Yreka to Redding -- California Scenic Byway: Route 3

I left Oregon a few days ago. The extended forecast offered no reprieve from rain. Winter weather had set in. I drove south on I-5 to the northern California town of Yreka.

Yreka is the county seat of Siskiyou County. Today it's a small unassuming town, but during the gold rush of the 1850s it experienced a boom. Prospectors came to pan for gold from the nearby mountain rivers and mine rich, pure veins of ore. Many claims were quickly exploited and closed. But within a few decades hundreds of millions of dollars of gold had been extracted from the area...

Today visitors can glimpse this past at the Siskiyou County Courthouse. Locals have generously contributed real gold samples to the Million Dollar Gold Display housed in the courthouse lobby. In today's prices the collection is actually worth closer to 3 million! It's advertised as the largest display of gold south of Alaska...

Having left the rain behind, I decided to take a scenic byway. Route 3 swings south through the wilderness of the Trinity Alps. Route 3 Scenic Byway passes through several small, former gold mining towns, such as Callahan. It offers vistas of Trinity Lake before meeting Route 299 (another scenic byway) at Shasta State Historic Park.

Trinity Lake--along with Whiskeytown and Shasta Lake--comprise a National Recreation Area popular for angling and houseboating. Though from what I witnessed, Lake Trinity was almost completely dry, and the levels of the other two lakes were way, way down...

The biggest city in northern California is Redding. Redding's famous landmark is the Sundial Bridge which sits in Turtle Bay Exploration Park. The Sundial Bridge straddles the Sacramento River. The Sacramento flows south from Lake Shasta and is California's largest river. The bridge and surrounding gardens are a great place to spend an afternoon. There are plenty of suprises to keep children (and the kids at heart) entertained...