Day 18 - Burney CA

Miles today: 325

Miles total: 6182

Since Redding was forecast to be 111F today I left Calistoga at 6:15am to beat as much of the heat as I could.  Headed south to St Helena, then took a series of back roads east to Lake Berryessa.  

Shortly thereafter I encountered a major problem in my route: 20 miles of the absolutely worst paved “road” I’ve ever been on - in any vehicle. Problem was I was already too deep into the route to go around it.  Crawling along at 20-25mph set me back 30 minutes. Here’s a shot of one of the better sections of pavement:

The only other vehicle I saw on that road was a Jeep Wrangler with big off-road tires, also plodding along at about 20-25.

At Colusa I followed the Sacramento River north to Codora, then east to Oroville.  I wanted to see the dam that had that spectacular spillway failure a few years ago.  Tallest dam in the US (770 feet). Unbelievably huge. 

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It’s obviously been repaired but it also looks like they rebuilt the whole face of the dam around the spillways. Compare it to the photos on Wikipedia right after the failure.

From there I headed to Chico and then up to Lassen Volcanic National Park.  It’s the southernmost end of the Cascade volcano range, and Lassen Peak is the tallest plug dome volcano in the world.  

The highway that loops through the park is a great drive, not insanely crowded like the Going-To-The-Sun road.  And at elevations from 5500 to 8500 feet the temperatures were only in the 80s. 

I only had to endure temps in the 90s and 100s for about and hour and a half all day.