A little more pretty than pretty itself.

The sun setting at 4 o'clock and it being pitch black at 5:30 really bums me out. I like to sleep in and get a late start to travel is slow. Did I mention that my stereo has been completely random for most of this trip? Well the faceplate plugged in and most of the time it does nothing, sometimes it will flicker and start playing a song then quit for another state. It hated California apparently.

Well I woke up really disoriented trying to figure out whether it was the fire alarm, alarm clock..or the phone was ringing. Uh, 1am. So the nice girl at the desk checks the parking lot at night and saw that my stereo was flickering, then started to play Coheed and Cambria really really loud. Well of course it works at 1am when I'm not in my car. Well I left the faceplate on so it was on, and got the call because she was worried that I'd wake with a dead battery. I appreciated the gesture, it was just really disorienting.

Oregon can be so green. Fires are apart of the cycle, and loggers are involved in this too. But otherwise it's really green.

Winter again! The coast has a variety of snow and no snow.

Once I got near to Crater Lake National Park heavy snowfall was apparent.

I like the green, but white trees are beautiful. Sticky big flakes of snow covered everything that they could. They shimmered so delightfully.

Winter is the worst time to see the parkas as far as travel goes. Roads are closed everywhere, so what you have been seeing on Magical Wonderfulness is only a sliver of the beauty! One step over to the rim of Crater Lake was amazing.

You have no idea how blue this blue really is. This lake is the seventh deepest in the world, first in the U.S. Blue and white made a winter wonderland.

The trees all around tried to show each other up in how beautiful they were.

Just look at that color! I wish you has seen it with your own eyes.

So does it look cold? Well it was blisteringly so. My fingers numbed right out of the car.

The lake gets a lot of snow. 500 inches or something like that.

There are no inlets or outlets to the lake. No rivers, no creeks, nothing in or out. The crazy amount of snowfall melts in, and seepage lets out through the rock underneath to maintain the level.

I did not have skis or snowshoes so I wasn't able to enjoy the trails. All of these pics were one hundred yards from my car. I couldn't imagine the vistas elsewhere.

I could not get over these trees.

Nothing looked real to me.

So this is the road. In winter it becomes a trail for skiers. The horizon danced.

My eyes started to hurt because of all the light everywhere. Even in shadow it was sunny.

The rim is so steep. The island in the middle looks like it needs a kid fort. I saw summer pictures in the gift shop from boats, and the water turns a rainbow of colors near the edge.

My camera could not even understand what was going on with all the color.

There was a single cloud in the sky, not one. The snow the Midwest is getting right now blew over the west and totally missed where I have been. yet still there was over 2 feet of snow on the ground here.

Beauty.

Pretty.

Ew. Since the park gets so much snow and is open the whole winter the buildings have snow tunnels. The building gets buried in the snow and the tunnels reach the road so that they are not as hard to dig out for entry.

It looked like some kind of grossly beautiful theater stage set or something. I am so glad I came north.

Truckers on the road out and to the interstate were carrying all the goods into little ass towns 100 miles from a city. This older truck looked mean.

there was nowhere to stop and look at this creek because of all the snowfall, but it was icey and wonderfully blue-green.

The national forest was so dense. Peaks that jut out from the horizon acted like razor blades to the scenery. The tree line is do dramatic. Snow covered sides of the road were full of babies. A lot of the roads in the mountains yet far have been paved or corrected somehow with the economic stimulus funds. You're tax dollars at work!

I had a no destination roadtrip mindset and knowing that I wanted to end at Yosemite made me want to continue further. I was so close, but swinging north will allow me to see even more, and Yellowstone I bet will be amazing. I hope it does not blow up before I at least get pictures posted from there! I'm scared to death out here. I hope even thus far on this trip inspires everyone to see the world in which we inhabit.