Tales & Trails of a Traveling Wiseguy

Kaiser Pass travelog #3
Kaiser Pass · Sat, 9 Aug 2025, 12:15pm

The obvious place to go on a trip I've dubbed Kaiser Pass would be the actual Kaiser Pass, right? So that's where we went first on Saturday. Well, first after multiple morning stops for breakfast and gas in Clovis, then snacks at Shaver Lake, and a quick vista at Tamarack Ridge. We drove to Huntington Lake and the end of highway 168 at the foot of Kaiser Peak, the continued up toward Kaiser Pass along forest road 80. From the pass at elev. 9,180' we turned onto Kaiser Pass Trail, aka White Bark Road.

I knew from the trail research I did on Thursday evening that this wasn't really a trail but a 4x4 road, and a not-particularly hard one at that. Our Nissan Xterra laughed at it.



The trail/road traverses a mile up to the top of the ridge then parallels along it a bit to a nice vista point. The first thing that struck us up here, with this far-ranging vista to the east across the John Muir Wilderness, is how smoky it is. 😷 I've cleaned it up a bit in the photo above, but it's frankly kind of distressing up here in real life.

The next photo shows how the mountains in the distance loom like ghosts in the mist.



Those mountains are the eastern crest of the Sierra Nevada. The peaks top out at 12,000' to 13,000'+.

The big lake off in the distance is Lake Thomas A. Edison. I'm not sure if it's named in honor of the inventor or is named for the power company that bears his name in Southern California. Edison, Inc. owns a lot of land up here, and a lot of dammed lakes, for power generation.



We spent a while up here at White Bark Vista climbing around on the rocks. Up here at elev. 9,700' the air is thin. It's no so much catching me out of breath today as it is making me feel dizzy. I've been wobbly on my feet— a bit alarming when I'm scrambling on rocks with a sheer dropoff hundreds of feet to the valley below!

After exploring around the vista for a bit we hopped back in the SUV and explored further out the ridge road. Just past this vista point are signs for the start of the Dusy-Ershim Trail. That name probably means nothing to you, but it was spoken with almost holy reverence by the club of hard-core 4x4ers I belonged to years ago.



I decided to start driving this almost legendary road to see if we could get to the shoulder of Mt. Givens (the one in the distance in the third photo, above). I navigated the first few obstacles on the trail reasonably well. Our stock Xterra made them not-hard with its svelte dimensions. Full-size pickup trucks would face a lot more difficulty. BTW, no I'm not talking about the rocks you can see in the photo above. Those are difficult 1 or 2 on a 1-10 scale. The obstacles I'm talking about are at least 6s.

Before I got very far along Dusy-Ershim I realized I'm not enjoying this very much. I used to enjoy 4x4 driving. The challenge of man plus machine against nature. The beautiful and isolated things I could only see that way— or by backpacking for days, but why do that when I can drive there with air conditioning and a kickin' stereo system? 🤣 But now... I don't know whether it's a getting-older thing, or the smoke in the area that dulls these magnificent vistas, or the lack of camaraderie. Being up here by ourselves and enjoy the solitude is nice, but some things, like 4x4ing, are best enjoyed with others.

We turned back from Dusy-Ershim and headed down to the paved road. There'd be no more 4x4ing today. Besides, we have plenty more stuff on our agenda already!
Coming next: Mono Hot Springs!

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.

What happens after a Friday Night Halfway? Say it with me: Saturday we go all the way. 😂 This morning we awoke in Auburn, having driven there last night and stayed in a hotel. I wish I could say knocking out 3 hours of driving last night (which was actually 4 because of traffic) helped us get an early start on our hike today, but I can't. I wound up sleeping in until after 8 because I spent a few hours in the middle of the night tossing and turning and sitting up, unable to fall back asleep. With breakfast and all, we didn't hit the road until 10am.

Checking for Fires

It used to be that when we plan a hike, we check the weather report. Well, we still do that, but now we also check the fire report. 😓 As of last night there was a fire burning in the north Lake Tahoe area, about 50 miles east of the Grouse Lakes Basin, but no smoke from it was drifting west. This morning we woke up in Auburn, even further west, and distinctly smelled wood smoke in the air. 😰 A quick visit to PurpleAir.com showed us the fire in Tahoe had apparently died down a bit but a new fire had appeared south of us in Placerville. The smoke we smelled in Auburn may have been from that. But air quality was still excellent near Grouse Lakes. 😮‍💨

Getting to the Carr & Feeley Lakes Trailhead

One nice thing about staying in Auburn is that it leaves us with only the nicest part of the drive up into the Sierras for today. We drove 40-ish miles up the mountain, heading east on I-80, then backtracked a few miles west on Route 20 past Spaulding Lake, then north on Forest Road 17 toward the lakes basin. The last 3 miles of the route are unpaved. The Forest Service recently put down a new layer of gravel so the unpaved part is more accessible to ordinary passenger cars. We probably could've taken the convertible but we're glad we drove our 4x4 just in case.



The Carr & Feeley Lakes trailhead is at the end of the road, around elev. 6,700' (2,040 m). And today it was crowded. The main parking area was filled to capacity... and the overflow area was filled, and maybe 20 more cars were parked along the side of the gravel road. This is about 4 times as many cars as I've ever seen at this trailhead before. I'm not sure what's going on.... Hedge Creek Falls was packed with 4-5x the usual visitation two weeks ago, now this trail at 4-5x. Did a bunch of our favorite out-of-the-way places suddenly become Instagram famous?

Keep reading: Starting the hike past Carr and Feeley Lakes (next blog)

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.

Last night I booked a trip to go hiking in the mountains this weekend. Shortly after writing that blog this morning I checked my news feed and...



It's on fire.

Overnight the Park Fire near Chico, California exploded in size (Sacramento Bee article via Yahoo! News, 25 Jul 2024), growing from under 6,500 acres to over 45,000 acres by morning and 71,000 acres by midday. The fire was just 3% contained at last update in that article. That means it's burning out of control and growing in every direction simultaneously.

When smoke from a fire affected our day of hiking in the Sierras a few weeks ago I wrote that maybe we'll have to check not just the weather forecast but also the fire forecast before we travel. I wrote that as grim humor, not as a literal prediction! Alas my grim humor is the emerging grim reality. Summer in California is becoming fire season. Anywhere in the state may be burning or choking on smoke from a fire.

Fortunately the effects of the Park Fire are currently only indirect on where we planned to go hiking this weekend. Like the fire near Fresno a few weeks ago there will be dozens of miles and some pretty high mountains between it and us. But like then the smoke could be an issue. Already the smoke is definitely an issue in Redding, where we're stopping on our Friday Night Halfway. And it might be an issue up in the Shasta-Trinity mountains if the wind shifts strongly to the northwest (though that seems unlikely).

Incidentally this Park Fire is not far from Paradise, California, where the 2018 Camp Fire killed 85 people. (A note about naming fires: "Camp Fire" does not mean it was a campfire that got out of control. It was given that name because it started near a local road named Camp Creek Road.)

Update: this afternoon I saw news that authorities have arrested a man on suspicion of arson in deliberately starting the Park Fire! Example coverage: KCRA News Sacramento article, San Francisco Chronicle article. Witnesses say the suspect pushed a burning vehicle into a gully. So maybe it wasn't his intention to start a massive forest fire destroying numerous homes and requiring thousands of people to evacuate the area, but that's been the result so far of his deliberate actions.

Update 2: As of midday Friday, the fire has grown to 178,000 acres and is now rated as 0% contained.

Update 3: As of Friday evening, the fire has burned 239,000 acres. That's 373 square miles. 1,600 firefighters are working on it... and it's still 0% contained.

Update 4: As of Sunday morning, the fire has grown to over 350,000 acres. Cooler weather on Saturday slowed its spread and enabled firefighters to establish some containment lines, otherwise it could be even worse. Miraculously there are no deaths reported from this huge fire. Thousands of people have had to evacuate. To their credit and authorities' credit, people got moved to safety quickly. I'm sure plenty of people living in the area remember what happened in Paradise in 2018 when a half day of "wait and see" delays before evacuation orders came caused pandemonium and dozens of deaths.

Update 5: Tuesday check-in.

Recently I saw a thread online about school field trip fails. On the list are failures of planning, organizers not appreciating what students actually want, crises created by student misbehavior, and even just a few plain-old accidents. That reminded me of a field trip I found particularly disappointing.

When I was in second grade, my class visited the local fire station. Fire stations are pretty cool, right? There are those big trucks to look at (they're extra big when you're little second graders!), all the interesting gear firemen have, and of course, the firemen (and firewomen— though there weren't any back then) themselves. Except when we rolled up to the firehouse in our school buses the trucks and teams had just rolled out to respond to an emergency call. The station was empty.

I remember the several dozen of us 2nd graders wandering around the empty station. The garage built for fire trucks sure seemed huge without the fire trucks in them. And all the fancy gear? Well, most of that was gone, too. There was, like, one pair of boots left over. Hey, kids, look! A pair of boots!

Maybe saddest of all was that we didn't even try waiting to see if we could tour the station after the crew returned. The teachers packed us back up into the buses to return to school after a few minutes of aimless wandering. Maybe they only booked an hour for the trip including the travel time.

Moral of the story: Don't plan a field trip to the fire station when there's also a fire scheduled!

North Cascades Travelog #12
Okanogan National Forest, WA - Mon, 4 Sep 2023, 9:45am.

This morning we got up early-ish— it's technically a weekday even though it's a holiday, so my standard alarm wakes me up at 6:45am— puttered around the hotel room for a bit, ate a light breakfast, pulled our packs together, and headed out for a morning hike. Our hike this morning is the Falls Creek Falls Trail. It's about 12 miles north of Winthrop in the Okanogan National Forest.



Curiously today marked the second time we've been at this trailhead. We were here yesterday, too! As I noted in my Day 2 wrap-up last night, when we got here late in the afternoon it was getting dark with clouds in the sky and had just started to sprinkle rain. Plus, we were really achy from other hikes earlier in the day. "It's only a half mile trail, maybe we should do it anyway," we told ourselves. We decided the poor conditions meant we should try again today. And since it's only about a 20 minute drive from town it's not like it's a lot of extra time spent getting there and back.

Though the trail does start out easy— in the photo above you can see it's paved and is marked as handicap accessible— I'm really glad we chose to bail out the first time and come back today. We're feeling so much more refreshed, and the weather is beautiful.



That paved trail in the first pic leads gently upwards through an old growth forest to Falls Creek Falls... or at least the first part(s) of Falls Creek Falls. Yes, the first part(s), because as beautiful as these falls are— and we spent a while drinking in their beauty— there's more to see further up the trail.

This spot is where the sidewalk ends, though. The trail turns to dirt and climbs steeply from here.



Zig-zagging up the switchbacks from the first falls took some huffing and puffing but it was a nice part of the hike. As we climbed out of the valley up the side of the hill we passed through a burn zone— as you can see in the photo above. A wildfire is burning right now in the high mountains to the west of here. This area burned maybe 3 years ago, I read. The charred hulks of the big trees remain, some of them barely clinging to a bit of life, while new undergrowth is already starting to thrive.

Stay tuned; there's more to come!

North Cascades Travelog #7
North Cascades National Park - Sun, 3 Sep 2023, 11am.

Today I'm reminded of the lyrics of the first stanza and refrain from my favorite Marshall Tucker Band song, Fire on the Mountain:

Took my family away from our Carolina home
Heard dreams about the west and wanted to roam
Six long months on a dust covered trail
They say heaven's at the end but so far it's been hell

[refrain]
And there's
Fire on the mountain
Lightning in the air
Gold in them hills
And it's waiting for me there

We only came from California, not Carolina, and it was only a few hours by aircraft plus several by 2023 Toyota Camry rather than 6 months in a wagon, and we weren't looking for gold in the hills, just a places to hike. But the rest of it matches. There's fire in the mountains!



As I've noted in recent blogs there are wildfires burning, or at least parts of them, in North Cascades National Park in Washington. News has been that crews are getting them under control, so we headed up into the pass this morning to see if anything's open yet. Nope. The trails we wanted to hike are all still closed, even the scenic viewpoint at the top of the pass is closed (the photos here are from the side of the road just below it), and the road at the top is one-way with crews signaling traffic.

We turned around when we saw the one-way traffic controls and headed back down the mountain, dejected. This was supposed to be our revenge trip. Instead Mother Nature is having the last laugh.



BTW when we got out of the car to make these pics at roadside pullouts we could smell the smoke thick in the air.

North Cascades Travelog #6
Winthrop, WA - Sun, 3 Sep 2023, 9am.

I remarked in my previous blog that this trip to Eastern Washington and the North Cascades is revenge, revenge for things we were not able to do in years past because of car trouble or poor weather. Well, where once poor weather kept us from appreciating Palouse Falls more fully, this year it was the government. All the trails down into the canyon are closed now because some dumbasses fell off the cliffs. Partly the closure is to protect other dumbasses from falling to their deaths— not that dumbasses actually pay attention to warning signs anyway— and partly it's because the local governments are fighting about whose budget has to be used to go and haul their bodies out. So that's why the other 99.9% of us can't have nice things.

Ah, but Palouse Falls was only the minor (thwarted) act of revenge travel this trip. The main part of the revenge was North Cascades National Park, where we cut our trip short six years ago when our car broke down. Now we'd come back for a few days and hike all those trails we were cheated out of hiking before! Except Mother Nature was ready for us. That bitch.

This morning we opened our guide books and websites to recheck the places we'd go hiking today and tomorrow. Whoops, there is a fire in North Cascades. Almost all the trails we wanted to hike are currently closed.

We made specific plans for this trip 6 weeks ago. That was relatively recent by vacation plans making standards! Everything was all clear then. This fire only started within the past few weeks.

I don't think the trails are literally on fire right now; I think the fires are mostly out, but things are closed until crews can make sure. And then there will need to be checks to make sure that everything's safe. You wouldn't want some dumbass shaking a dead tree and dying when it falls on their dumb ass. I mean, whose budget would even pay to haul their dumb ass corpse out of the woods?

Smoke from wildfires is in the news again. News articles are running with pictures of cityscapes viewed through orange haze. It's like... uh, basically each of the last few summers in California and the US West... except this time it's not in California! Fires are burning in Ontario, Canada, and smoke is drifting south into the Midwest and Northeast US. The pics of orange skies are not from San Francisco but New York City this time around.



Out here in the San Francisco Bay Area we've got a different problem with the sky. The sky is... leaking. Yes, it actually rained yesterday! To put in context how rare that is, I've lived in California for 27 years, and the last time it rained here in June was... before I moved here. I remember it raining in late May twice, but never in June. Just after our weather caught up with late April (in June) it regressed to March. And while it's clear the rest of the week it'll remain cool-ish very unlike June.