Posts Tagged ‘shasta-trinity’
Enchanting dogwoods by the waterfalls
I adore dogwood tree flowers. Perhaps because the tree in my backyard only blooms for a month. And it does so in early spring, even before the tree bears leaves. It the middle of the green of spring foliage in the yard, the bright white flowers of dogwood look like stars, more so during dawn and dusk. The Pacific Dogwood, aka Mountain Dogwood, are native to the area around Mount Shasta. Catching the Shasta-Trinity region is early spring has also meant that the dogwood is in bloom. It is one thing to have a tree or two in bloom and it is entirely another to walk a trail where dogwood trees are blooming everywhere. It doesn’t hurt if the trail is by a river, and the river is gushing with newly melted snow.
Read the rest of this entry »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?
Locomotoring 