In the last few years, California has been plagued with horrible, runaway brush and forest fires. One of the more recent conflagrations was the Carr Fire, which burned a substantial amount of forest and grasslands here in Shasta and adjacent Trinity Counties. It was started by a sparky wheel from a tire failure resulting in 230,000 acres (358 square miles) of pine and oak forests and some 1600 buildings being fricasseed between July 23 and August 30, 2018. Quite a bit of this land was within the Whiskeytown National Recreation Area although there is substantially less recreation now.

Today we took a spin through the abundant burned and few lucky unburned areas involved in the fire. Most of the forests are now huge expanses of big pointy black sticks devoid of leaves, needles or branches. Fire is funny, vigorously rubbing out some areas and leaving others unscathed. One of those places is the tiny town of French Gulch where all two blocks of downtown is intact but the majority of outlying houses are now just grubby flat spots with scorched driveways and this spring’s weeds popping out everywhere. All the communication and power poles and lines are new.

We took a spin up to Shasta Dam and Lake, the largest man-made reservoir in CA. There are nice views of the dam, lake and Mt. Shasta in the distance.

Today was also my beloved Peggy’s birthday so she got to choose where I was going to take her for dinner. As usual, her choice was superb, selecting a great Chinese restaurant called Sailing Boat in Redding that served very tasty food. Our waitperson was from India but had strangely gone to Marston Junior High in San Diego in her youth. Marston is located about 8 blocks from our house in San Diego and the same school where both our kids went to junior high. As I remember, both kids hated it.

We took a few shots of areas unburned, which were quite nice. Click the link if you wish to see them. https://photos.app.goo.gl/1rJ4Mg9fb8tWz2N89