Morning mist in Redding CA
Solstice Sunrise on the Sundial Bridge 2024
Sunset over the Sacramento River at the Sundial Bridge
New Courthouse in Redding is about to open
I see the new courthouse in Redding is finally set to open. I captured this aerial footage of it under construction in the fall of 2022. The scene starts across the street at the old courthouse, dressed in beautiful fall colors, and then (takes too long) to circle the new structure. Worth a view, if you haven’t seen it elsewhere on social media.
Chamise Peak Trail delivers a splendid perspective
A rare view that includes both Castle Crags on the left, and the 3 Shastas to the right.
A perspective gained from the top of the Chamise Peak Trail just north of Redding. The Chamise Peak Trail is considered “easy.” I guess that depends on your skills. It’s only about 2.6 miles one way, but it does rise about 600 ft. Most of the trail is wide and smooth, but towards the peak it gets more narrow and rocky. Click on images to enlarge.
Still, the results are worth the effort. Follow Flanagan Road off Lake Boulevard west to the end, to the trailhead.
A pleasant hike rewards hikers with new perspectives. The Chamise Peak Trail.
It’s Really Redding.
Castle Crags, late April 2023
About 25 minutes drive on Interstate 5 north of Redding, you come across a spectacular sight. Granite spires rising through the forest to the west. This is Castle Crags State Park. Pull off the highway for hiking, camping, or just plain gazing upon the beauty of it all.
Technically, these are granite pluons. Molten granite has formed beneath the surface in these shapes, cooling more slowly than the rock around them. The spires are what you can see uncovered as the surface eroded around them. Seeing that, and realizing the time scale involved in their formation, one is left to ponder the insignificance of a single human lifetime in the face of geologic time. Yeah, it’s brief.
Music in the video is an Excerpt of “Eternal Path” by Craig Padilla and Skip Murphy (me) from the CD Phantasma on the Groove Unlimited label. Gobsmacking scenery courtesy of planet earth. It’s Really Redding.
A rare foggy day in Redding
Covid again
“US response to Covid has ultimately been like our response to school shootings: Once we decided unimaginable loss was a price worth paying for an imagined ideal of freedom, the number of deaths ceased to matter. We’d trade a million lives for our need to do exactly what we want.”
Peter Manseau @plmanseau ·
This tweet is spot on. Same is true for human caused climate change brought on by land use change, meat production, and burning up as much fossil fuels as we can.
Back when the pandemic first hit in 2020, there was a panicky lockdown. It looked like it could get pretty bad, but nobody knew for sure. It did get bad, especially for frontline medical workers. But then it eased up with increased mask use, and the several excellent vaccines. And then Redding saw a second wave with a more contagious mutation named Delta. You can plainly see it in the graphs:
The new variant came, and quickly spread. More people died, hospitals filled up. But then the wave passed, just like the first wave in late 2020. So now there is a new mutation called the Omicron variant. Will it bring us another wave? Well it might, because despite the wide availability of a free and effective vaccine, many people refuse to take advantage of that protection. Health officials literally just shut down the free clinic at the Redding Senior Center because nobody was using it. You can still get vaccinated easily (again, free of charge) at any drugstore. But the local ratio of vaccinated to unvaccinated population has remained about the same as it was before the last wave, with predictable results:
So the virus still has lots of opportunity to continue to spread and further mutate among the unvaccinated population.
“Once we decided unimaginable loss was a price worth paying for an imagined ideal of freedom, the number of deaths ceased to matter.” Yep. Oh, and there was another school shooting today, and 3 kids are dead. I suppose this is just normal life now. Get used to it.
Stronger than Carr, the short film
The Carr fire of 2018 wounded Redding badly. A few local citizens hired a local film studio named speropictures to create something about special about it, and it is quite amazing. The live event premiere of the short seems to have been taken down. But here is a trailer for what may be a monger version.
It reveals a lot about Redding. We all learned more about ourselves and our community during and after the fire.
For me personally, watching the short film brought back some of the PTSD like feelings surrounding the evacuation. My home did not burn, but the beast burned homes on the next ridge over from us. I’ve no idea why it stopped there. I saw and heard the fire tornado firsthand. Nothing could stop it.
I was pleased to see my name in the credits, although I had nearly nothing to do with the production. They used a brief video clip from the video of the fire tornado I shot before fleeing for my life.