The objective of the day was to summit Ash Creek Butte and find the geocache there. Our approach was off of highway 97 on Military Pass Road. This is the same road taken to access the trailheads up to the Mount Shasta glaciers. We had gone about a mile when we encountered U.S. Forest Service law enforcement officers. They asked if we had any woodcutting equipment, what we were going to do (in general), and where we were from (in a conversational way). Then they warned us to be careful because there would be trucks loaded with wood coming down the road. I’m sure permits were required to cut wood, and it makes sense to me that they would check those permits. But I didn’t get why it would take six armed officers to do that. I’m wondering if they weren’t checking for some illegal leafy plant material to be coming out as well.

Military Pass Road was rougher than I expected it to be so we had to drive slowly. After we passed the turnoffs to the Mount Shasta trailheads, the road smoothed out a bit. Eventually we joined Deer Mountain Road, which is graded gravel. We stayed on this for a few miles and then turned eastward on a logging road that dead-ended at 6800 ft elevation on the flank of Ash Creek Butte.

From here we had a steep 600 ft climb up to a ridgeline. It might have been better to park at a different dead-end road north of Surprise Lake. It was 200 ft lower, but accessing the ridgeline would not have been so steep. Once we achieved the ridge, we simply followed it as best we could to the summit. The ridge, of course, is the lip of the volcano crater, although one side of it seems to been blown out.

We never had to walk on unstable rock, or put ourselves in danger of an extreme fall. About three-quarters of the way up, I took this photo looking back at the ridge. Mount Shasta dominates the skyline to the west.


Beyond the summit is some really rugged stuff. We didn’t go over there.


On the summit, we found the geocache and signed the log. It has gotten one visit a year and we were the first to log it this year. We also signed the summit register, which has many more signatures in it than the geocache. Interestingly, the previous entry to ours was someone from Pleasanton. The summit of Shasta was wrapped in clouds. The peak finally popped out in the late afternoon.


Shasta and its glaciers are so impressive. We could easily see avalanche tracks and huge crevíces. I am actually still amazed that I have stood on the summit of Shasta by climbing a route up one of those glaciers. I couldn’t have done it without some great snow and ice climbing instructors and guides.


Our descent was anticlimactic. We exited the area on Deer Mountain Road out to McCloud, and then headed home.

Today was primarily a day of checking out Lava Beds National Monument. I was tired of lugging the camera around, so there are no photos.

From Alturas we backtracked to Canby and took 139 towards Tule Lake. We took the back way into the Lava Beds, stopping at a couple of geocaches near interesting lava features. I don’t think we saw anyone else while in this remote part of the park. After stopping at the visitor center, we went into a couple of the numerous lava tubes. Frankly, we weren’t too interested. We’ve been in several long lava tubes in Bend, OR, and one lava tube cave seems much like the others.

On the way north out of the National Monument, we hiked around a couple of locations where the Modoc War of 1873 occurred. After years of disagreements and skirmishes, Modoc leaders were meeting with U.S. peace commissioners on April 11, 1873. After discussions were fruitless, the Modocs turned on the commissioners and killed most of them. This location is now marked by Canby’s cross. A couple of miles away, we hiked through Captain Jack’s Stronghold, an area of natural lava ridges, cracks, depressions, and caves. It provided the Modocs a very strong defensive position. In a fight at this location a couple of months before the ill-fated peace negotiation, the Modocs killed 35 soldiers while taking no casualties. There was a predictable eventual outcome, of course. The Modocs lost.

Farther north we stopped for a roadside geocache and discovered the site of a POW camp used by Italian and German prisoners during WWII. It is not open to tour, but does have a small descriptive sign.

We followed the California-Oregon border west to highway 97 and took that back to Weed and our motel for the evening.

Spending a night in McCloud was certainly a quiet experience. Even though our B&B room overlooked the main street, there wasn’t any traffic after about 8 pm. Since breakfast (a voucher at the café in the McCloud River Mercantile building) was served from 8 to 10 am, and we were up early, we decided to go for a hike to the three waterfalls on the nearby McCloud River. We started at the lower falls and hiked quickly along the river, through the campground, past the middle falls, and climbed up out the gorge to view the upper falls. We hustled back to the pickup, logging a bit over 3 miles hiking, and made it back to the café for breakfast by 9:30 am.

We stopped briefly for a view of Mt. Shasta (this mountain just dominates the horizon from numerous locations in north-east California) before heading on to Burney Falls.


At Burney Falls State Park, we parked by the visitor center and used three nearby earthcaches to guide our hiking. Earthcaches have no container or log, but take you to geological features where you must gather some data related to that feature. The river here is primarily spring-fed, with huge amounts of water gushing from layers in the lava rock (much like the Metolius River in Oregon). We hiked down to the base of the falls, and then continued on downstream to Lake Britton. When we returned to the parking area, we had our picnic lunch and then continued on toward Alturas.

Somewhere around Adin we passed some marvelous welded sculpture and I had to turn around to get a photo.


We arrived in Alturas just before dinner time. The Best Western Trailside Inn was a comfortable motel. After dinner, we drove out to the Modoc wetlands viewing area. We didn’t see many birds (a few geese) but heard quite a few as they were settling in for the evening.

On our first day of a short vacation to the north east part of California, we headed north on I5. A few miles south of Redding, Karen saw the sign for the historic Cottonwood district, and since it was a good time for a lunch break, we took the off-ramp. In the mid-1800’s Cottonwood was a stage stop. The historic area seems to be about 1 block long, and looks a bit dreary. We stopped in the shade at a small park across the street from the Post Office. While munching on my sandwich, I checked for a nearby geocache using my phone and saw there was one less than 100’ away.

A special GPS geocaching exhibit was at the Turtle Bay Park museum in Redding, so we stopped to go see that (GPS Adventures Maze Exhibit). When Karen saw the admission price to Turtle Bay Park she elected to stay outside and read her book (actually she stayed inside the visitor center because it was air conditioned, and it was a hot afternoon). I zipped through the maze without looking at all the details so she didn’t have to wait for me too long. After getting coffee nearby, we headed north again.

I stopped at Sims Road for a geocache at an old steel suspension bridge over the Sacramento River. I believe it was the first major project completed by the newly formed Civilian Conservation Corps in 1933. The parts for the bridge were delivered without any instructions on how to construct it, but the crews figured it out. The banks of the Sacramento frame Mt. Shasta here.

There is another nearby cache (Sims’ Big Brother) that I am interested in, but it would be a slow 4×4 drive and we didn’t have time.

Continuing north, we drove into the town of Mt. Shasta and found the headwaters of the Sacramento River. It’s a good size spring pouring out of the side of a mountain.

We stayed the night in McCloud at the McCloud River Mercantile. It’s a nice B&B with rooms upstairs and shops downstairs. All of it has been extensively refurbished.

It turns out that on my last trip into the Mendocino National Forest west of Orland, I didn’t go far enough west to find a geocache on page 65 of the Northern California Delorme map. I remedied that today with a fun trip into the remote parts of Mendocino National Forest. My destination was a cache on top of Black Butte, which is also the high point of Glenn County, but I intended to search for a number of other caches along my route.

I headed west out of Willows on highway 162, which turns into Alder Springs road. This eventually becomes a well-graded dirt road, but it does continue west all the way to highway 101, through Covelho in Round Valley. I found a couple of caches along the pavement part of the road before hitting the dirt. Black Butte is just about 60 miles from Willows.

A dead-end track leads up the side of Black Butte, then it’s about 0.5 miles of easy hiking to the summit on a clear use-trail. The geocache hadn’t been logged since July, 2007, and apparently folks were having difficulty finding the cache and were signing the summit register instead. I found both the summit register and geocache together in plain sight. Unfortunately, I could not open the cache. PVC pipe with a screw plug just seems to get welded together as time goes by.

I drove a little farther west to Mendocino Pass and then turned north to join up with route M4, which I roughly followed back east to Paskenta.

As I was approaching one cache location, I paused at an intersection to consult my GPSr and a forest service fire crew rolled by and stopped. One of the crew hopped out to inquire if I was OK—ie. do you know where you are and how to get out of here? I assured him I was fine—really. I’m not sure he completely believed me. Anyway, I made the turn I wanted to the next cache, which described the Nome Cult Trail—a “trail of tears” of sorts for the Maidu Indians around Chico. Four hundred and sixty one Indians were forced to relocate from Chico to the Round Valley Reservation on foot through this rugged terrain. Only two hundred and seventy seven survived the trip.

In the late afternoon I was getting pretty tired, but wanted to find the last caches in a series. They were harder to find than I had hoped, and then I came upon this large rattlesnake sunning itself in the road. After taking a few photos, I decided I didn’t want to poke my hands into any more rock crevices, so I called it a day.

I got a hamburger at Burger King in Corning, which was unremarkable except it was the slowest service I have ever had at a fast food restaurant. Finally got home about 10pm—it was a long day.