Beautiful Klamath River

This campground is in one of the most beautiful settings of our journeys.  Sunsets and sunrises are spectacular and made more evocative by the near-constant fog and mist that winds through the coastal hills.

The sites along the river are a bit crowded, but the views make up for it!

Taken through our living room window at sunset after the rains cleared.  And this is facing East!

Facing West for the same sunset. Taken from our open door.

Exploring the Redwood Coast

Raining today, and forecasting constant rain all today and showers for the next few days, so we are hunkered down at home doing laundry and catching up on loose ends. Yesterday we did get some exploring in, but the clouds and dull light made for limited photography opportunities.

We explored the beach at the mouth of the Klamath River, then went up highway 101 to the Trees of Mystery.  This iconic tourist trap has been a family operation since 1946 and is best known for it's huge statues of Paul Bunyan and Babe, the Blue Ox looming over the highway.  It is actually a great place for the tourist rushing by on their way to San Francisco to get a couple hour introduction to the Redwoods, see some huge stumps and ride a gondola up a short mountain through the forest.

After Lynnae got caught playing with the Ox, we opted out of the tour and just visited a little-known gem of the attraction, which is a museum built around the collection of a woman named Marylee Thompson, now in her 90's.  It houses a very decent amount of Native American artifacts, divided into rooms for the various regions of the country. They have some very nice pieces indeed:

As the afternoon closed in, we headed a few miles north to False Klamath Cove and it's beach.  Very characteristic of the coastline up here, this beach had many large haystack rocks offshore.  There were also nice tidepools and lots of birds.

Oystercatcher

The wind was so strong, Tucker almost flew away ;-)

The sand was very dark grey, almost black.  This shell is about 1/2" across.

There will be better days to capture the beauty of this coastline in the weeks ahead, so come back often!

Back to the Pacific Coast

207 days ago, on March 9 to be exact, we left San Clemente on the Orange County coast and headed inland to begin our exploration of the deserts and mountains of California.  Today we headed west from the Trinity Alps area and reached the coast near Eureka ("I have found it!") California.  We stopped for lunch at a summit just before we reached the coast and saw the fog rolling in over the coastal range.

We drove through some of the redwood parks and past some rugged coastline before arriving at the mouth of the Klamath River in Klamath, CA.  We will be here a week and plan to explore the many parks and beaches of the area before heading just a bit further south for another week.  All-in-all, we will be on the Redwood coast for about three weeks and we are both very excited about being back in these beautiful forests. Rain is forecast for most of this week, so the weather may not be ideal, but we are thrilled that there might be rain in this drought-ridden state so early in the rainy season.  Fingers crossed.  Our campground is right on the Klamath River and the setting is GORGEOUS.  I'm sure I will have some fun taking pictures here!  A few  from our first afternoon, all taken from our campground.

Our neighbor, Rick from Bakersfield, fulltimer and life of the party

Lynnae, and Tucker walking with our neighbors from Orange County

A "Patriot" from Weaverville

Nancy is a local resident of Weaverville who chatted with us for a bit on Sunday before we left for the coast.  She works in a seasonal job and is about to be laid off for the winter when she will collect unemployment until spring.  She complained about the economy in Weaverville where there are rich people, "people on welfare" making babies or on disability and the middle class like her who are struggling to make ends meet.  She is a Tea Party Patriot and somehow didn't see the irony of her decrying the people on welfare while she collected unemployment from the government half the year. She also admitted she and her husband hadn't made a mortgage payment for two years and were trying to prove that Wells Fargo didn't actually have a legal claim on their property due to the fact that they didn't seem to have the original note for the mortgage.  She had a good crop of marijuana about to be harvested and it was already pre-sold to large grower they knew who exported a large crop to Colorado.  It seems that growing pot is pretty common around here, but it doesn't seem that most people are making much money from it.

This far northern part of California was going to become the state of Jefferson, if the ballot initiative to split the state into six different states had passed.  As it turned out, they couldn't gather enough signatures to get on the ballot.  It is sure apparent that this area is worlds apart from Silicon Valley, 200 miles to the south.

A Last Visit to Weaverville

The day before we left the Trinity Alps, we headed back down to Weaverville for an art fair they were having.  The fair itself turned out to be underwhelming, but we enjoyed hanging around the town, talking to folks and having some lunch at Mama Llama's, the local hangout.

This fellow was from Quebec and he looked REALLY stoned

Both the dog and owner had incredible blue eyes

This fellow was walking his pig down the sidewalk. Even in Weaverville this seemed to be a bit unusual.

Joe did nice beadwork and was very friendly

We never talked to this guy, but his Native American crafts were beautiful

Mamma Llama had coffee and 250 kinds of beer...great salads too

Another Mamma Llama patron relaxing and escaping the heat today

Weaverville is still a big logging town.  This HUGE pile of logs was right on Main St. near the grocery store.

Back into the Trinity Alps Wilderness

We rode out a day of drizzle and clouds by doing some projects around the house, then when the next day promised to be nice, planned another hike into the mountains.  This time the goal was Little Boulder Lake, which was described by local guides as an easy 2 miles each way to a pretty lake in the peaks.  What they DIDN'T say was that to get to the trail head, it was an 11 mile, 3,000 vertical foot drive up a skinny one-lane dirt road! The fact that there was no cell service at all, no other cars in sight the whole trip and some of the road had vertical drop offs of hundreds of feet on one side or the other just added to the tension.

Anyway, we survived the drive in and hiked through beautiful and fragrant evergreens to Little Boulder Lake and ate our lunch and hung around for an hour or so.  The hike down was quick and we were rewarded by a view of Mt. Shasta (snow-less at 14,000 feet this year, unheard of).  Nine miles into the bouncy drive back down the dirt road, we came face-to-face with a semi truck pulling a HUGE tractor on a wide-load trailer heading up to the logging areas.  We (that is, Lynnae) had to back the truck uphill for about 1/2 mile until we found room to pull off the road and let that baby pass. We were glad when we got back to pavement, but also thankful that these logging roads allowed us to penetrate 13 miles into the very rugged and steep wilderness out here without being Sherpas or marathoners.

Tucker got to swim and fetch a stick for a while.  He doesn't mind the cold.

This picture shows how clear and green the water is in the lake

There was an established campsite by the lake with a stone fire ring and this "throne" 

I had to try the seat of honor and it was comfortable!

Mt. Shasta 14,180 feet (second highest in CA) about 80 miles away

Weaverville Farmer's Market

Being in California, where about 50% of the fruits and vegetables grown in the US are from, you get used to getting great produce in the supermarkets.  But like in New England or anywhere else, it is in the farmer's markets where you can find the really great stuff.  We happened to pick farmer's market day to visit the nearest town of Weaverville, founded in 1850 (which doesn't sound like long ago to our New England friends, but in California terms, it is pretty old).  Weaverville is a logging, mining  and forest service town that now depends on tourism to a great extent to drive the economy.  In other words, it is a home to many rednecks and mountain folk, and it is also a hippie enclave that feels like a time capsule of the 60's.  The farmer's market was a great place to take in the local scene.

The farmer's market was in a meadow right on the highway through town.  Logging trucks were constantly going by. There was a live band playing too.

These folks sold many kinds of peppers, dried herbs and tomatoes.

The produce was beautiful, inexpensive ($1/pound for the heirloom tomatoes for example) and varied.  We bought lots and also some locally grown organic beef that we cooked up in our slow cooker today.  It was awesome!

We saw more tie-dye that day than we have in 20 years!

 Everyone was super nice and we had lots of conversations with the vendors.  We both got chair massages and we look forward to going back on Saturday for the arts festival, featuring a blues band and lots of local artists doing demonstrations.  Fun stuff!