So, as promised in the last post (which was #2 of 3), here are the pictures. The good ones.

This was a lookout in a giant lava flow. It was built out of rocks provided by the volcano, and had directions to look for every mountain in visible range. But we couldn’t see any of them, because it was foggy. Still: great lava flow.

Here are two pictures of our embarrassingly large house.

And here are a few pictures of the hike that Grandma and I took along the river nearby.

This is the Mount Bachelor parking lot, which is massive, but the mountain is actually not Mount Bachelor but another mountain near it somewhere. I don’t remember what its name is.

With Joe for scale, this is what the flow looks like…

and how positively enormous it is.

Here’s a diner that we stopped at in Mitchell, Oregon. Besides the traffic cones, this thing has walked in straight out of the Old West.

Near the John Day Fossil Beds, the geology started getting interesting.

Here’s a little hike through an area of green clay near the Fossil Beds museum.

You can kind of make out the green color in this picture. Grandma was trying to snap a picture of it the whole way down the trail, but never thought she got the green really captured. Then she took off her sunglasses and decided maybe she’d gotten it okay after all.

On the highway away from the Fossil Beds, for no discernible reason, is a tree full of shoes. There’s no sign there explaining it, and no evident reason why this tree should attract (or grow) shoes. When we saw it, there were some people there, putting on another pair. We asked if they knew what this was all about. No idea, they said.

I already posted some pictures of the Painted Hills, but I have some more you should see. For example, this one where the moon posed on a point of rock.

And this one where Joe ate it.

And this one where he’s good at sports.

Or how about a plain and simple one?

And here’s Crater Lake. What a lake.

Here is a sample of the mountains you can see from Garfield Peak on Crater Lake. Like I said, you can see every mountain in the world from up here.

This is the old-growth forest we walked through to find the waterfall. I don’t think I’d ever been in an old-growth forest before. I certainly don’t intend for this to be my last time.