Category Archives: November

Castle Crags Trail

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Elizabeth and I started our day at the Black Bear Diner in the City of Mount Shasta, where we enjoyed a massive breakfast and views of the city’s namesake mountain.

Our goal today was to hike into the Castle Crags in the eastern Klamath Mountains before driving home. But before that, we made an impromptu visit to Dunsmuir where, based on nothing more than a provocative sentence in my California guidebook, we went looking for Mossbrae Falls. We found them after a mile-long walk along train tracks, at the bottom of a hill hidden by trees—you could walk right by the falls without knowing they existed. But Mossbrae Falls were spectacular—only 50 feet tall, but 150 feet wide—and I was glad we made the trek.

Back on the road, we drove to the base of the crags. It was noon. That left us plenty of time for the 5.5-mile round trip hike into Castle Crags.

We started in a dense secondary forest of Douglas-fir, ponderosa pine, incense-cedar, and black oak. We couldn’t see the crags at all through the unbroken canopy. Nevertheless, a stiff wind blew through the trees and I was cold enough to put on all of my layers: a fleece jacket, a windbreaker, wool gloves, and a baseball cap. The forest’s understory, now at the beginning of the wet season, was bare, covered only with pine needles, pine cones, and oak leaves.

We climbed steadily up the trail, through forests that gradually became sunny and open. Greenleaf manzanita and Labrador tea showed up. Oaks that I couldn’t identify grew on spindly trunks with fissured bark.  The wind had stopped and the air had gotten warmer. I took off my jackets.

We finally saw the crags. The mountain ahead of us, instead of being covered with green pines like the others, bristled with spectacular silver spires. Lone pine trees, large in their own right but dwarfed by the crags, grew in the cracks between them. Castle Crags seemed two-dimensional from our distance—some waterfalls and mist and they would have looked like an old Chinese landscape painting.

We climbed, passing a Forest Service sign announcing our entrance to the Castle Crags Wilderness. The trail became rockier. The forest diminished into scrubland. Greenleaf manzanita was still with us from lower elevations, but it was joined by pinemat manzanita and ceanothus. A few pines grew out of the scrub.

The trail became faint, splitting and merging—a manzanita maze. Would we have trouble finding the correct trail on our way down?

Higher up, even the scrub faded, leaving us on bare granite. This was familiar terrain from our hikes in the Sierra. We scrambled up to a saddle near Castle Dome, using our hands for balance when the granite got steeper.

The crags, which had looked flat from far away, became three-dimensional once we were inside them. Crags next to the trail were some 50 feet tall; others were the size of skyscrapers.

We scrambled up to the saddle below Castle Dome to look down its other side. It was so narrow we could only stand on it one at a time. A great chasm opened up in front of us, dropping thousands of feet into a dark forest. On the opposite side of the chasm, a set of cliffs just like ours screamed down. In the distance, the fresh snow of Mount Shasta was so bright that it hurt to look at.

We stopped at a flat area to eat and drink. I was still so full from my Black Bear breakfast that I only ate a granola bar and some fruit leather. The mountains in the distance were a contrast to the crags: a gentle green landscape that reached to the horizon.

Elizabeth and I made it back to the car by 4, some 40 minutes before sunset. Pretty good timing, I think. We made the long drive back to the Bay Area, stopping at Los Mariachis in Red Bluff for huge portions of good Mexican food.

Bears on the Trinity Alps Stuart Fork

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Elizabeth and I stayed in Weaverville last night, still awestruck from the huge flocks of geese we saw in the Central Valley. Weaverville is a town of a few thousand people nestled in the Klamath Mountains, just south of the half-million acre Trinity Alps Wilderness. We stopped for an excellent dinner at La Grange, where local artists’ paintings of the Trinity Alps hung from the interior brick walls and the table centerpieces were filled with pine cones.

This morning we woke up at sunrise. Weaverville’s empty streets were filled with fog. Temperatures were below freezing, and cars, houses, and trees were covered in a layer of frost. How long had it been since I last scraped ice off my car windows?

I knew I wanted to hike in the Trinity Alps, but I didn’t know where to go. There was already snow on the mountain tops, and the roads to the trails were steep, winding, single-lane Forest Service roads, often unpaved: harrowing enough without snow and ice on them. We stopped at the Weaverville Ranger Station for some suggestions.

The ranger recommended the popular Stuart Fork Trail while his yellow Labrador, Scion, broke free of his leash and ran around the station. Elizabeth played with the dog while I talked to the ranger about the area. He gave me a topographic map of the trail and directions to the trailhead. Scion was rolling on the ground, and I gave him a good belly-rub on our way out.

The Stuart Fork trailhead was at the end of a narrow and potholed dirt road, but we got there without a problem. Our car was the only one in the parking lot. I expected not to see anyone on our hike.

Mountains west of Stuart Fork in the Trinity Alps

Outside it was shady, cold, and damp. Immediately I spotted some very large incense-cedar and Douglas-fir.

The Stuart Fork was a deep blue-green river with a little whitewater. Its sound filled the thickly forested canyon. Streams trickled downhill to meet it. In fact, we heard running water throughout today’s hike. What a contrast to the High Sierra, where we’d sometimes walk for hours without seeing water.

The forest, meanwhile, reminded me of the middle-elevations on the west side of the Sierra Nevada. Incense-cedar and Douglas-fir, the trees I’d seen near the car, were most abundant. There were also sugar pine and ponderosa pine. I even saw an unexpected lodgepole pine. Broadleaf trees included black oak and bigleaf maple. In a way, the forest reminded me of an outsized version of the riverside forests I’d spent so many days hiking through in Pennsylvania and New York. I felt at home.

After an hour and a half on the trail, it was almost time for us to turn around. I heard something, like a tree or rock, fall down by the river. A minute later, a big, furry black animal crossed the trail 15 yards ahead of me. I’d seen dark objects out of the corner of my eye hundreds of times will hiking and wondered what they were, but this time I knew instantly that I was looking at a bear. “Uh-oh,” I said. We stopped. The bear seemed oblivious. Did it not know we were there? Or did it know, but just not care? The bear stopped and turned toward me. Recognizing a human, it ran away, bounding up the hill. I turned around and Elizabeth was wide-eyed and starting to walk backward. Now the bear’s cub crossed the trail. Then the cub, too, saw us and ran up the hill.

Elizabeth had turned around and was walking away at a quick pace. Well, I thought, it’s time to head back, and now would be a perfectly good time to turn around. I followed her.

We were still tingling with excitement from seeing the bears when around a turn in the trail ahead came a wolf. “Not again,” I thought. He was walking right toward us. He looked oddly happy—as if he wanted to be pet. Then I saw his collar: he was just someone’s dog. I rubbed his head and he brushed up against my leg. He turned around and led us down the trail to his owners. They were all backpacking up to Morris Meadow. Their dog was Diesel Henry, a wolf-malamute hybrid. We chatted a while, then we went on our ways.

I kept looking around as we walked back, taking in as much as I could: the huge conifers, the moss-covered maples and oaks, the snow-covered peaks, the dark green canyons that went on without end. Everything held the promise of more adventure. It felt like the beginning of a crush. I’d have to arrange a way to see the Trinity Alps again.

Gray Lodge Wildlife Area

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Elizabeth and I drove through the Central Valley on our way to the Klamath Mountains today. The farmland was so flat, the roads were perfectly straight and named after letters in the alphabet.

We were on Road Z. At one point, the road’s pavement just ended and turned into gravel. There were no other cars around for miles.

It’s late November and all the fields were brown and yellow, separated by rows of trees with fall colors. Rain clouds billowed to the west over the Coast Ranges and to the east over the Sierra Nevada, but the sky was placid above us.

We were going to spend the night in Weaverville, but we amused ourselves on the way by visiting wildlife refuges in the Central Valley. One of our stops was the Gray Lodge Wildlife Area.

Marshes and Sutter Buttes from Gray Lodge Wildlife Area

On the way there, we saw a group of parked cars with people milling about nearby. What were they doing? Was it an accident? We slowed down. Everybody had big binoculars hanging from their necks. They even had a scope on a tripod. These were birders—serious ones. Elizabeth rolled down her window and asked if they were looking at anything unusual. “Sandhill cranes,” one of them said, “about 200 yards west of the road. Nothing unusual, but something good to see.”

We stopped our car and got out. All I had was an old pair of pocket binoculars. I felt embarrassed looking through them. I could barely see the cranes.

Fortunately, the birders let us use their scope. The sandhill cranes were nearly four feet tall. They were slender and gray with bright red crowns. We heard their high-pitched rattling calls. Elizabeth watched a pair dance. A few cranes took off and circled gracefully before returning to the group. Then we thanked the birders and left for the wildlife area.

The Gray Lodge Wildlife Area is directly north of the Sutter Buttes. Known as the smallest mountain range in the world, the Sutter Buttes form a perfect circle of hills rising directly out of the Central Valley. They aren’t particularly tall, but the immense flatness that surrounds them ensures that they are often visible from hundreds of miles away. I’d seen them many times while driving Interstate 5.

Gray Lodge Wildlife Area was the closest I’d ever been to the Sutter Buttes. They were right in front of me. But now they were completely obscured by low, gray clouds.

We did the gravel auto tour route through the refuge. The landscape started out pleasant enough: a mix of brush, tall cottonwoods, and marshes. The wetlands were filled with ducks, geese, and other birds. Nice.

Things got better when the clouds cleared a little. It was late in the afternoon and the sunlight came in at a low angle. It lit up the yellow and umber leaves of the trees next to the marshes. I could finally make out the western hills of the Sutter Buttes. Their grasslands were gold and the oaks and pines scattered upon them were dark green spots.

Storm clouds were piling up over the Sierra Nevada. Thousands of white geese were flying past the clouds, illuminated by the setting sun. They were far enough away to look like dots, but there were so many that they turned into an endless stream of white Vs crossing the sky.

The white geese were snow geese and Ross’s geese. They’re both big white fowl with black wingtips. They’re similar enough that I couldn’t tell them apart. But because of their colors, their silhouettes alternate distinctively between black and white as they flap their wings.

Near the end of the auto tour we passed one last wetland backed by the Sutter Buttes. It was filled with ducks and geese, much like the others. We stopped our car, rolled down our windows, and turned off the engine. The only sounds were wind, honking geese, and flapping wings.

Then the sound of a distant plane startled the birds.

The geese lifted up from the water in one giant wave. They blocked the view of the buttes behind them. Their white bodies and black wingtips made the entire mass flicker light and dark. Geese kept lifting up from the water, filling in the mass, as the others climbed higher. They filled the sky above us, swirling in different directions. There were thousands upon thousands of them.

I thought of the old accounts of endless herds of bison on the American prairie, how they once stretched to the horizon. And I thought of the old accounts of passenger pigeons, how their flocks could at one time darken the sky for days. Even California’s Central Valley once sustained some 40 million waterfowl on nearly 4 million acres of wetlands. Today, only 400,000 acres of wetlands remain. Waterfowl populations, predictably, have fallen to a tenth of what they once were. I wondered: If we could see so many birds on the wildlife area’s puny 9,200 acres, what was the entire Central Valley once like? I imagined the birds returning from their summer breeding grounds in the Arctic only to find the wetlands they had used for thousands of years drained and plowed. Starvation, disease, or hunting finished them off. It made me sad to think of the abundance that was once commonplace and of the millions of animals that had been sacrificed for wealth. The geese we saw were a reminder of what had been lost and what our land could still support.

We drove away. Dark clouds closed in. Rain pelted the roof our car. The Sutter Buttes faded behind the downpour. The huge flocks of birds we saw were no longer visible, vanished into the air.