Tuesday, September 5, 2023: How an oops turns into a major Äha – or two or three!
Info
Äha is the Austrian expression for “Hoppala” or “Oops”.
The coast of California is home to the Redwoods – the tallest trees in the world! They can reach heights of up to 350 ft / 106 m! They store moreCO2 than any other tree species. Because they are fire resistant and do not rot, 95% of the total stock was harvested because they are valuable timber. Their bark can grow up to 30 cm thick and is full of tannin, which protects the tree from pests and fire, so it can live for thousands of years. Officially, the oldest redwood is 2,200 years old, but it is believed that there are even older ones. They were already growing in the Jurassic period, when dinosaurs still ruled the earth. They are known to communicate with each other. They entwine and connect their roots so that they support each other.
The inland city of Redding is most impressive for its Turtle Bay Exploration Park, a recreational, nature and cultural area on the Sacramento River with the Sundial Bridge. Due to the location between the mountains, the temperature can rise up to 50°C in summer. Nearby are Shasta Lake with its stalactite cave and Whiskeytown Lake, both reservoirs used for power generation.
Lake Tahoe is one of the favourite vacation destinations for locals. The lake is located on the border between California and Nevada in the Sierra Nevada at an altitude of 1,900 m between the mountains.
My opinion:
I’ve seen very little of the California coast, but the interior is not to be sneezed at!
Diary:
So I innocently call a campground 300 km north of San Francisco on the California coast from Oregon because I want to see the Mendocino Coast, and I get a roar of laughter. Booked out for a year. The entire California coast. Because it’s Labor Day Weekend.
Äha.
That’s why the lady at the campground at Redwood State Park had said I had to be gone by Friday!
Booked out. One year before. Fine, go somewhere else then.
On the map I saw the town of Redding, which I knew nothing about at all except that it was on the way to Lake Tahoe. And I had wanted to go to Lake Tahoe 35 years ago, but I didn’t have the time.
So no San Francisco, no Golden Gate Bridge, but Redding and the Sundial Bridge.
I decided to wait for Labor Day Weekend to pass in Redding before continuing on to Lake Tahoe because everything was booked out there too.
Before that, I spent two more nights near Crescent City to see Redwood National Park. Highway 101 runs along the coast, often passing through forests. And all of a sudden the trees get higher and higher and even higher. At some point I started to feel really small.
There were many tree stumps around the campground that were five meters thick, or even more. That was already very impressive.
I drove to the Trees of Mystery in Klamath. There is a path through the forest with many explanations, and before I knew it, I was standing at a height of 20 m in front of a suspension bridge that led to the next tree trunk. For one who until a few years ago suffered from extreme fear of heights and couldn’t even climb a stepladder, that was quite a challenge. Then I remembered that I wasn’t afraid of heights anymore and enjoyed wandering around high above the ground. Back on the ground, I looked up. That was really very high! There also was a cable car up the mountain, where you could enjoy the panoramic view of the surroundings. Unfortunately, the panorama was a little overgrown.
I would like to introduce two special trees to you. One began its earthly existence over 3,000 years ago and then fell over at some point. On its trunk grew a tree, which in the meantime has a diameter of three meters. Wood and roots of the old tree have not yet rotted.
Lightning struck the other. A ranger told us that the fire fighters came but there was nothing to do. The tree stood there glowing red and burning internally. The fire did not penetrate through the bark to the outside.
Overall very impressive. So the next day, on the way to Eureka, where I turned inland, I made another detour on back roads. If I had started to feel really small among those trees two days before, that would have been a reason to feel even smaller. But it was the giant trees that gave me a sense of security.
For comparison, Annie Way is 5.41 m long, 2.05 m wide, 2.65 m high and 1 year and 3 months old.
The drive to Redding through the mountains was quite adventurous, especially since it was raining hard and going up and down steep hills. Annie Way purred contentedly, I found it a bit exhausting.
When I asked at the campground what you could see in Redding, the lady at the front desk stuttered. The surroundings, she meant.
A friend sent me a message that she was just sitting on the Danube. That brought me to the Sacramento River. I can’t believe how beautiful the grounds of Turtle Bay Exploration Park are, with walking trails through the (renaturalized) area, with a museum, a restaurant, an arboretum, and the pond with the turtles. The two sides of the river are connected by a pedestrian bridge with a glass floor. It is called Sundial Bridge because it resembles a sundial.
The next day I drove to Shasta Lake and steered Annie Way down the winding, narrow road where the tour to the Caverns, the dripstone caves, started. First we went by boat across the lake, then by bus up the breakneck route to the cave entrance. They used to sell T-shirts that said “I survived the road to Lake Shasta Caverns.” In fact, however, nothing has ever happened.
Where the Wintu Indians went in and out for millennia, in 1878 a Mr. Richardson immortalized himself on a wall with his signature and the date, making him the official discoverer of the cave.
Regarding the term “Indians” – it is obviously still used in the US. Occasionally I hear “native Americans,” but rarely. I don’t like either expression because it reflects the white perspective. In Canada, they handle it quite differently.
The caves were indescribable!
In order not to disturb the structure of the crystals and stalactites and stalagmites, one must not touch anything – which did not prevent many people from climbing up somewhere and having their picture taken. I overheard a ranger in one of the caves say to a colleague, “Most people are not interested in the caverns, they only want to take pictures.” I can confirm this impression.
As water seeps through the mountain, it becomes enriched with carbon dioxide (CO2). As a result, it dissolves the lime (CaCO3) in the rock. If the liquid comes to a cavity, drops form on the ceiling, theCO2 escapes and the lime remains. This is how stalactites are formed. If the drops fall to the bottom of the cave, a stalagmite grows upwards from there. When stalactites and stalagmites join to form a column, it is called stalagnate.
In the caves, the path is mostly uphill, so that when you exit, you have to walk back down in the open air – with a dream view of the lake!
Back in Redding, I hiked along the Sacramento River again.
The next day was Labor Day. This is always the first Monday in September. Which adds up to a long weekend. School starts on Tuesday. Which means the campsites are no longer fully booked.
I drove to Whiskeytown Lake. Like Lake Shasta, it too is artificial, because the electricity for California has to come from somewhere.
The questions remain: Where is the whiskey? Where is Whiskeytown?
It was a Gold Rush town, which thereafter lost importance. Where the name comes from cannot be proven with certainty, but there is a story of an 1850 miner named Billie Peterson. He also had a little mishap, an oops. He was transporting goods to a mine when a piece of luggage came off the back of his mule and all the whiskey it was carrying rolled down the hill and landed in the creek. Äha. The creek was then given the name Whiskey Creek. The town was called Whiskeytown.
It doesn’t exist any more. Before the lake was created in the 1960s, the few people of Whiskeytown got financial compensation for their properties and had to relocate elsewhere. Whiskeytown Lake is a very popular destination.
On the way back, I looked at the buildings of Shasta – also a Gold Rush town, but one that relied on brick houses after a fire, which remain today. When gold was discovered in 1848, the prospectors overran the area inhabited by the Wintu – not only completely ruthlessly, they even called for the extermination of the “Indians”! Fortunately, the Wintu were not impressed by this and survived the Gold Rush, although their dwellings were taken from them.
There was this school bus in a parking lot in Shasta … with countless tie-dyed T-shirts. For me, a youth memory, when I myself did some tie-dyeing. Didn’t take long and I left the parking lot with three t-shirts and a dress. T-shirts and dresses with tie-dyed patterns are not yet forgotten in the USA. I have seen them in many stores, but printed and not tie-dyed. The clothes sold by the aging hippie with the yellow school bus were all made by him and his wife. I just couldn’t resist … In general, much of what once belonged to the hippie culture is still alive here. Right down to old, brightly painted VW buses that for some unknown reason are still roadworthy. Although quite slow.
The drive to Lake Tahoe was again through the mountains – this time in fair weather. I even took a detour into Nevada and drove through Reno. From there it was uphill until the lake became visible.
The campground was in the middle of a forest a bit outside of South Lake Tahoe, which is a typical tourist village. I drove to the beach and walked along the lake.
The next day I finally got over myself and rented a kayak. Why hadn’t I done this before? No idea! It was fun and the time flew by.
As I strolled back along the lake after my paddling excursion, it happened. The next oops that grew to an Äha. I stumbled – and really stumbled, because I wasn’t looking at the ground, but at the ducks.
There I lay in the soft, warm sand in the shade of a tree and did not move. Because I didn’t know what had happened. I just stayed put. Fortunately, there were no people around. It took a long time for the pain to subside. Then I moved my right foot very carefully. That worked. I sat up. Ouch. But clearly nothing broken. Probably overstretched the ligaments. At some point, I limped back to Annie Way. She took me to the campsite and I didn’t move for the rest of the day.
Except the one time I closed the sliding door because it got pretty chilly in the evening. 3°C were predicted for the night, so I wanted to save a little warmth.
No sooner had I sat down and put my leg up than I heard voices, and two young men were running around Annie Way. That’s something you just don’t do in campgrounds – you respect other people’s privacy.
But then I saw the reason. Two black bears stood comfortably on the other side of Annie Way, in front of the sliding door I had closed two minutes earlier. Äha!
No, not an Äha, but incredible luck. So it didn’t matter that I could hardly sleep at night because my foot wouldn’t stop hurting.
I still woke up frequently the following night. But by the third night after stumbling, I was sleeping through the night again. During the day, my walking shoes gave me secure footing, even though I limped terribly at first and only left Annie Way when I couldn’t avoid it. After a week, the spook was over.
Conclusion about the Ähas: I would never have come to these beautiful areas if everything had not been booked out on the coast. Also, I’m pretty sure I would have been sitting outside Annie Way’s sliding door in my comfy camping chair, wrapped in the big shawl Donna had crocheted for me, if I hadn’t had a hurting foot that needed to be elevated. The bears would then not have found a closed sliding door, but a very frightened Ursula (Latin: little female bear).
From that point of view, I was very lucky. All my lucky charms must have joined there efforts!