Vacation: McCloud to Alturas

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.

Links
—McCloud Alturas photo gallery