Leakage from a Cluttered Mind

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

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.

Links
—Glenn County high point photo gallery