Tales & Trails of a Traveling Wiseguy

North Coast Roadtrip travelog #9
Fort Bragg · Sun, 27 Jul 2025, 4:30pm

We wrapped up our morning on the Lost Coast a bit before noon, drove inland to Highway 101, then south, then dodged back out to the coast along Route 1 to Fort Bragg. Just north of town is a spot we always enjoy hiking, MacKerricher State Park.



There's a beach here, which attracts the attention of, I'd say, most of the park's visitors. But when the typical summer weather is somewhere in the 60s and kind of cloudy, there are better things to do than sit in the sand and be cold. We always like walking the trail out to the bluffs. It starts with this boardwalk (pic above) into a forbidding looking forest of sea-swept trees. Just like you can't judge a book by its cover, though, you can't judge a trail by its first 150 meters. The trail cuts through the stand of trees to open bluffs not far above the ocean.



Out here the boardwalk loops around and doubles back. It's not clear if it's an official trail anymore, but it's still marked on the maps... so we jumped off the boardwalk and onto well-worn footpaths along the edge of the bluffs.



The clouds in the sky made today not my favorite visit to MacKerricher State Park. Oddly it's sunny over in Fort Bragg, a mile inland from this craggy point, but out here it's overcast. The weird and interesting thing, though, is how colorful the plants clinging to the cliffs are in this light. Known as ice plants or sea fig, they're invasive to the California coast but— for better or worse— grow really well here. At least they're pretty to look at with their bright colors. 🙄



As we walked along the bluffs we had the area mostly to ourselves. Out her we passed on family and one solo hiker. That's way better than near the parking lot, which was full of people whose loud conversations were all about (a) which caliber of ammunition is best for their guns, (b) driving illegal and loud go-karts around the parking lot, and (c) having to take a shit. Yeah, we're always happy to leave the parking lot behind. Sometimes all it takes is that first 150 meters to get far from the madding crowd.



After a while of walking the bluffs we took a shortcut back through that stand of trees to an old rail trail. The rails have long since been removed, but the old rail bed runs arrow-straight through the area. It took us back to the edge of the parking lot, where we crossed back down to our parked car and packed up to drive into town.

North Coast Roadtrip travelog #7
Shelter Cove · Sun, 27 Jul 2025, 10:30am

Life's a beach. Sometimes it's a dreary beach. Alas that has been our experience this morning on the Lost Coast. We drove out here yesterday afternoon on our North Coast roadtrip and stayed last night at a nice inn perched on the cliffs. Alas all we've had to see for the high cost of lodging and food out here is fog. We knew fog would be a thing, but our weather apps promised us there'd be some clearing in the afternoon. Nope. Not while we've been out here anyway.

We lingered at our room at the inn this morning to see if the fog might lift like the weather forecast even today said it would. Still nope. So we decided to go visit some beaches in the fog. Nearby Shelter Cove are Black Sand Beach and Little Black Sand Beach.



We started with a drive to Little Black Sands Beach (photo) because it's just up the road from where we stayed. There's not a lot out here; just an end-of-the-road gravel parking/turnaround area and a crumbling bit of old road that serves as a footpath down to the beach.

That beach isn't really black sand, by the way. It is gravel. It's not particular fun to spend any time on. And it's not helped at all by the fact that a) the temperature is cool, b) the fog makes it so that we can't see much, and c) the water is super dangerous— as attested to by warning signs that caution visitors not even to dip a toe in the water, the ocean is so dangerous!



After visiting Little Black Sand Beach we drove up the road two miles to (big) Black Sand Beach. It was the same thing but... bigger. I actually preferred the smaller scaled of the little beach. It felt more intimate and more like a place we could have to ourselves. The bigger beach was far from crowded but there were usually a few other people in sight at any point. And the water was just as murderous.

In beauty I walk. In dreary, murderous beauty.

North Coast Roadtrip travelog #5
Eureka · Sat, 26 Jul 2025, 3:15pm

After driving quite a bit this morning— including a relaxing roll along Avenue of the Giants— and rock-hounding at Agate Beach we'd worked up quite an appetite for lunch. No, we didn't eat at a brewery as the title of this journal entry made lead you to believe. We ate lunch at a regular restaurant. Then we went to the brewery, just for beer tasting. 😅

Lost Coast Brewing is a small brewery located in Eureka, California. We passed through Eureka this morning driving north, driving right past the brewery just south of downtown, then ate lunch just up the street from it. We mulled eating at the brewery, as it has a small food menu in addition to its beer, but decided the eats might be better at a regular restaurant. So we enjoyed Philadelphia-style cheese steaks first then drove over to the brewery.

I'm familiar with a few of Lost Coast's beers. Grocery stores here in California generally carry their Great White and Downtown Brown varieties. Great White is the one with a Picasso-esque shark on the label. That shark art also exists as a huge wood carving in front of the brewery (photo right/above).

I'm not much of a fan of the Great White, and I've had Downtown Brown various times before, so in picking a handful of beers for my taster sampling I chose a bunch of beers I've never seen before. There was a pilsner, a plain wheat, an amber ale, a dry stout and the Peanut Butter Chocolate Milk Stout. I also grabbed a quick taste of the Great White to remind myself of what I'm not missing.

I liked three of the beers enough to want to buy six-packs to take home: the pilsner, the wheat, and the candy-bar-in-a-glass stout.

Beers I didn't even bother tasting include any of their IPAs and overly fruity wheats. I know I don't care for those. I grabbed a quick taste of their best-selling Great White to remind myself of what I'm not missing.

Unfortunately when I went to check their shop, most of the beers I liked were not sold in bottles or cans; they're only available on tap at the brewery. That left the Peanut Butter Chocolate Milk Stout as the only one I could buy to take home with me. So I bought two boxes. 😂

Update: since getting back home I've enjoyed one can of the candy-bar-in-a-glass stout. It really is like drinking a candy bar in a glass. That's why I've only had one. It's delicious but it's so sweet it's not something I find enjoyable to drink too many of. It's like milkshakes. I love milkshakes— but I've never drank two of them in one day.

North Coast Roadtrip travelog #3
Redcrest · Sat, 26 Jul 2025, 9am

This morning we got up around 7:30 at our motel in Garberville. The main reason I picked this particular tiny town for Friday night halfway, as opposed to pushing 30-45 minutes further north to a larger town along US 101, was to do a special drive in the quiet hours of the morning today. The Avenue of the Giants.


The Avenue of the Giants begins just north of Garberville and runs 31 miles, roughly paralleling highway 101. But for most of the drive you can't tell that you're close to a major north-south artery with 4 lanes of cars and trucks whizzing past at 65mph. Instead you're on a quiet country two-lane that winds among stately trees that can reach over 300 feet tall. The oldest of these trees are over 2,000 years old; though most of the trees in these groves probably are just 500-700 years old.

We dropped the top on our convertible, cranked the heat (because it's chilly out this morning!), and enjoyed the 360° view.

In beauty I walk. Even when I drive my car.

North Coast Roadtrip travelog #2
Garberville · Fri, 25 Jul 2025, 10pm

In my previous blog I wrote about our Friday Night Halfway trip to the tiny town of Garberville. I pushed out thats blog as quickly as possible this evening after arriving in Garberville and settling in to the hotel because I wasn't sure how much time I'd have for more. Well, there's a whole lot of nothing to do in this town on a Friday night, so here comes part 2. I'm calling this Postcards From Garberville.



The drive up US 101 this evening was pleasant once we got out of the San Francisco area. Once past the 8- to 10-lane stretches of superhighway— and the loss of lanes in the Novato Narrows as my friend Dave says it's called— 101 is a really pretty road. The photo above comes from somewhere above wine country in Mendocino County. Yeah, the road is narrowing there, too. It's one of the few places in far northern California where 101 isn't a 4-lane highway.

Of course that spot, climbing through the golden hills, isn't the narrowest....



In a few spots in Humboldt County US-101 narrows considerably as it winds through groves of redwood trees. Yes, there are redwood parks up here, including Redwood National Park, but you don't even have to go into a park to see these magnificent trees. They're right on the road. You have to slow down and steer not to hit them.



We pulled off Highway 101 into Garberville just before sunset Friday evening. You can actually see most of the town in this photo if you squint. 😅 That's our motel with the "MOTEL" sign just down the hill.



In a town this small you don't expect your motel to be the Waldorf Astoria... or even the Hampton Inn. We stayed at a no-name motel that was strictly basic accommodations. A bed, a roof, a shower... and, since it's not 2005 anymore, a mini fridge, a microwave, and wifi. This room ran us about $100. That's kind of the ante nowadays for basic accommodations. We could've stayed at the Best Western Plus down the street, with a pool and a hot tub, for $200+.

Speaking of the mini fridge, I'd packed some drinks and breakfast food from home in a cooler bag to store in the room. I brought a bottle of beer to enjoy this evening... but just one bottle. One was all I had cold in my mega fridge at home, and I didn't feel like going down to the cellar to pull up more. 😅 No problem, I figured; I could check one of the stores nearby in town and buy more beer.



At a gas station convenience store down the hill I was all set to buy a six-pack from a north coast microbrew I rarely see carried in stores around home. Then I noticed something I've never seen before, in any store. Red Tail Ale.

Once upon a time Red Tail Ale was my favorite beer, hands down. I discovered it when I moved to Calfiornia back in the 1990s. Then around 2010 or so the brewery, Mendocino Brewing Company, was acquired by a Japanese conglomerate that started fiddling with the recipe and ruined it. The company folded up in 2018.

No, these aren't 7 year old cans of beer from before the company dissolved. They're also not 15 year old cans from before the foreign buyer fucked it up. They're a new beer, made by a new local brewery, that found the original recipe for Red Tail Ale and got access to the name and beautiful artwork. You know I had to give it a try!



Back at our motel room, there wasn't much of a place for me to enjoy my beer. Just two chairs around a small table under the TV. So I did like I noticed several of our neighbors doing.... I dragged a chair out to the breezeway and set up on a railing overlooking the parking lot. It seemed like such a trailer park thing when I first saw it— and yes, there's a trailer park across the street, complete with crying kids walking around in diapers and yapping dogs—but then I figured, "When in Rome...."

And yes, the Red Tail Ale is good. It reminds me of the beer I fell in love with twenty-some years ago. Is it just as good as the original? I'm not sure. It's hard to compare to something from that long ago. But now I know to start looking for this in stores near home.

Oregon Cascades Travelog #23
Yreka, CA - Sun, 6 Jul 2025, 9am

Sometimes you pick a hotel for the night and it turns out to be a bad one. That's what happened to us last night— or, rather, about a week ago when we picked the Comfort Inn in Yreka, California, that we checked into last night.

"Why Yreka?" you might ask. (That's an alliteration, BTW, as Yreka is pronounced WHY-reek-ah.) And also, "Where's Yreka?" 😅

We drove to Yreka yesterday after finishing up an amazing hike at Misery Ridge in Smith Rock State Park in Oregon. Part of the idea for stopping at this small town in far northern California was it's a halfway home stop to finish up our July 4th trip to Bend, Oregon. It's kind of like our Friday Night Halfway strategy for getting a jump start on trips, but in reverse. The other part of the idea was that Yreka wouldn't just be a stopover point halfway but could be a good jumping-off point for a hike in, say, the Shasta-Trinity mountains today.

A pall was cast over the whole plan when we checked in to the hotel, a Comfort Inn, last night and found it below our expectations. One little thing that we spotted as we parked is that the pool area doesn't include a hot tub. It would been nice to relax our sore muscles after the Misery Ridge hike. Oh, and speaking of "as we parked"... the hotel shares a parking lot with a Taco Bell. That kind of became a signifier for everything else. 🤣

The main unwelcome surprise at the hotel was that it has no elevator. That was unexpected because it's a hotel with interior corridors. It's normal for motor-lodge style hotels with rooms that open from exterior breezeways not to have elevators. However this Comfort Inn has interior corridors. I haven't seen an interior-corridor hotel that lacks elevators since... since I was a kid. And it was an old hotel built in the 1930s. This hotel was built in the 21st century. Plus, Comfort Inn, as a brand, is positioned in the market a level where things like "Has an elevator" are table stakes. Here I was worried about whether Days Inn would measure up on this trip, and it's the higher positioned Comfort Inn that falls short. The lack of an elevator would be only a minor annoyance other trips except Hawk was struggling with mobility yesterday evening. And the hotel had no ground floor rooms left available. (Probably everyone who checked in before us demanded them upon learning there's no elevator.)

Then there's the view from our window....



I'm not sure if this is better or worse than a view of the Taco Bell. 😅 When I open the window I can still hear them taking orders at the drive-thru. 🤣

Other things came up short with the Comfort Inn and Yreka, too, but I don't want to dwell further on them. One thing that went right was the bed was comfortable— better than we've slept in the past several days. And, especially after a good sleep, today's a new day.

Today's a new day, but we're tired. I swatted my snooze button until 8 this morning. While Hawk was still sleeping in I began researching places we could hike today and I... I just can't. I don't feel like hiking today.

I broke the bad news to Hawk a few minutes ago when she got up. She didn't take it badly at all. She's worn out, too, and is game just to go home.

If we pack and leave now we could be home just after 3pm... assuming we keep time spent on stops for lunch and gas to a minimum and don't hit traffic. But it's Sunday on a holiday weekend so we probably will hit traffic. And that's another reason to start the drive home early. Traffic slowdowns headed back into the SF Bay Area will only get worse late in the afternoon and into the evening.

Two weekends ago we explored Pluto's Cave on the north flank of Mt. Shasta in California. This was part of the weekend trip spent evading smoke from a huge wildfire. ...Wait, did I say a wildfire? There was more than one! Smoke from other fires choked us out of our Sunday plans to hike in the Trinity Alps even though we were fine there just a day earlier when we hiked to East Boulder Lake. We weren't just going to go home, though, with no hiking on Sunday. We picked two shorter hikes in areas not badly impacted by smoke. The first of these was Pluto's Cave.

Pluto's Cave is lava tube. It's collapsed in several places. Some of the cave-ins form entrances you can get down into (and back up & out!) with just a bit of scrambling. The entries are about 1/2 mile across volcanic desert from a trailhead that's about 1/2 mile in from a paved road on a dirt 4x4 route. We explored 4 parts of the cave. I edited together this video of our adventure:



One small note.... In the video I mention that some of the graffiti underground is historical graffiti. Although it's more than 100 years old it's still considered graffiti, not history. Even though it's dated 1917. If it were 11 years older it'd be protected as history by the Antiquities Act of 1906.

The Park Fire continues to burn in northern California, north of Chico and east of Red Bluff. As of Sunday evening it has burned 386,000 acres. That's over 600 square miles. It is now the 5th largest fire in modern California history.

Here's a map of the fire as of this evening from CalFire (click on image for link to source page):



The CalFire incident page for the Park Fire notes that there are over 5,700 personnel fighting this one fire. Firefighters are being pulled in from all over the state. When we were in Redding on Sunday afternoon, stopping for lunch while driving through, we chatted with a fire crew who'd just driven up from near where we live.

The size of the fire, at 386,000 acres as of this evening, hasn't grown much in the past 48 hours. Authorities say that's because the hot weather in the area that last through Friday broke on Saturday. With cooler temperatures and more humidity in the air, the fire has spread more slowly. This has also enabled crews to start containing it— though as of this evening it's still only 18% contained.

Miraculously there are no deaths reported from this fire. Thousands of people have had to evacuate homes, though. To their credit, and to the credit of authorities managing the situation, people were moved to safety quickly. I'm sure plenty of people in the areas impacted remember the tragedy of the 2018 fire that burned the town of Paradise. There, even a half day of "The fire can't possibly spread over here that fast!" meant that when evacuations orders did come, there was pandemonium and dozens of people died.

Sunday was the last day of our two-day weekend trip to the Trinity Alps in northern California. I'm backlogged on writing about the hiking we did over the weekend, but here I want to catch up on something else: the smoke from the massive Park Fire burning near Chico, California.

We started our day in Yreka, California. It's a town of about 3,000 people just 25 miles south of the Oregon border.



The town's so small we spotted a deer strolling through the hotel parking lot when we were packing our car at 8:30am. But notice also in this picture how clear the sky is. Yreka is about 140 miles away from the Park Fire. Oh, and there are a lot of mountains in between them, too. Like 14,180' Mt. Shasta.

Southwest of Yreka the sky wasn't so clear. We headed down toward the Trinity Alps with a day of hiking planned, but as we got to Fort Jones, just 20 miles away, we could see a wall of smoke ahead of us. That wouldn't have been smoke from the Park Fire... it was smoke from various fires burning in southern Oregon. We decided to pull the plug on the Trinity Alps and try a pair of shorter hikes further south.



Our next stop was in Weed. Yes, there's a town called Weed, California, pop. 3,000. Yes, it's the one famous for the road signs "WEED: NEXT 3 EXITS".



We did a hike about 15 miles northeast out of Weed. Down here the sky was clearer than in Fort Jones though not as clear as up in Yreka. There was haze low to the ground.

After that hike and driving back through Weed we continued south on I-5 toward home. Smoke in the air increased as we reached Lake Shasta. It got thicker as we dropped down out of the mountains into Redding, California, where we stopped for a late lunch. There we could not only smell all the smoke in the air but practically taste it.



Thick smoke continued with us quite a ways south of Redding. The last photo above is from near Corning, California. It's just before 4pm in the afternoon. You can see how thick the smoke is all around us and how it limits visibility. At this point we'd been driving through smoke for 80 miles— and would continue to see (and smell, and taste) it around us for another 70 miles or so.

Compare this to the smoke cloud we driving through here on Friday night. It was a single, if large, cloud on the horizon. On Sunday afternoon, less than 48 hours later, it stretched over 150 miles across.

We made a decision to cancel our travel plans for the Fourth of July weekend. We were going to drive up to northern California and spend 4 days hiking in the Trinity mountains near Mt. Shasta. Now we'll stay home instead. I've even given up Friday as a PTO day. I'll work on Friday instead. 😢

We made this decision on Sunday, when we were home and resting up after our long day-and-a-half trip to the Sierras. It wasn't because we were too tired to take another trip so soon, though I was really tired on Sunday. I rolled into that Sierras trip less than 24 hours after coming home from a business trip and I was feeling ragged on Sunday. No, the reason was weather. Weather.

No, it's not that the weather's going to be cold or shitty (or both). Summer weather is predictably warm and sunny in Northern California. The problem is the opposite— it's going to be too warm and sunny. Look at those temps on the four days we'd be out hiking (Thu-Sun), with highs running well over 100° F! (For those outside the US, 108° F is about 42° C.)

Yeah, those temperature figures are for Yreka, the town where we'd be staying in a hotel. Weather up in the mountains at ~7,000' elevation where we'd be hiking would generally be cooler by 10-12° F. But still, temps in the mid to high 90s are not ideal for hiking. Especially not for physically demanding hikes climbing mountains.

It's a bummer canceling these plans. Even though I do find make plenty of opportunities to travel and do things I enjoy, I'm always looking for more opportunities. The challenge, of course, is balancing fun times with needing to work for a living. In that sense a holiday weekend is such an easy opportunity with free time away from work I feel like I'm squandering it, like I'm failing to step up and take what's mine. Thus Hawk and I did not come to this decision easily. We debated it and came to the decision reluctantly. But as we've asked ourselves since Sunday (it's now Tuesday) if we made the right call, our confidence has grown as the weather forecast has gotten even more extreme. 🥵

Are we being wusses? That's a question we've asked ourselves several times as part of our debate. We didn't used to cancel plans because of hot weather. But now we've done it at least twice in recent years. (The other time I'm thinking of is when we canceled a trip to Eastern Washington when the temperatures were so hot roads were melting.) Sadly, increasingly extreme hot weather is becoming increasingly more common with climate change. Yeah, we didn't used to cancel trips over weather. But worse weather is a new normal now.

What'll we do instead? We'll stay home. It's going to be hot here, too. Our local forecast has highs in the mid to high 90s. But instead of climbing mountains in those temperatures we'll hang out by the pool all day. Except Friday, when I'm working. 😢