Life and all in Redding California
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
Erin attended the opening night of The Moroccan Dinner at Armando’s Gallery in Redding and came away with a few images.
In Redding, we are blessed to have Whiskeytown National Recreation Area literally a few minutes drive to the west. In addition to being home to a beautiful lake, the area has numerous trails to explore. Below, my friend and colleague Riley Johnson of Shasta Home Inspections quietly rides a single track section of the famous 10 mile Chimney trail in this brief video. Check it out:
It offers a glimpse into the adventure, but also the serenity of the ride. There are lots of trails at the park. This website details local trails and offers an interesting 3D view of the path. 5 miles uphill, and 5 miles downhill.
Here’s how the area looks from across the lake.
Thanks for sharing, Riley. Beautiful riding all around us. It’s Really Redding.
