American. It was curiously pleased that I had not made that mistake.
Rosco and I kept on going, and I became aware of us being watched by 3 to 5 (maybe more) other such creatures, who kept their distance, but were intrigued by the human who had greeted the one. We were just a curiosity, and we all left each other alone.
A short bit later, there was a spot that had obviously once been a stream of lava flowing, and rather fast, then cooled on top and been a small tunnel, emptied out, the roof had collapsed, and then some more lava had run through that corridor later on. Skipping/running/flowing down this was a smaller (than the other elemental) ... creature. On one hand, I might call it more a fire elemental, as it was much thinner and lighter and red and hot in appearance, but it wasn't... it was... more like a lava elemental for lack of a better way to describe it. It giggled and laughed a lot, very playful, and active... child-like and yet ancient. I asked if it was remembering when the lava flowed through that stream, and I got the impression of "past and present- flowing", like memories of it on the surface... but currently still flowing deep below. It was just a LITTLE unnerving! LOL! We left it to its games and headed back for the car- shortly after that was when Rosco found the little rattlesnake.

Ok... I think that's all I have to say about yesterday's adventures now.