I’ve wanted to hike the Cinder Cone and see the Painted Dunes in Lassen Volcanic National Park for a long time. I hadn’t been able to do it previously because I wasn’t sure that the cars I had been driving at the time could make it down the six mile dirt and gravel road. This time I had a much higher clearance vehicle (a small SUV), so I was sure I could make it.

Below are some photos I took while on the hike. The first is of the Cinder Cone, which is a volcano that erupted in the 1650s. Yes, I hiked up that crazy path on the right side of the cone. It’s a little over 700 feet high and while standing at the base of the volcano I thought, “What?! Am I really going to hike this crazy thing?!”

Usually from the top you can see quite far, but since the Carr fire near Redding was causing a lot of haze in the area, the view was really limited. You can see in the second and fourth photos below what the painted dunes looked like after I took a photo from on top of the Cinder Cone. Using the de-hazing tool in Lightroom I was able to get a lot more detail out of the dunes, as shown in the third and fifth photos.

The last photo is a close-up image of one of the Painted Dunes. It kind of reminded me of the NASA photos of the surface of Mars.

Have a great week everyone!