NorCal quickie before Artown

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I was planning a slightly more ambitious trip for June, but then Martha and the family actually visited me! Very exciting! They stayed Wednesday and Thursday nights last week, and it was a success in every way. Even the teenagers enjoyed it. Tyler brought his buddy Dino, so they kept each other entertained. The primary entertainment being the river! Martha had bought a really nice inner tube in the course of her eBay shopping, so every morning and afternoon they would hit the rapids. I shadowed them the first two or three times, to see how they did and show them where to get out and how to find their way back. After that they were on automatic. The only stupid Reno thing that happened over those three days was that some dude took Rylan’s little nerf football that they were throwing. The boys weren’t too upset, but Ry chose to have a little fit for two minutes then that was the end of that.

So that was last week, when I otherwise might have mustered myself out the door for a trip a little grander than Lake Almanor. But Lake Almanor ain’t chopped liver, so this week, with still have eleven days until Artown kickoff, I am mustering myself out the door for a modest little North Sierras trip. Hit the hot springs, visit my friend Jeff, traverse Lassen, thence to Petaluma for a little more up close and personal of those adorable grandkids (hope I don’t pick up their germs again)

Leaving Day (Jun 19)

Frenchman’s Lake is only 40 minutes away, which is a good thing because it takes me 3-4 hours to execute the whole packing and leaving thing. Sleep late, pull out of my parking spot a little after 3pm, pick up my sando and hang at See See Coffee for a while, then pull out of town around 4:15.

The road from Chilcoot to Frenchman’s Lake is a beautiful drive.

I like site 14. Pleasant through the trees down the hill view.

Around 7pm I embarked on a little hike that turned into a big hike, which made me feel great! There is a ridge of broken up lava (basalt?, andesite?) behind the campground that for some reason entices me to walk to the top of it. When I stayed here other time I scrambled to the top then down to the shore on the far (west) side and headed right, which effectively took me around the point and back to the campground. That hike was ok, but not a great bang for the buck. It was tiring to pick one’s way along the rocky shoreline, and there’s not much variety on the lakeshore. So it was a good adventure, but kinda meh.

So this time I crested the ridge and headed left, with the idea of making it to the dam. It was rough going again until I ran into the road I came in on and followed it downhill. Once at the dam I got the genius idea to bushwhack down the side of the dam to the little parking area at the bottom! The idea was that it is getting pretty late, but there will be enough light to get there, then the walk all the way back to the campsite will be on paved road, which I can certainly navigate on a half-moon night.

It worked great. It took quite a while to get down the hill, with some last minute course correction to not come down on the wrong side of the creek (duh!), but I did it, and made the long walk back pretty easily. What’s got into me to have so much energy? I dunno, but I’m liking it.

I plan to be camping the next six days. The longest day of the year is Thursday, and the whole strech will have a waxing gibbous moon. So pretty good timing!

Wednesday

This morning on my way out I checked out the other campgrounds, and here’s the report:

• Spring Creek – the next one over look like the best for low key swimmers and kayakers. Not as big a hill, the lake seems much more accessible.
• Big Cove – You have to drive another 3-4 miles around the corner of the lake, and it doesn’t look worth it to me. It appears to be where the big ballers go with their big powerboats.
• Chilcoot – Not on the lake, rather on the creek in the canyon on the way to the lake, on Last Chance Creek, the outflow of the lake. If you want the creek experience rather than the lake experience, this is for you.

They are all the same price, currently $25. But Forest Service campgrounds run by concessionaires seem to raise their prices every year or so.  Gotta turn a profit on that federal land. (grumble)

I took my time and enjoyed the really quite dramatic and pretty drive down the hill, to a new (to me anyway) little cafe that’s sprung up in the corner market in Chilcoot.

Coffee, wifi, fresh donuts, cheap homemade sandos – perfect except that a coffee refill is another full-priced coffee. I quite liked the place.

Chilcoot is in the far northeast corner of the wide Sierra Valley and Sierra Hot Springs is in the far southwest corner. The typical route is over then down (south then west), This takes you through downtown Loyalton – speed limit 25 mph. County seat of super-conservative Sierra County. It feels like the kinda place where the city cops would be super mean if they stopped you, and anyway it’s a boring town and it’s boring to drive 25 mph with no traffic or people around. So I punted on that and took the country roads through the middle of the valley – basically south then east then south again. Great choice! The last part, on Harriet Lane was an unofficial waterfowl refuge. Tons of ducks, and one of my personal favorites, the White-faced Ibis!

I lingered for a while then drove the remaining eight miles to the Hot Springs (big valley!). Creature of habit that I am, I followed my usual hot springs ritual pretty much exactly:

• Stop at the lodge to register for camping – $38!! (new price of $33 plus one month’s membership).
• Hang out on the lovely porch for an hour or so, slowing down and taking it all in.
• Drive another 1500 yards to a spot for the night. I always privilege view over shade here. That is I park in the front row so I have an unimpeded view of the beautiful valley, but the sun beats me up pretty bad in the late afternoon. Next time I may go for the shade.
• Walk over to the Mediation Pool for a short-ish soak. The 5pm sun is brutal here.
• Back to the van to eat and hang until a little before sunset. Tomorrow is the longest night of the year, so that’s almost 8pm.
• Walk to the main pools to soak and watch the sunset over the valley.
• Home to bed. Almost full moon so the walk back is simply beautiful

Thursday

• Muddle around at the van in the morning until the sun makes it too hot to stay, usually 11:30-ish.
• Drive the two miles to Sierraville, dine at the little place at the intersection that has gone upscale and is called the Fork and Horn. The previous management served breakfast till closing at 2pm, but these folks stop at 11 am. A potentially tragic situation, but since my sausage and eggs do not require the pancake griddle I was able to talk her into it. :)))
• Back to the lodge to hang out on the porch until my 24 hour stay expires, which today is 2:51pm. A more energetic me would squeeze in a daytime soak, but tody’s me is happy to just sit.

ZXZ-43497466971-ZXZToday’s I follow winding, tiring Route 89 up the middle of the North Sierras – Graeagle to Quincy to Greenville (a strange town) past Lake Almanor to Chester – where my buddy Jeff has a fruit stand and a house with a yard I can park in.

It’s a tiring drive in any event, but three separate lengthy road repair stops killed me. I felt tired and all around crappy towards the end. I thought it was maybe a hot springs hangover, but now I know it was a preview of how crappy I was gonna feel tomorrow.

I arrived an hour and a half late, feeling kind of harried, but no problem!  Jeff wasn’t even there yet for the weekend. His high school buddy Bert was there waiting for me to show up, hanging out behind the fruitstand, so all was well.

My brand new friend Bert and I caught up with who each other was, then Jeff arrived an hour later, panel van full to the gills with fruits and veggies he picked up at his spot in the Valley. Bert cooked an excellent tri-tip with potatoes, and we had a great time.

Thursday – Friday

I feel really crappy today. A tooth that has been worrying me off and on for months hurts. I’m in the green snot phase of the cold I got last weekend. I thought I had kicked it a couple of day ago, but it is back with a vengance. I feel a little feverish. All in all I suck.

Jeff fortifies me with a pot of coffee and a breakfast burrito. I hang out with the crew for a while, but I am quite worthless, not feeling good enough to be sociable. Jeff’s older sister Linda and her hubby Darryl have arrived to visit for the weekend, so I hang with them for a while. Low-energy notwithstanding, I am determined to have some kind of  adventure today. The plan is to drive up and see what Drakesbad is about. It’s an 18-ish mile drive north into the southeast corner of Lassen Park. The final 3-4 miles are gravel road. Drakesbad appears to be a cool place, but is not very user-friendly if you’re not staying there. The warm pool is only for guests.

There is a National Park campground there, and the terminus of a couple of nice hikes to thermal activity areas. The longer one looked way more interesting, but it’s seven-ish or so miles, and there’s no way I can make that feeling like I do today. So I do the easier one, one mile each way, to Boiling Springs Lake. It wasn’t boiling when I got there, in fact all it was is a medium sized pond of very hot thermal mud. So, not very exciting, but it was very good for me to get myself out and doing something.

Back to Jeff’s, had a nice evening with everybody, feeling better. The seven of us (Jeff + Bert + Lark + Justin + Linda + Darryl + me), sat outside at a picnic table, used his burrito fixin’s bar as a salad bar (the tomatoes were as good as any in my life!), and ate a couple of quiches Lark had made to sell. Just superb, really.

Saturday

Feeling pretty darned good this morning I am happy to say, although the tooth still hurts a little. Coffee and fresh blueberry-peach pie ala mode for breakfast – YUM! Another batch of Jeff’s relatives swing through to hang out for a while, so everybody is busy catching up.

Linda had come prepared to make her contribution to the family business in the form of canning pickles. I find canning to be fascinating and appealing – I think it taps into my “fear of scarcity” psychology. Anyway, I got to see the whole process. She cooked up a bunch of fresh cucumbers with all the spices. Then she immersed the Kerr jars in boiling water so they were as hot as they could be.  She would pick out a jar with tongs, then ladle the very hot pickles into the very hot jar and slap the sealing lid on it, and boom! you have “canned” pickles! I loved it!

Leave around 2 pm and head for Lassen. Pass through Childs Meadows on the way, notice that the collapsing shed across the road is still collapsing. That place always appeals to me. At the park I head straight for the mud pots. Official name is the Sulphur Works, but they are the mud pots to me. My favorite stop by far. There they are, bubbling away as always, four feet from the road.

This is such a lovely drive. I stop and enjoy the second little alpine lake that’s right on the road. There is still snow up here! Then crest the pass, Drive past the two Summit Lake campgrounds that don’t open till next week, then head down the northern slope, through the area that got messed up by the eruption 100 years ago. I had it in my head that JJ’s Diner closes at 3 pm, so I stopped at the Manzanita Campground Store on the north end of the park and had a really forgettable sandwich. A tragic bit of over-planning, as JJ’s was open and doing it’s usual thriving business when I drove past at 6-ish. Sad!

Bridge Campground was pretty busy, but I lucked into a real nice spot close to the creek. Mostly hung out in the hammock until dark. People-watching my neighbors was the most interesting thing going tonight.

Sunday

Such a pleasant place to be. Knowing that tonight I will be in the furnace of the Central Valley makes it even harder to leave. I finally tear myself away around 12:30. JJ’s is super crowded today. I have to hang outside for a while just to get a table. All in all I’m here from about 1 pm to 3 pm, which is just fine by me. Today’s drive is about two hours, and as mentioned above I am not looking forward to it. maybe it will be a little less awful a little later in the day.

In more hospitable times of the year I love taking the valley back roads, but today I head straight to I-5, and take it south 90 miles to Williams.I stop at Granzella’s for old times sake and just to get into the air conditioning for a while, then onward to finally spend the night at Cowboy Camp.

There has been wildfire smoke to my right (west) most of the way down I-5, but now that I am driving due west it looks like I am driving right into the fire. A I am not as it turns out, it’s somewhere to the north of Route 20, but the smoke is pretty thick. There’s a county or state cop stationed at every gravel road heading that way to stop you from driving that way.

Well, here I am finally staying at Cowboy Camp. After some initial “why the hell am I here in this heat?”, it was quite nice. There were some odd dynamics. There were super-high-end hippies in the upper parking lot when I arrived. They were visibly huffy about me coming to exist in their space, so after some fussing around they moved to the lower area. That was pretty awesome by me since they had a big dog, but what was REALLY interesting was that I didn’t know there was a lower area! There is a really obvious gate and road down there, but all the times I have been here it was winter, and the gate was locked. So I simply didn’t register it.

Monday – Wednesday

It was quite pleasant in the morning, no fire smoke. There was a little excitement when I discovered the hard way that I where parked my rear door was right over an angry ant colony. I stood there for as long as it takes to put my chair inside, and suddenly I’m doing the rain dance, hopping about and knocking 20 ants off my leg.

No phone reception here, but I knew from last night that there are a couple of coffee places at Clear Lake, about 25 minutes away, so that’s my plan. The drive is very familiar from going to Harbin all those years, but my search for coffee took me off the road so that I actually explored the towns of Clearlake and Clearlake Highlands for the first time ever. Interesting and surprising, in that the place had a beautiful lakeside location, but was kind of a slum. I would be interested in the economics of why that is. Catfish Coffee House was an oddball kind of place, but good overall. The wifi was good, the barrista was nice, the coffee was just fine, but the goodies were kind of weak … as was the air conditioning. It was about two blocks from the lake, so i explored Lakeshore Drive a bit afterwards. Kinda depressing how un-festive it was.

I am all too familiar with the restaurant choices around here. After Middletown there is basically nothing, and Middletown itself is pretty bad, so I stopped for lunch about six miles after I stopped for coffee, at the good ole Foster’s Freeze, an ice cream shop with a reliably good grilled chicken sandwich. Then I just put in my time on the winding mountain roads – Lower Lake to Middletown to Calistoga to US 101 in Santa Rosa to Petaluma.

It’s early so I stopped at the Outlet Mall. The plan was to hit the Vans store, which I did. But the bonus was a Banana Republic, where I got 3 pairs of just the kind of boxer shorts I love ($21). It’s been a long time between Banana Republic for me, and my collection has become quite tattered so this was a big deal for me. :) I also got a pair of Vans ($39). I did the thing I almost always do, and got ’em a half size too big, but so far they have worn ok. I am telling myself it’s a feature because they slip on so easily, but I know I messed up. They should be harder to put on and snugger when walking.

It was a fairly uneventful visit. Chad gave me a ride to town on Tuesday – coffee at the downtown Acre and a happy hour beer at McNears. Wednesday I just hung around. The evenings were family dinner and playing with the kids … the point of visiting! No meals out, no family adventures, not even any kid classes or events. Pretty low-key. Tyler’s life is a lot more mellow since he dropped out of basketball entirely. I wish he was still involved at some level.

Thursday

I arrived at Martha’s a day earlier than I’d planned, and she (arbitrarily, IMO) put me on a three day limit once I got there, so am leaving a day earlier than planned also. That would be today. It actually worked out quite well. I decided to use the extra night to camp somewhere on the way home, and I made some discoveries. There are National Forest campgrounds right off of I-80, up around Cisco and Kingvale. I have to have seen these before, but somehow they didn’t register … I think because they are only open Memorial Day to Labor Day.

I checked a couple out:

• Indian Springs – had to drive a few miles from the exit. It’s a beautiful spot on the Yuba River, except it’s right next to the freeway. It’s kind of shabby and the sites aren’t level.
• Hampshire Rocks – right at the exit. Not as pretty, but sites are level and it seemed to be a nicer campground. I shoulda stayed here, but I got it in my head I wanted to stay at:
• Martis Creek – a little east of Truckee on the way to North Star. This is a lovely, conveniently located spot, and it was FULL. :(

I was so confident in my plan that I stopped in Truckee and had a beer and an appetizer at some swishy downtown place, and I think that was my downfall. I mighta gotten a spot if I had gone straight there.

This was disappointing. I hung around for a half hour or so to soak up the outdoor feeling, and with a little daylight left headed on home. At this point I was really only about 40 minutes away, so no big deal. Now I am home for the month of July.