Posts Tagged ‘May’
Must be rather tiring.
An excerpt from “Waldorf Salad”, season 2 episode 3 of Fawlty Towers:
- Sybil Fawlty: Mr. and Mrs. Hamilton were telling me about California. You can swim in the morning, and then in the afternoon, you can drive up into the mountains and ski.
- Basil Fawlty: Must be rather tiring.
Bay Area traffic simply won’t allow that sort of California experience. However, now that I am in the Shasta-Trinity region, it seems possible. Not that I know how to ski, or would want to take a plunge in near icy waters of the rivers here but here, I could go fly fishing in the morning and snowshoeing in the afternoon.
In Aug 2022, we had aborted a trip to Shasta, Crater Lake and Modoc due to McKinney fire. The year before, the Dixie fire had burned nearly a million acres. This week when the opportunity to travel presented itself, I decided to reinstate the same trip except I forgot that May is very early spring up here and there is snow above 6000 ft. We drove up Mount Shasta and found the road blocked right around 7000 ft, near Bunny Flat trailhead. Half of Mount Shasta is above 7000 ft. We came back down and modified our plan to explore the lower elevations of Shasta-Trinity and Modoc Wilderness. The area saw a good bit of snow this winter and now, the waterfalls and streams are at their peak intensity. We even swapped out one volcanic park with another – Lassen with Lava Bed National Monument. But I just couldn’t let go of Crater Lake. We were staying within 50 minutes drive, in the town of Klamath Falls. The Steel Visitor Center was open. The lodges were getting ready to open. How bad could it be, right?
El Corte de Madera Creek Preserve, May 2022
This park is a recommendation from Peninsula Trails by Jean Rushmore, Frances Spangle and Betsy Crowder. The trailhead is about 100 ft north of the Skeggs Point parking lot. It is a wonderful park for summer. The trail we followed was approximately 4.4 miles by the park map and 6.1 miles by wearable devices. It took us through El Corte de Madera Creek trail to Resolution trail to Fir trail to Tafoni trail back. El Corte de Madera Creek is mostly redwoods. Fir trail is mostly Douglas firs and madrones. We hung about the picnic bench near the Resolution Aircraft Memorial and did a quick detour to see the Tafoni sandstone formation. Resolution trail is interestingly rocky, makes you think you are elsewhere, like in Joshua Tree NP and seemingly popular with bikers.
Read the rest of this entry »San Bruno Mountain, May 2022
The recommendation for San Bruno Mountain Summit Loop Trail came from the book Peninsula Trails by authors Jean Rushmore, Frances Spangle and Betsy Crowder. On a fogless day, you can see a lot – Daly City, Colma, the Pacific Ocean, and the Santa Cruz Mountains, San Francisco, the Bay Bridge, Oakland, Mount Diablo, and the San Francisco Bay, planes taking off from San Francisco International Airport – you can also see all this without hiking by simply parking at the San Bruno Ridge Trail parking lot.
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Locomotoring 