canyonwalker: My other car is a pair of hiking boots (in beauty I walk)
Two weekends ago we drove to northern California to enjoy hiking in the Trinity Wilderness northwest of Mt. Shasta. As I've written in several blogs recently, we had to contend with smoke from the enormous Park Fire blazing near Chico— plus smoke drifting down from fires in southern Oregon. 🥵 The latter caused us to cancel our plans to hike in the Trinity Alps Sunday, even after we hiked there comfortably on Saturday, so instead we picked a pair of shorter hikes further south.... in between the clouds of smoke from the various fires.

Hedge Creek Falls in Dunsmuir, California (Jul 2024)One of those hikes was a short walk to an old favorite, Hedge Creek Falls. It's just off I-5 in Dunsmuir, a tiny town between Mt. Shasta and Shasta Lake. In the past when we've visited it's been a hidden gem. Typically we shared the trail with just a few other groups. But on this particular Sunday two weeks ago there were more than 20 cars parked at the trailhead.

Hedge Creek Falls in Dunsmuir, California (Jul 2024)

The crowds don't make the falls less pretty. Well, not until over-visitation by careless people trashes the place. 🙄 Thankfully that hasn't happened here... yet.

Hedge Creek Falls in Dunsmuir, California (Jul 2024)

We stayed at the falls for a while, at least twice as long as any of the other visits. We watched two or three sets cycle in and out. I had fun making slow-exposure photos with my nice camera and tripod— even though I'd lost one of my lenses in an Alpine swamp the day before. You can see two of the motion blur pictures above. Here's a short video I made:



In beauty I walk.

canyonwalker: My other car is a pair of hiking boots (in beauty I walk)
Two weekends ago we explored Pluto's Cave on the north flank of Mt. Shasta in California. This was part of the weekend trip spent evading smoke from a huge wildfire. ...Wait, did I say a wildfire? There was more than one! Smoke from other fires choked us out of our Sunday plans to hike in the Trinity Alps even though we were fine there just a day earlier when we hiked to East Boulder Lake. We weren't just going to go home, though, with no hiking on Sunday. We picked two shorter hikes in areas not badly impacted by smoke. The first of these was Pluto's Cave.

Pluto's Cave is lava tube. It's collapsed in several places. Some of the cave-ins form entrances you can get down into (and back up & out!) with just a bit of scrambling. The entries are about 1/2 mile across volcanic desert from a trailhead that's about 1/2 mile in from a paved road on a dirt 4x4 route. We explored 4 parts of the cave. I edited together this video of our adventure:



One small note.... In the video I mention that some of the graffiti underground is historical graffiti. Although it's more than 100 years old it's still considered graffiti, not history. Even though it's dated 1917. If it were 11 years older it'd be protected as history by the Antiquities Act of 1906.

canyonwalker: Sullivan, a male golden eagle at UC Davis Raptor Center (Golden Eagle)
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.

A deer strolls through the parking lot of our hotel in Yreka, California (Jul 2024)

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.

The "WEED" sign in downtown Weed, California (Jul 2024)

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".

Weed, Next 3 Exits! Road sign on I-5 near Weed, California (Jul 2024)

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.

Smoke from the Park Fire chokes the air around I-5 at Corning, California (Jul 2024)

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.

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