We hauled ass out of wine country and headed north toward Mt. Shasta, but not without swinging through Chico, CA to check in on the very formidable Sierra Nevada Brewing Company.  What an awesome brewery with a great restaurant with outdoor seating.  Check it out if you are ever in the area…it is definitely worth the trip.

We arrived later than expected in Mt. Shasta, and after a few-mile drive up the hills into the national forest lands, we arrived at our campground only to find that it was completely full.  We bolted farther up the hill and found a pullout on the side of the road to crash for the night until we could do some more involved research the next day.Mt. Shasta is a cool little mountain town in CA not far from the OR border.  I first visited Mt. Shasta back in 2009 when I was working for Jack Johnson Company in PC.  At that time, Mt. Shasta was interested in expanding their resort by adding more terrain and ski-in ski-out residential properties.  When the market crashed, all of those plans were shelved, and to this day, the development has not been completed.  So, Mt. Shasta remains the sleepy little mountain town it was back in 2009, and probably for the better.  We managed to get a few loads of laundry done while in town, and I also had the tires rotated on the van. We headed slightly west of town toward Cascade Lake, and after a brief hike around the lake, we found an awesome free campsite with unobstructed views of Mt. Shasta.  The weather was beautiful, but the night was cold considering we were above 6,000 feet.  With a little more time at this site, I was able to smoke a beef brisket on the Traeger that evening as we watched the sun set over Mt. Shasta.

The next day, we stopped at the Mt. Shasta Visitor’s Center and connected with a woman who worked there that seemed to know everything about the area and beyond.  We picked her brain on exploring the CA redwood forests, and she filled the margins of the maps she gave us with handwritten notes and directions on what to see and what to avoid.  We left Mt. Shasta later that morning, not feeling completely fulfilled by our stay.  Shockingly, we didn’t visit one of the nearby breweries, nor did we play a round a golf (too expensive for our senior budget), and nor did we plan a bike ride.  I’d describe our stay as “industrious”, and we took the time to slow things down and get some errands done.  Shit, I even had time to remove the 100-watt solar panel from the trailer so that I could use it more effectively to follow the sun and generate more free power, more easily.  And the weather was so nice, we even did a little sunbathing…what?!?!  Anyway, next stop would be Ashland, OR, heading north to get south to the coastal redwoods of northern California.  Red lumba (that’s “lumber”, for non-Bostonians), here we come!