Paddling Antelope Lake

We were really excited to drive up to Antelope Lake to put our kayaks in the water!  When we checked with the forest ranger at the Eagle Lake District Office near Susanville, we asked her which lake she would paddle if she had just one choice.  Her answer was immediate:  "Antelope Lake!"  We took that to heart.

Antelope is a pristine lake in Plumas National Forest, southeast of Lassen National Park.  As we drove by the lake, we got this overview of it:

We got into the lake quickly.  We had been warned that the weather would be windy today, so we wanted to do our paddling early in order to avoid too much wind.  Here, Kathy is showing how calm the lake water was in one of the coves:

The lake's shoreline is one cove after another, which gave us lots of opportunities to explore.  Here is one of the picturesque points --

-- and here is another:

Someone had pegged birdhouses to trees along the lake's margin.  We didn't spot any feathered residents, but it seems like a good idea.

At one point, Kathy looked across the end of the lake and spotted sheep on a grassy meadow in one cove.  By the time we got over there, she realized that she had spotted geese - not sheep.  This flock was tending to chicks and, while nervous about our approach, did not fly away because the chicks can't fly yet:

The shore was decorated with boulders of all types and sizes.  This one caught our eye:

And Kathy spotted a type of water flower that - while not a water lily - still decorated the surface of the water of one cove we paddled through:

After lunch, as we neared the end of our trip, we spotted three different groups of mule deer.  This one - the last one we saw, sat still for us as we crept close to snap a photo:

The wind was coming out of the northwest, and we worked our way up the western shore of the lake in order to let the wind push us back to our embarkation point at the Jeep.  There was a beautiful island positioned exactly in the path we would follow as we paddled downwind, so we paddled from the far shore to the island, then around the island, before heading back to our starting point.  At one point around the island, we spotted these beautiful wildflowers:

All in all, it was a gorgeous day and a relaxing paddle.  No odyssey, we only paddled 4 miles.  But we enjoyed every minute and had spectacular scenery to enjoy, at the north end of the Sierra Nevada on our last day before leaving California to head north into eastern Oregon.