Lake Oroville: Visual Gold

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Lake Oroville is a giant reservoir in the foothills northeast of Sacramento

There is a visitor center for the recreation area with exhibits, native american artifacts recovered before the lake formed and viewing platforms

 Native Americans used these boulders to grind their food, especially acorns, which were then leached of their tannins with water

 Generations and generations of people used these stones

Dioramas 

An early 1800's map of Alta California 

They had this nice theater with over 30 videos to choose from. I went with rice 

I had no idea it was so prominent in the Sacramento valley. The video was so 80's, but maybe produced in 1992

A bubbling fountain

The dam is the straight line on the left, a raptor above 

It was a beautiful late-summer day, but back when the fires clouded the views, can you see the raptor again?

 One of the main bridges north/east into feather falls

 Looked like dinosaur bones

 Sunset

Note the lake level back then, vs in October

 

 Crazy pretty with the concentric rings of past water levels

 About 200 feet seemed exposed in some areas, I wonder why this red dirt collected here

 The plant life was interesting, and starting to turn fall colors

 A lot of resilient waterside trees dotted the former shorelines

 These boulders looked like a sliced potato to me

 This lake is popular with boaters

 The undulating shoreline reflects the foothill geography

The views from the valley showed the recent snows in the high mountains (at left) 

This pod looked like it was from the little shop of horrors

 But had lovely flowers

 This was an old, creeping lichen

 Tiny flowers

 Interesting fungus, reminded me of halloween

 Along with these

 Tiny cup fungus

 The sunset was breathtaking, I'll let the pictures speak for themselves

Mt. Shasta - Magnificent Views (Plus Castle Crags)

A continuation of my trip north:

What's that in the distance?

 A few more miles up and it is much closer

 Oh, there it is!

 Mt. Shasta, the second southern-most cascade volcano (Lassen is the furthest south). Still covered in glaciers in late August

 The freeway goes by Castle Crags State Park, where a granitic extrusion created these immense, complicated cliffs popular with climbers

 This is a spatter cone volcano, likely very dormant. They have ski runs on another one of these closer to the mountain

 I went up a little further to hang out in Weed, Ca. It is just too funny of a name, and if you see below, they have a 'Cougar Cafe', I'm not sure if this is a retiree community...

 The forest ends at the tree line, about half way up the slopes

 And it creates its own weather. The clouds form and are shaped by the mountain, in this case, they arch above/around the summit

 From my camping spot

 At sunset it went crazy pretty

 These colors don't do it justice, it turned pink and then purple

 Almost gone

 Bye bye sun

 The morning brought very cool cloud formations

 One of the volcanic remnants, I liked the red dirt on top

The summit, also with a touch of red

 Wispy clouds go by

 So etherial on the slopes

 More mountain cloud formations, see them dome over the promontories

 A mini volcano in the sky

 This is the crags from about the tree line

 It just went forever with the mist of forest fires all around