We really intended to do something today but it started raining and the wind came up so we didn’t. We emptied the waste tanks and took down our shore water system but other than that, we watched Audie Murphy westerns that had mostly midget casts.
We will head north again tomorrow. We intended to head for cooler weather than Southern California and, today at least, we got our wish.
We were scheduled to have a visit with my niece’s kid, Autumn, and her crony, Caylin, but they were both required to go to work and be productive today so we decided to make it at around 5:00 PM. To kill some time, we first took a spin to the Abbey of St. Clairvaux who was allegedly responsible for driving all the funny pronunciations of French out of France. Not really. It was a nice building but not worth a pilgrimage. Then we chose to drive to the town of Paradise, ravaged last November by an absolutely uncontrollable firestorm driven by extremely dry conditions and a 70 mile per hour wind from the southeast. It was a big story late last year, maybe because the damage was so extensive and random.
Almost all the buildings in town, which until recently housed businesses, have been destroyed. Huge expanses of former residential neighborhoods are now scattered piles of rubble with rusty metal parts sticking out of the ash. Almost all the trees are still standing but they are fried right up to the tippy-top and will ultimately fall down in all directions if not cleared. A shopping center which originally housed a Safeway, a Round Table Pizza, a liquor store, a Papa Murphy’s, an ice cream parlor and seven other businesses now is a back and two side masonry walls and a whole junkyard of rusting metal items about five feet deep. The bodies, and nothing else, of hundreds of burnt cars are everywhere. There were no tires. Motel pools are filled with fetid water but there is scant evidence there were ever adjoining motels. The Jack-in-the-Box sign is still there but the joint is gone.
An RV dealer in town lost all his inventory including a large but unidentifiable Class A diesel pusher. Only the wheel hubs and the steel cords from the tire beads remain. The frames looked like pretzels. It is grim and very sobering. More than 80 people were killed and about 30,000 people became homeless in minutes. The strong wind driving the fire lit up the whole town in seconds and the local firefighters were quickly overwhelmed. They were lucky to get out alive, as were scores of civilians. The fire took all the utilities. There was no electrical power until recently, due to the efforts of PG&E and their subcontractors. Sewer processing stations were unable to run pumps and aerators. The water supply was destroyed. Businesses remaining, other than the hardware store, have no customers.
Paradise is located on a ridge between two formerly gorgeous and scenic gorges. Nature has made a substantial comeback with lots of greenery popping up between the battlefields of wreckage. There is an abundance of heavy construction equipment in town converting scorched logs to chips, sound logs to lumber, demolishing remnants of foundations and scrapping the thousands of tons of metal poking up almost everywhere. It must have been horrible.
After a couple hours of checking out the devastation, we drove back into Chico and inchwormed our way through obnoxious traffic to the Bidwell Mansion, a gorgeous building located within the property of Cal State Chico. It is a very pretty building but we did not go in because it was closed. Still having time to fiddle about, we drove back out of town into the gorge north of Paradise to find that the fire had not just taken the town. On Honey Run Road, which borders Butte Creek, had, until recently, the Honey Run Covered Bridge, renowned for being the longest covered bridge west of the Mississippi. The embers must have been raining out of the sky from Paradise up on the ridge because they lit the bridge on fire and now it is merely some lonely-looking pilings in the stream. Nearly all of the houses in this gorge were also incinerated although we probably spotted about five or ten percent of the buildings which are still standing.
Having seen enough fricasseed stuff, we headed back downtown to meet Autumn at a great Chinese Buffet called Kwando, which is pronounced the same way as “when” in Spanish. We had a long dinner with this great kid and were joined about half way through by Caylin, who just started a job as a sprinkler fitter. Ironic that there weren’t sprinklers in any of the former structures in Paradise, Magalia and Honey Run. Maybe a few more would be only partially destroyed had they been fitted with fire suppression facilities.
Click the link for views of Hell. https://photos.app.goo.gl/RAy3GUornQRjtnfw5
Chico has both a Costco and a Trader Joe’s. We took advantage of this by cutting loose with better than $400 snapping up foodstuffs for our continued travels north. We did very well. I also got a supply of geezer meds for the next 100 days so we are really set.
However, this type of activity is boring and I have nothing to report other than that our RV space at Woodson Bridge RV has ample mud, some of which followed us into our trailer.
Today was not originally a travel day but we found the Nicolaus area so rewarding that we decided to leave early. There is a really great Mexican food and hamburger stand in East Nicolaus but we have eaten there twice and a third time would be dancing with a prospective heart attack. There are some nice nut tree orchards and once in a while we would see a cropduster fly over. Those who like catfish and bluegill go fishing here in the lake but the take is mostly carp, a type of fish so worthless that throwing them back is forbidden. With all these stellar features, we decided to leave a day early this morning and continued our northward trek.
We travelled on CA-70 for about as far as we could go before merging onto CA-99 through Chico. 99 transitioned into one lane each way shortly thereafter but we only had to follow it for about 20 miles before turning off onto a farm road and ultimately to the Woodson Bridge RV Park. The park has some spots right along the Sacramento River and we were assigned one of them. Unfortunately, the spaces are extremely narrow and it took us about an hour to get our mammoth trailer into our skinny spot. Rain made it much more pleasant.
The park has a lot of what are called “seasonal” tenants. “Seasonal” apparently really means “permanent” because some folks have grass all the way up to their floorboards. Many units have wood entry ramps and porches. They also have a substantial quantity of their treasures with them. The treasures are stored under grey and blue plastic tarps when not stuffed under the trailers and motor homes. There is no WiFi in the park but there are full hookups. There is no satellite TV but the park does have rudimentary cable TV that sometimes provides five or six channels with so little static one can almost make out the picture. Three of the channels are Fox so that leaves two or three.
We initially scheduled today for shopping for supplies but our last shopping trip was so effective that we decided we could let that go until we get more space in the fridge. We did drive into nearby Yuba City where we went to Harbor Freight to get a buffer because Peggy wants to polish the rather dingy exterior of our beloved Barbarian Invader.
Yuba City may be inhabited by folks who were unable to to find their way out of town so they had to get jobs and settle down. We tried many ways to leave but were defeated on several attempts. We did, however, get to see a lot of the town.
On the way home, we stopped again at Sammie’s in East Nicolaus where we purchased and consumed some more of their very tasty and economical food. We are sure it is bad for us but collectively we went into denial and ate every bit.
Since we are not going to shop here, we decided to do a bit of re-scheduling so we can leave tomorrow instead of the day after. We will depart, after some waste tank emptying at the dump station, before heading up CA-70 to a spot north of Chico. We will stop there to visit and probably embarrass my grand-niece who attends college in that town.
We had a cultural enrichment day today by making a trip to visit the California Railroad Museum in downtown Sacramento. It was about a 20 mile drive from our RV park in Nicolaus to Sacramento and it was a nice ride until we got into the mysterious and circuitous roads of our state capital. We found our way into the parking area for the museum after only one or two direction reversals. Once parked, both of us adults became completely stymied by the machine that dispenses the little paper chit making the parking legal. It was confusing for us so I called the phone number prominently displayed on the expensive kiosk housing the expensive electronic gizmo and was rewarded with extended recordings of information about how to retrieve a towed vehicle, how to acquire neighborhood parking permits, the location of the parking authority and other equally useless tidbits of info before finally being allowed to press zero to speak with a human. The human told us that the reason we could not get the frustrating machine to take our money was because our credit card was no good. Strangely, after that we were able to get the machine to accept our allegedly no good card and were rewarded with a six dollar scrap of paper.
We strolled over to the museum where they took another $12 a head to get in. The price, however, is quite reasonable once we took a look inside.
California has a rich and varied history of railroading being the terminus for the first transcontinental railroad and having considerable passenger and freight service. Additionally, the state has abundant agricultural lands served by extensive rail assets along with many mining railroad systems. It seems pretty plain that Californians have a considerable debt to acknowledge as almost all the work was performed by 18,000 Chinese laborers along with quite a few Irish immigrants. It was a difficult and dangerous job making rail beds through the Sierras considering that the work was performed by hammer drilling and black powder explosives, all done by hand. There are hundreds of tunnels through granite, miles of rail protected by snow sheds, massive amounts of cliffside work along with gigantic cut and fill operations and low wages. The Chinese withstood all of this misery in the hopes that they could live better than they had in China in the late 19th Century.
The museum has extensive displays about the labor forces, the rich kleptomaniacs that funded the operations and a truly spectacular display of both steam and diesel locomotives in addition to freight, passenger, refrigerator, sleeper and dining cars. They have a primitive but quite effective tunnel boring machine, railroad size. The largest steam locomotive I have ever seen is located indoors right near the lobby. There are even displays of prosthetic devices used by folks who had their hands and legs amputated by dangerous work practices. The museum’s collection is extensive and thorough. There is also a nice gift shop with very expensive items available for purchases by suckers, including us.
We lingered in the museum until our parking permit expired so we made our way back to our truck and left the capital city for the drive back to Nicolaus. We took a little different route back home and stopped in East Nicolaus, an intersection with even fewer building than Nicolaus. The only open business we detected was a Mexican food and hamburger joint called Sammie’s. They served us superb burgers, amazing carnitas fries and the best chocolate milk shakes we have had since 2016 in Manti, Utah. The prices were very good.
See photos by clicking the link. https://photos.app.goo.gl/JJqz8dUw4LV7xxdu6
We gathered up all our stuff and departed from Yosemite Lakes TT this morning. Departure didn’t take long because we cleaned up and packed most of our stuff yesterday. We also spent quite a bit of time checking out the dogs that were being walked by our RV space. The only drawback to our form of travel is that we miss our doggies who are hanging out with our kids back in San Diego.
The road from Yosemite Lakes back to the Central Valley of California initially climbs and descends a few times fluctuating between 3000′ and 5000′ above sea level. Once in Groveland, the road starts falling pretty substantially from around 4000′ to 3000′ until it reaches the top of the Priest Grade where the road drops from 3000′ to about 500′ in around 6 or 7 miles. It is a very serpentine and steep decline but, fortunately, our recently repaired trailer brakes worked perfectly, keeping my trousers dry and unsoiled.
From the bottom of the grade near Chinese Camp, we headed almost straight west on CA-120 until we reached Visalia where we turned on CA-99 for a long run north. We passed through Stockton and Sacramento with their dreadful traffic and labyrinthine routing but emerged only slightly shaken on the north side of the state capital. We continued another 20 miles or so up 99 until we reached the four or five buildings which constitute the town of Nicolaus. There we turned off and pulled into the Lake Minden Thousand Trails facility. We found a spot along the lake which really isn’t a lake but a small reservoir. There are quite a few birds and fishermen here. Unfortunately, there are no sewer hookups or WiFi so we will be on our way pretty soon.
Another trip into Yosemite National Park filled our day today. Instead of planning another excursion on the valley floor, we chose to drive from our RV park down into Yosemite Valley but continued without lingering up the other side of the Valley to an alleged town (really just an intersection) called Chinquapin. At Chinquapin, we turned off onto the Glacier Point Road and continued for about 15 or 20 miles on a serpentine and regularly quite narrow road. At the end, we arrived at Glacier Point.
Glacier Point is on the south edge of the Valley some 3500 feet above the floor. The views of Half Dome and thundering Nevada Falls are spectacular. Yosemite Valley can be seen thousands of feet below and a magnificent range of very high Sierra peaks can be seen thousands of feet above. It is a stunning place but the air is pretty thin and I was gasping like a steam engine while wandering about. Peggy seems to be in much better shape because she was outdistancing me and stopping while I wheezed along behind.
Despite the wheezing and the 2 hour drive each way, the reward of the glorious views is really worth it. There is nothing boring along the way and the passage through a bit of the Valley floor is magical. It is difficult to find an unappealing sight here; flowers, roaring and trickling waterfalls, tumbling river rapids and placid pools, forests of pine and redwood trees, dramatic ridges, cliffs and ravines, snow fields and grassy meadows line the roads all the way there. Fortunately, this place was declared a national park during Teddy Roosevelt’s administration and no greedy idiots have figured out a way to engage in logging and mining here since. We hope it stays that way and does not fall victim to the fate of the adjacent Hetch Hetchy Valley which was flooded so San Francisco can have crystal-clear drinking water. San Francisco just ain’t worth it.
See photos. Click the link. https://photos.app.goo.gl/kSG9QHognBSwXgcNA
Yesterday we hung out at the trailer because we had to do the laundry and I had to dump the waste tanks. It was uninteresting.
Today we were again free to explore because we did our chores yesterday. We had a good breakfast here in the trailer then took off on a tour of the campground. We were unaware of about half of the extent of this park, surprising because we have been in Yosemite Lakes TT twice prior to this year’s stay. We found this facility has two different tent camping areas, getaway cabins across the Tuolumne River, tiny shacks called bunkhouses up in the bushes, a bunch of yurts and a hostel, apparently for cyclists. It also has a little store / gas station combo where they happily charge about six bits more per gallon than we paid down in the flat lands. They are quite busy because fuel is only sold here and a couple other spots between Yosemite and Merced.
After irritating our fellow campers by spying on them, we left the campground and headed about 5 miles west down CA-120 where we found a spot on the Tuolumne River called Rainbow Pool. It looks like it would be a great swimming hole but there were no takers today, maybe due to the near-freezing snowmelt running through it. There were a couple of fisherman there and one of them was doing quite well. The other guy was sullen.
We also took a spin on some back roads northeast of Groveland which is located a bit further west on 120. We spotted nice patches of flowers, a big flock of Canadian Geese feeding in a pasture and many confusing road signs and pavement markings. After a bit, we found our way back to 120 and headed back for our trailer because the sky was starting to look sort of ominous. Just as we got home, a gentle rain started which soon changed into more substantial precipitation before transitioning into a nifty thunder and lightning storm. The thunder produces some extraordinary echoes here in the mountains and valleys of the Sierras.
Happily, we found no leaks in our trailer.
See photos. Click the link. https://photos.app.goo.gl/V6thRYS4hBsXynFU7
Today we drove into Yosemite Valley to gaze in wonder at that extraordinary place. It is about an hour drive from our campground to the Valley floor but it is actually only about 35 miles away. The road to the park winds around quite a bit and climbs about 3000 feet before descending about 3000 feet to the Valley floor. Our federal geezer pass saved us $35 at the gate.
The first sight entering the park on CA-120 is the magnificent Bridalveil Falls cascading almost 1000 feet from the rim of the valley to the floor. However, we tried to look the other way in a fruitless attempt to avoid distraction because we had a plan to eat breakfast at the Yosemite Valley Lodge. We found our way there where we were served some park concessionaire’s food that was very nearly almost nominal but pricey. The food was better than the food at the north rim of the Grand Canyon but worse than the food at the Federal Court in San Francisco. We are not convinced that having the low bidder in the private sector run the food and lodging concessions in parks is a good idea.
The Yosemite Valley Lodge is located right at the bottom of Yosemite Falls, a 1000 foot plus three-tiered waterfall that has so much water falling that is makes smacking noises when it hits the rocks far below the rim. The sound can be heard for miles.
In 2014 we passed this way during California’s dreadful drought and not a drop of water was falling into the Valley. However, this was a year with substantial rainfall and all of Yosemite’s waterfalls are open for business. The Merced River running down the Valley floor was swollen and considerable white water rapids can be seen throughout the Valley floor. The wildflowers and dogwood trees are in full bloom and very pretty.
The massive granite monoliths of Half Dome and El Capital loom over the puny tourists below. We stopped in a meadow below El Capitan and got out all our optical gear to look for climbers insane enough to climb the 4000 foot smooth granite block. It took us a while to spot any because they look like tiny black dots to the naked eye but between a long telephoto camera lens and a 20 – 60 power spotting scope we finally found quite a few loonies up there. It looks like about a two or three day climb for those experienced enough to try this amateur killer. I wonder where they poop. We stayed clear of the very bottom of this huge cliff in case my guess was right.
There are not sufficient superlatives to describe the stunning beauty of this place. People have flocked here for many years and only the most jaded would be unable to be awed by this place. It is absolutely magnificent.
See some photos by clicking the link. https://photos.app.goo.gl/QggnJrjWdUACQ21BA