Fernley, NV to Redding, CA

Days five and six took me from Fernley, NV over the mountains of eastern California, past Mount Lassen, and down into Redding at the upper end of the central valley. I was hoping to spend the day with Sylvia, a friend of my friend Jaime whom I hadn’t seen in about ten years. She used to live in San Francisco, and had moved up north several years ago. My trusty GPS navigated me right to her door, but not before I went through some amazingly hellacious weather crossing the mountains. I had taken off early to finish the trip, which was only a little over a couple of hundred miles, at a reasonable time. When I got beyond Susanville, CA, and was approaching Mount Lassen, the temperature suddenly dropped 20 degrees, and I found myself in a deluge. The deluge suddenly morphed into hail – pinky-tip-sized hail that made the road slippery and pelted me like machine-gun bullets. As luck would have it, I was only a few hundred yards from one of the few rest stops on US 395, and I pulled off to wait out the storm. Another beemer followed me into the rest area a couple of minutes later – we both rode our bikes up under the overhang between the buildings of the rest area – illegal, but sensible. The picture above shows the hail amongst the flowers – double click the picture for a larger view.

I finally made it down into Redding, only 75 miles or so further along the route. This was one of the clearest illustrations of the relationship between altitude and temperature I’ve seen – by the time I reached Redding the temperature was around 90 degrees, and humid. The air quality was also awful – you could no longer see more than a few miles.

In the evening, after eating a great sushi meal, Sylvia, Natalie and I went to see one of Redding’s main attractions (perhaps its only one!) – a pedestrian bridge across the Sacramento River designed by Santiago Calatrava. I’ve seen some of his other work – including the Turning Torso in Malmö, Sweden (Google it if you’re interested). This bridge was spectacular – built so that it cantilevered out over the river, and could be swung around on its pivot point during construction to simplify the process and do as little environmental damage as possible. Pictures are above.

The next morning (June 1^st), I took off for Eureka, riding along the winding path of CA 299, a beautiful, twisty road that goes along the Trinity River and down to the Pacific. And that’s where we’ll leave it until tomorrow . . .