Nathan’s Artisan Sourdough Bread

Nathan makes amazing bread in his home kitchen in Fall River Mills, and sells it at Redding’s Farmer’s Market on Saturday mornings.

Our favorite is the Organic Garlic Asiago. Glorious!

“Ingredients: Organic wheat flour, water, organic sourdough culture, garlic, asiago cheese, sea salt, LOVE.”


The LOVE definitely shows! You can also find Nathan’s artisan sourdough breads at R&R Meats in Redding on Tuesdays and Fridays. His kitchen location is appropriate. Fall River Mills began as a water powered mill town. Nathan told me he has a website, but I can’t find much about his baking online. His phone number is 530 276 3717.

Highly recommended! Nathan’s sourdough is Really Redding.

Fix for DJI OSMO Mobile phone camera stabilizer

Just posting this here so it will be online. I added counterweights to my OSMO Mobile so it will shoot using my iPhone 7+ without overheating. Posting it here in case you have that problem too. and also so I may post this image at their forum. Three 1/4 ounce weights stacked as illustrated worked fine for me. These are weights used for balancing automotive wheels.

The wines of Castello di Amorosa

Okay, yes. This isn’t Really Redding. But it’s not all that far away. This is Castello di Amorosa in the Napa Valley, to the south. What is seen above ground is stunning, but perhaps even more amazing is that there are 8 levels below.

I describe this place as “Disneyland for Oenophiles.” It’s not nearly as old as it looks. And the tastings are plainly designed to entice you to buy some fine wine, cheese, and chocolate. Nothing wrong with that.


Redding falls between the Napa Valley and South-Central Oregon for wine appellations. We are west of the Inwood Valley appellation, and the several good wineries in Shingletown and Manton. My good friend Angelo Passidakis grew Zinfandel grapes here in the Redding heat, with some success. And we have Matson Vineyards on the east side of town. They produce a number of fine local vintages. And local favorite Moseley Family Cellars is based in Redding.

A recent story about the proposed Shasta Wine Village had me thinking, “what if it was as awesome as Castello di Amorosa?”
As we left, I couldn’t help but notice their parking area was filled to overflowing.

Something similar would certainly get passersby on I-5 to stop and stick around. I hope the new wine village project doesn’t just provide more of the usual interstate highway stripmall ambiance. We’ll see.

Castello di Amorosa. It’s Really Northern California. And the Redding of our imagination.

Smokejumpers practice their skills

I was in Mountain Gate when I happened upon these smokejumpers practicing. Click any image to enlarge. Check out the person standing in at the door. Jump!


So, these folks jump leap from perfectly good airplanes…


…into forests of pointy trees…


…that ARE ON FIRE!!!


Godspeed, grace, and protection, Redding smokejumpers. Thank you for your service.


Jumping out of aircraft to put out fires, that’s Really Redding.

High water release at Shasta Dam

A series of views of the Shasta Dam spillway running at high water release I captured on Feb 12 2017. This water flows into the Sacramento River. I believe the flow was around 70,000 cubic feet per second at this point.

I think this was about the same time that state officials became seriously concerned about the Oroville Dam. Shasta looks solid, though. Click to enlarge:

A TV station in Medford Oregon called and asked permission to use my footage of the Shasta Dam spillway, which I found to be gratifying. I asked them to attribute it to Really Redding.

Images of Redding from the West

A view of my favorite city beneath a snowbound Lassen Peak. Taken from a friend’s home in West Redding. And look for Redding’s big flag in the lower middle. Thank you Enterprise Lion’s Club for maintaining Redding’s iconic big flag!
CLick to enlarge.

Below, the Sundial Bridge from the same vantage point. You don’t often see the bridge juxtaposed with Best Buy, but here it is.


Really Redding is really beautiful.

Bricks Roadhouse in Redding closes

Bricks Roadhouse opened on Churn Creek Road just over a year ago. Definitely a Redding original, I had posted here about Bricks 2 previous locations. I liked their food very much. I took these images seen below intending to post about the Churn Creek location. But I hesitated, thinking I needed a few better photos first. I really wanted an image of the cool looking bar. Too late, now.

Today I read at Redding.com that Bricks has closed. Too bad. In retrospect, the images I captured make it appear mostly empty. A grim foreshadowing.

This building has seen several restaurants come and go.
I was hoping Bricks would break the cycle.

Bricks2 -smBricks3 -smBricks7 -sm
Bricks1 -smBricks8 -sm
Bricks6 -smBricks4 -sm

 

In my draft, I wrote:

“Bricks has been around for years. This is the third time I’ve written about them in this blog, and this is their third location. With each move, they’ve grown bigger and the list of food and drinks grows accordingly. Evidence they have a menu for success.”

Evidently not. Easy to blame the building/location. Who will be next to give it a try?

Thanks for trying, Bricks. Looking back on my first post about Bricks from 2010, you can sense the excitement as they begin, and start to grow popular. That feeling like the sky is the limit.

The restaurant business is really tough in Really Redding.

Reflecting on life around Shasta long ago

Curating this intriguing video here. I often wonder what it was really like in the Northstate, say 600 years ago. We know very little for certain. But from bits and pieces of history I’ve learned, a kind of mental picture emerges. Thousands of people living along the rivers and streams that make life abundant here. Then abruptly decimated by plague and disease brought here via contact with the “old world.” By the time the Gold Rush hit around 1849, that larger indigenous culture was nearly two hundred years gone. What little was left was crushed by mining and other natural resource exploitation. Not even like they traded land for beads. It was simply taken.

After that, we know more. A native village on the north side of the river from early Redding existed in an uneasy and ultimately doomed relationship with the town. Remaining tribal fragments are today scattered in various Rancherias. Remnants of what we would today describe as genocide. Trying to visualize the whole picture is impossible with so many pieces of the story missing. And then this brief video added an important piece to the picture.

I like to think that if you try hard enough, you can visualize just a glimpse of first people’s lives when observing the natural beauty that surrounds us in the northstate. Lives engaged hunting and gathering. Bountiful salmon, smoked for keeping on pole racks along the river. Menacing Wolves, Mountain Lions, and terrifying Grizzly Bears. A complex oral history passed down around a village fire. And not romanticized. They were just like all humans, good and bad. Also tribalism can bring out the best and worst in humankind.

And then it was gone.

And so the collective history of humanity in the Americas will always have a big gaping hole.

MtShasta Lenticular1

Climb Descend Repeat -in and around Redding

Here’s a locally produced film of a couple of mountain bikers enjoying some local trails around Redding. The terrain will look familiar to northstate viewers, even if you haven’t actually been on these particular trails. Nice production. Nice riding.
We boast an amazing system of trails throughout the Redding and Shasta region. A strong culture of riding has naturally followed. You can learn more from the good folks at Ride Redding, who are committed to promoting all aspects of our local bike community.