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 ( Read more... )

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 ( Read more... )

Last Saturday we hiked to East Boulder Lake in the Trinity Alps wilderness west of Mt. Shasta. As I shared in part 1 of this trip, the climb up to the lake was steep in places but full of views.


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The Park Fire continues to burn in northern California, north of Chico and east of Red Bluff. As of Sunday evening it has burned 386,000 acres. That's over 600 square miles. It is now the 5th largest fire in modern California history.

Here's a map of the fire as of this evening from CalFire (click on image for link to source page):


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This past weekend we headed up to far northern California. Friday night we drove to Redding and stayed there. Saturday morning we saw a lot of smoke to the east from the Park Fire, but then we drove almost two hours northwest toward the Trinity Alps. By the time we reached the trailhead for East Boulder Lake an hour west of Mt. Shasta there was no ( Read more... )

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 ( Read more... )

Last night I booked a trip to go hiking in the mountains this weekend. This morning I was checking my news feed and...


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We made a decision to cancel our travel plans for the Fourth of July weekend. We were going to drive up to northern California and spend 4 days hiking in the Trinity mountains near Mt. Shasta. Now we'll stay home instead. I've even given up Friday as a PTO day. I'll work on Friday instead. 😢

We made this decision on Sunday, when we were home and ( Read more... )

A magnitude 6.4 earthquake struck California's north coast region early morning. The epicenter was a few miles offshore from the town of Ferndale, population 3,500. Scattered damage was caused to roads and buildings. Thousands of residents in the remote area lost power or water. Two deaths occurred shortly after the earthquake. Authorities say that ( Read more... )

I'm still catching up on the first few rounds of my Beer Tasting 2022 project. A few weeks ago I bought a pair of amber ales in six-packs. As with Round 2 when I compared two dark lagers that turned about to be almost indistinguishable once poured I ended up choosing these two beers because I expected them to be similar. Although I didn't start ( Read more... )