West Coast 2012: Northern California

So…. Mt. Shasta, huh?  Nope – not quite.  Somewhere about an hour into our trip North, C and I realized that we weren’t stopping at the town of Mt. Shasta right off I-5 to camp for the night like we had originally thought… instead we had reserved a campsite two hours (round trip) out of our way – awesome.  Well at this point, what can we do??  We decided to make the best of it!

Rice is grown in Cali.... news to me! 

After driving through some of the smaller towns of Northern California, we ended up at a Vista in the Mt. Shasta National Forest – this would have been just a stretch point if it weren’t for the Burney locals (logging town down below) that let us borrow their tool (no idea what’s the small black thing is called) in order to see the transit of Venus!!  This is when Venus crosses the sun, and no one will see it again in the world for another 105 years!!  Amazing sight.

Finally, we arrived at our campsite at McArthur-Burney Memorial State Park that sits between the Mt. Shasta National Forest and the Lassen National Forest.  We pitched our tent about 5pm, and headed out for a short hike - we weren’t prepared to see one of the most gorgeous waterfalls we’ve ever seen!  AMAZING!  The water seeps into the ground and comes out all along the face of the waterfall – this makes for a very wide waterfall with a lot of flow points.

Water seeping from the face of the cliff - beautiful!

The fire we built fed us turkey burgers again – yum – and we finished up some delicious Napa Valley wines and had some good ‘ole beers by the fire.  We knew it was going to get cold during the night, but boy was it COLD.  At about 38 degrees I was huddled in the middle of my sleeping bag with C’s socks on my hands and my towel wrapped around me for an added layer.  You would think we would pack more appropriately for cold weather camping after our Grand Canyon experience… (35 degrees in a thunderstorm with sheeting rain and wind) but no.  Oh well.

Wine and camping??  Why not?

We survived and woke up to a beautifully crisp morning.  Moving on… Mt. Shasta, yes we actually saw Mt. Shasta today.  The beautiful snow-capped dormant volcano rising 14,162 feet high was a gorgeous staple along our morning drive.  It was absolutely breathtaking to have a view of this volcano throughout the entire 55 miles to Mt. Shasta – thank goodness it’s dormant!  Did you realize we had 71 volcanoes on the mainland U.S.?  I certainly didn’t – fun fact!

Where to next?  Portland, OR... I hear the roses are in bloom... Until there's something worth posting...