Tales & Trails of a Traveling Wiseguy

Today we drove 200 miles round trip, out to the town of Dixon, California, for... Lambtown! It's a weekend fair of all things... sheep.



Up front there were vendors pavilions full of yarn spinners selling yarn, spinners, and knitting tools. Out back, where we spent most of our time, were county fair type demonstrations of sheep dogs and sheep shearing.

The sheep dog demonstrations were put on by an organization called Redwood Empire Sheep Dog Association. As one of the speakers described it, RESDA was founded when a few sheep herders were sitting around on a slow day and one said to the other, "My dog's better than your dog."

And the second sheep herder fired back, "Oh, yeah? Prove it."

Kaiser Pass travelog #6
Back Home · Sun, 10 Aug 2025, 8:30am

We're back from our quick weekend trip to the Kaiser Pass in the Sierra Nevada mountains. How quick? Well, it started with our Friday Night Halfway in Fresno and finished when we got home late Saturday night. We were out for just over 29 hours. Here's a recap:

Friday night we arrived at our hotel. It's in Clovis, a smaller town adjacent to/a suburb of Fresno. Despite leaving later than I wanted, due to work going long, we got in earlier than I expected, due to traffic surprisingly not being shit on a summer Friday. Maybe it's because school started in many districts this past week and parents aren't taking their kids on weekend trips again yet? Anyway, despite arriving early enough to use the hotel's pool and hot tub we decided we'd rather just stretch out in our room. Partly that's because we used our pool and hot tub, at home, this afternoon.

Saturday morning I awoke with my 7am alarm then just puttered until 8. We didn't leave the hotel until almost 9. I'd have been frustrated about that but we didn't need to hurry. That's the point of Friday Night Halfway: to buy us more time to do things— and not have to rush— on Saturday. I noted as I checked the weather forecast that the high for the day in Fresno would be 106° F. 🥵 (That's 41° C for the rest of the world.) Well, it's a good thing we're not here for Fresno but to drive up into the high mountains. As a rule of thumb the temperature drops 3° per 1,000 feet of elevation, so at 7,000' it should be a warm but not stifling 85°.

Leaving town we stopped at Costco for gas then Del Taco for breakfast. As we got up into the mountains we stopped at a general store in Shaver Lake for snacks.

Our first activity was a drive up a 4x4 road to Kaiser Ridge. We'd already driven to the Kaiser Pass via California 168 and forest road 80. Now we left the pavement behind for another 1.5 miles on a dirt road to the top of the ridge. Up here we were at 10,000 feet with great views down across the Mono Valley of the San Joaquin River and the mountains beyond— or what would have been great views except that there was a lot of smoke in the air.  I joked some time back that when traveling in the West now we need to check not just the weather report but the fire report. It's turning out to be less a joke and more a prophesy. 🤦

Saturday afternoon we drove down the Kaiser Ridge to its far side, the Mono Valley. Why? Because buried deep in there are Mono Hot Springs, a cluster of natural hot springs fed by geothermal activity. There's a small resort there but also a handful of pools that are on Forest Service ground. We hiked a short trail to them and Hawk took a dip.

Late afternoon we stopped to hike Rancheria Falls on our way back down the west side of Kaiser Ridge. We've visited there once before, a few years ago. It was definitely worth visiting again. It was mellow in the late afternoon hours, and the light was perfect.

We got back to Clovis a bit after 7pm. We weren't staying another night, just stopping through for dinner and gas. We'd tried for dinner at a small pizza shop in Shaver Lake, but the staff there warned us the wait was 90 minutes to cook a pizza. We figured we could drive 60 minutes to the Fresno area and still eat sooner than that, plus be 60 minutes closer to home.

The last part of the drive home was late. We finished with dinner and getting gas around 8:15, but then it was over 2 hours home. We were both fading hard. I drove for an hour and a half, then Hawk took the last 45 minutes as I nodded in and out. We got home around 11, unpacked the car, then I took a shower and tumbled into bed.

This morning we set off on a road trip to Oakhurst. It's a jaunt of 175 miles, just a touch over 3 hours of driving without traffic. Having left at 9:47am (again, I mentally mark such things) I expected we could be hiking in the mountains above Oakhurst as soon as 1:30pm, after stops for lunch and probably gas along the way.

Just before we left, though, we heard the patter of rain on the roof. Not what we want to hear on a hiking day!



Indeed it rained for the first leg of the trip as we drove south from Sunnyvale. There was no rain in the forecast for the area around Oakhurst... though the weather still wouldn't be nice there. The forecast has called for clouds and high temps in the 50s on Friday since, like, a week ago. "There's a week to go, maybe it'll get better," I said to Hawk. Hahaha, no, that didn't happen.

It's especially a pisser that we get partly crummy weather for our weekend trip after it was so nice last weekend when I was traveling for work. It was 72 on Sunday, 80 on Monday, and a whopping 85 on Tuesday— the warmest day since a freak heat wave 5½ months ago. But now that I have a day off it's not even 60. 😡



One thing about it being the rainy season in California is that many of the mountains that are brown most of the year are green right now. This is the Pacheco Pass (Route 152) through the Diablo Mountains. The East Bay Hills (also part of the Diablo range) in the Bay Area are carpeted with green right now, too. It's enjoyable to see it because it's only a few weeks a year these mountains are green.



Here's another pic of the incredible greenery. This is overlooking the San Luis Reservoir on the east side of the pass. And yes, the rain had abated as we passed through here.

The skies stayed partly sunny/partly cloudy as we drove across the Central Valley. The sun even started feeling a bit intense as we drove up into the Sierra foothills. Heavy clouds hung over the higher ridges of the Sierra, though. Would our hiking spot be favored with sun or it would be it cursed by those rain clouds? It seemed like it would be a close decision....

Stay tuned for more!

It's Friday night... and again it's Friday Night Halfway! Last Friday found us in Auburn, halfway to a hike in the Grouse Lakes Basin of Tahoe National Forest. Tonight we're in Jackson, halfway to a hike tomorrow along the Pacific Crest Trail above the Kit Carson Pass.

Jackson is a town in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada. It's a crossroads town, at the junction of highways 88 and 49. Route 88 is one of the passes over the Sierra Nevada. Route 49 is "the 49er trail" connecting a bunch of towns in the foothills that sprang up in the California Gold Rush that hit its peak in 1849 following the discovery of gold at Sutter's Mill the year before. Sutter's Mill is/was about 35 miles north of here, in Coloma, though in the gold rush years gold was discovered nearby here, too. In fact there are at least a dozen historical gold mines within a few miles of Jackson. But those are not why we're here. For us it's just Friday Night Halfway.

Not Stuck in Lodi Again

The drive out to Jackson starts like a drive to Yosemite. We leave the Bay Area via Livermore on I-580 the hook the short I-205 east toward Manteca. Yes, Manteca, the Spanish word for lard; lard as in rendered pig fat. But instead of going all the way to Manteca as we would en route to Yosemite, we turn north on I-5 to Stockton and cross over to Route 99 north. On Route 99 we drive north a few miles to Lodi to exit onto Route 88, which angles northeast up into the Sierra foothills.

Lodi is always an amusing town to drive through. We can't so much as think about the town without also thinking about the classic hard-luck song named for it.


Thankfully we're not stuck in Lodi tonight, or even hanging our hats there. I mean, we could have chosen a hotel there. We actually did, once, ten years ago. Going back would have to be just for the LOLz, though, as Lodi is about as dreary in real life as it's made out to be in song. ...Not that Jackson is worlds apart. It's a hardscrabble town whose best days were upwards of 150 years ago. Stately Victorian buildings built as banks with Gold Rush money are today biker bars popular with 50+ year old rebels in MAGA hats. But at least Jackson's 30 minutes closer to where we're going hiking tomorrow.

It's Friday night and time for another episode of Friday Night Halfway. Yes, we did a Friday Night Halfway just last Friday, driving to Redding. I haven't even finished blogging about the hiking we did on that trip, and already we're going on another one. But not back to Redding. Main reason: it's too smoky still from the Park Fire. 😧 🥵 Tonight we're in Fresno.

Fresno. Yes, Fresno. The 5th largest city in California. But we're not here because of its size or its significance... Fresno being widely known for its slogan, "No, really, we're now the 5th largest city in California." 🤣 We're here because it's halfway to somewhere else.

Somewhere else in this case is the Sierra National Forest and the Dinkey Lakes Wilderness. Yes, it's really called the Dinkey Lakes Wilderness. No, the lakes are not really dinky. I mean, some of them certainly are, but that's not why they have that name. It's a person's name. Yes, really. 🤣

This Friday Night Halfway is similar to a stay in Fresno 12 months ago. We're staying in a different hotel this time, so the last umpteen miles of the trip were the same. And it was only about 156 miles total from home. The Friday Night to Fresno Travelog I wrote last time still mostly pertains. At least this time we were able to get an early start from home, rolling out of our garage at 3:40pm, so were were all tucked away in our hotel room by 9pm after multiple stops for food, gas, and dessert, plus traffic delays getting out of the Bay Area.

Sunday was the last day of our two-day weekend trip to the Trinity Alps in northern California. I'm backlogged on writing about the hiking we did over the weekend, but here I want to catch up on something else: the smoke from the massive Park Fire burning near Chico, California.

We started our day in Yreka, California. It's a town of about 3,000 people just 25 miles south of the Oregon border.



The town's so small we spotted a deer strolling through the hotel parking lot when we were packing our car at 8:30am. But notice also in this picture how clear the sky is. Yreka is about 140 miles away from the Park Fire. Oh, and there are a lot of mountains in between them, too. Like 14,180' Mt. Shasta.

Southwest of Yreka the sky wasn't so clear. We headed down toward the Trinity Alps with a day of hiking planned, but as we got to Fort Jones, just 20 miles away, we could see a wall of smoke ahead of us. That wouldn't have been smoke from the Park Fire... it was smoke from various fires burning in southern Oregon. We decided to pull the plug on the Trinity Alps and try a pair of shorter hikes further south.



Our next stop was in Weed. Yes, there's a town called Weed, California, pop. 3,000. Yes, it's the one famous for the road signs "WEED: NEXT 3 EXITS".



We did a hike about 15 miles northeast out of Weed. Down here the sky was clearer than in Fort Jones though not as clear as up in Yreka. There was haze low to the ground.

After that hike and driving back through Weed we continued south on I-5 toward home. Smoke in the air increased as we reached Lake Shasta. It got thicker as we dropped down out of the mountains into Redding, California, where we stopped for a late lunch. There we could not only smell all the smoke in the air but practically taste it.



Thick smoke continued with us quite a ways south of Redding. The last photo above is from near Corning, California. It's just before 4pm in the afternoon. You can see how thick the smoke is all around us and how it limits visibility. At this point we'd been driving through smoke for 80 miles— and would continue to see (and smell, and taste) it around us for another 70 miles or so.

Compare this to the smoke cloud we driving through here on Friday night. It was a single, if large, cloud on the horizon. On Sunday afternoon, less than 48 hours later, it stretched over 150 miles across.

It's Friday night, and it's time for another episode of Friday Night Halfway. That's the term I coined for my approach of driving halfway to something we want to do far away on Saturday, on Friday night. It splits the time and effort of driving and gives us more time to do the thing we actually want to do on Saturday. I've been doing Friday Night Halfways for just over 9 years now. ...At least that's how long I've been blogging about it. I'm pretty sure I've actually been doing it for at least 12 years and more likely 15+.

Tonight's Friday Night Halfway brings us to Redding, California. It's a city of just under 100,000 population at the northern end of California's enormous Central Valley. It's the biggest city in northern California and a reasonable stopping off point for where we're going tomorrow: hiking in the Shasta-Trinity mountains west of Mt. Shasta, which is north of here. This is the almost-last minute trip we planned 48 hours ago.

How was the trip? I mean, the first half. 😅 The drive to Redding is just over 250 miles. Sans traffic and stops I could hammer through it in about 3h40m. But with Friday afternoon traffic and stops for dinner and gas it took us just over 5½ hours.

• We pulled out of our garage at 3:30pm. I'd been hoping to hit the road earlier, at 3pm, but two afternoon work meetings got added to my calendar in the past 48 hours.


• At least we were able to pack quickly so our leaving wasn't further delayed. It helps that we just need our hiking gear and changes of outdoors clothes for 2 days.


• We fought through lots of traffic leaving the Bay Area. It took us just over 2 hours to get to Fairfield, where the Bay Area gives way to the Central Valley. Without traffic that part of the drive would take just a smidge over 1 hour.


• We stopped for dinner in Fairfield. After that we only had traffic for about 5 more miles getting to Vacaville. Then, as we exited I-80 onto I-505, all the traffic melted away. For the next two hours it was just hammering across the plain of the Central Valley.


• About that fire....

• We saw this huge smoke cloud (photo above) from the Park Fire near Chico starting over 100 miles away.


• Here in Redding it's HOT. It's not literally on fire, though you could be forgiven for thinking so with an afternoon high temperature of 102° today and smoke choking the air from the Park Fire east of here. By the time we arrived at 9pm the temperature was a still-warm 89° F.


• We're staying tonight at a Holiday Inn hotel. I thought maybe we stayed here once before, years ago, but it turns out it's new to us. It's not a new hotel, though, but at least we've got a comfortable room. They thankfully left the A/C on for us so we didn't walk into a sweatbox.

A bit over a week ago we made the decision to pull the plug on our July 4 hiking trip in the Shasta-Trinity mountains. The weather forecast was showing extreme heat over the 4 days we'd be there, and we decided it would spoil the enjoyment of hiking. Instead we stayed home— in the milder extreme heat Silicon Valley got— and had a great time lounging around the pool 4 afternoons in a row. But what did we miss? News reports yesterday provided some of the receipts.

From Friday through Sunday numerous heat records were set in California. In Sacramento, on-this-date records were set with 110° on Friday and 113° on Saturday. The Saturday high blew away the previous record of 105° set on July 6, 1989. In Redding a new all-time high temperature of 119° F (48.3° C) was recorded. New records were set in plenty of other cities, too.

Redding's record is directly relevant to what we missed because it's the closest larger city to the mountains where we would've gone hiking. Now, 119 in Redding doesn't mean it was 119 up in the mountains. As a rule of thumb, the air temperature drops 3 degrees Fahrenheit per 1,000 feet of elevation. Redding stands at around 600' elevation at the northern end of the Central Valley just below the Shasta-Trinity mountains. The hiking trails we were looking at had us starting at elevations of 5,500-6,500. So 15 to 18 degrees cooler than 119— yeah, still over 100. 🥵

Tonight we're at a hotel in Chowchilla, California. No, not chinchilla. That's a species of rodent native to the Andes Mountains of Chile. Chowchilla. It's a town of approximately 19,000 people in California's Central Valley. By California standards that's basically a highway rest stop, though by New Zealand standards... it's twice the size of the towns of Clinton and Gore, combined.

Why Chowchilla? It's Friday Night Halfway. We're headed to a couple of hikes in the Sierra National Forest tomorrow. Today's drive of 128 miles knocks out a few hours of travel, leaving us a drive of just 56 miles, about 1 hour 15 minutes, to our first hiking trail tomorrow.

We got stuck in some traffic driving to Chowchilla this evening. Normally it'd be a drive of just over 2 hours. Leaving at 4:45pm— which, yes, was less than 24 hours after I got home from a business trip 🥵— we caught a bit of early rush hour traffic driving south to Gilroy on US-101. We stopped for dinner in Gilroy wondering if maybe the traffic east through the Pacheco Pass might clear a bit but, alas, it didn't. We were stuck in the usual Friday Night Escape misery on CA-152. We'd lost almost an hour to traffic delays by the time we got to Los Banos. We stopped there for a bathroom break, leg stretch, and ice cream cones. Oof, I really needed the leg stretch. And the ice cream was good, too. 😂

Continuing east from Los Banos it was smooth sailing the last leg of the trip to Chowchilla. We arrived at our hotel at 8:45pm, for a trip of 4 hours including traffic and food stops.

What's in Chowchilla, other than approximately 19,000 people? Well, first of all, that 19,000 figure apparently includes the inmates in two area prisons. How many are free to leave their rooms in the morning like we will, I don't know. 😂

Chowchilla really is a highway rest-stop type of town. I mean, people do live here. We passed by many houses and a few apartment buildings on the drive in. It's an agricultural town. People who live here presumably work the farms in this area and the businesses that support them. And staff the two prisons. 😂 But the businesses in town are mostly gas stations and a few fast food restaurants clustered near highway 99.

Update: You know what happens after Friday Night Halfway, right? It's Saturday Morning the Rest of the Way!

Friday, 25 Aug 2026, 10pm. Fresno, California.

It's Friday night and we're in Fresno. Yes, that means it's Friday Night Halfway! Because why the hell else would anybody want to leave Silicon Valley to go to Fresno. 🤣


Maybe I shouldn't bust too hard on Fresno. It is the state's fifth most populous city. With a population of 550,000 it's ahead of Sacramento, the state capital; and Oakland. It's behind fourth-place San Francisco. But as basically an overgrown farm town iit is... miles away from San Francisco.

Speaking of miles, the drive this evening was about 168 miles. The map shows a timing estimate of 2:38 at off times. With traffic it took us about 30 minutes longer. Plus another 50-60 minutes for a dinner stop. All in, we were in our hotel by 10pm. Oh, and yeah, technically we're not in Fresno. We're in the adjoining town of Clovis, which I guess could be described as "Just as dismal as Fresno, but with even less to do."

Our plan for Saturday is to head east, up into the Sierra Nevada mountains. We've picked out a pair of waterfall trails to hike. With this head start from Friday Night Halfway we should have time to hike both of them!

Update: Keep reading in:

• Five Things en route to Fresno
• After Friday Night Halfway it's... Saturday the Rest of the Way!