Up, up, up, this morning along windy highway 242, though pine forests. At 4,000 feet suddenly the woods were full of white flowers that looked like snowballs on a stick.

Higher still, and suddenly the trees were gone, and we were at the edge of a lava flow, a large field of aa only a few hundred years old. Aa is the cindery, sharp lava beloved of Scrabble players.

Still after a few hundred years, plants start to take root. Here a lone tree…

… there a vibrant burst of wildflowers.

At the top of the pass there is a strange observatory. It looks like a castle tower, but each of the windows points at a specific mountain, and they are labeled on the inside to tell you what you are looking at.

On top of the tower there is also the traditional brass plate with arrows.

We descended to the high plateau east of the mountains where we spotted the first cows of the day, and got a fine view of the Three Sisters range with a field of sheet steel horses in the foreground.

We headed back into the mountains again, and up to Crater Lake. The crater is over 6000 feet high, and there are still patches of snow around. This was where we parked for the first view of the lake.

And this is the view.

The lake itself is almost 2000 feet deep, because geology. We sat on a wall for a picnic lunch with this view.

A Clark’s Nutcracker sat in the tree in front of us…

… while his buddies competed with the ground squirrels for tourist tidbits. The ground squirrels won on cuteness, but the nutcrackers were big enough to chase them off.

Humans have created several interesting evolutionary niches. One is for being harmless and cute, and another is for being slow and stupid and tasting good. Cows evolved from a much larger and more aggressive animal, the aurochs. Humans bred lots of them killed off the aggressive ones before they could reproduce. This is exactly what Joe Exotic was doing with tigers! With their habitat being destroyed the only chance for long term survival of tigers as a species is to get to “harmless and cute” in the next hundred years or so. Do you want to live in a world without tigers or do you want to help them evolve into something we can share the planet with.