In the month of June, in 2023, I was keeping busy doing my typical workdays as well as volunteering at the Siskiyou County animal shelter and Rescue Ranch. Despite the hectic schedule I was keeping, I still tried to get out and see as much of the natural beauty as possible of the Siskiyou County area as could before moving back down to the Sacramento area. Though I love Sacramento, and I will have to admit that it has always felt like the place that is most comfortable to me, there is no denying that I have become very fond on Siskiyou County. I must admit, that many of the people in Siskiyou County don't find I and my liberal perspective all that desirable, I have none the less formed many wonderful friendships here in Siskiyou County, and I have enjoyed countless beautiful locations.
On the first weekend in June, I loaded Remi up on Saturday and headed out to see three sites in Siskiyou County that I have been wanting to visit. You see, my time here is limited, and I want to be able to do what I can for my family and the dog rescues around town, so since Remi is always game for an early morning car ride, we got an early start and began our adventure to see three wonderful locations.
Our first stop was the three different McCloud falls, down in the Mt. Shasta area. The McCloud Falls actually consists of three separate water falls in the park. The Lower, the Middle and the Upper Falls. In this particular trip, we visited the Lower Falls first, followed by the Middle Falls and then the Upper Falls. All three are in the general park area, and you can visit them in any order, but I was most eager to visit the Lower falls first, because this is the one that Remi and I visited in the wintertime. On the winter visit, there wasn't enough snow to drive me to put the snowshoes on because of the snow patches followed by muddy dirt patches followed by snow patches and so on, but by the time Remi and I had hiked through that particular experience, we were too tired to visit the other two Falls locations.
Also, as you can see, just like many of my other adventures, I can never pass up an opportunity to take a picture of Mt Shasta... especially if I can also include the Jeep in the shot!
After we finished visiting the McCloud Falls, we then set out on a drive to the Lava Beds National Monument. Unfortunately, Google maps initially took us down about 25 miles of a paved forest Service Road that we eventually found was closed due to the fact that there was a large section of the road that was closed due to snow that had not melted yet. While we probably could have "Trudged" our way through the snow with the Jeep in 4X4 Low, I really wanted to get all three parks in on this day, so after consulting the Jeeps Navigation system, I found that going out to the state Highway route, would only take us about 30 minutes longer than the 15 minutes we supposedly had remaining if there wasn't any snow on our current path, so I opted to take the "Route More Traveled". None the less, before we got to the actual Lava beds National Monument, we did take in The Jot Dean lava cave less than 100 yards from where the snow closed roadway was. So, we checked out that cave, and then continued on to Lava beds National Monument.
Just like all of the other national monuments I had visited, this one did not disappoint. We spent 1 and a half to two hours at Lava beds national Monument and checked out several caves. If you ever find yourself in Siskiyou County, I highly suggest you check this out.
Once we had finished our visit to Lava Beds National Monument, we continued our drive to our final destination Juanita Lake. This is a beautiful lake with a RV campground adjacent to it. There were lots of folks who were here visiting this weekend, fishing and paddling around in Kayaks. This, like so many other locations here in Siskiyou County are simply gorgeous.
There are so many wonderful places here in Siskiyou County that I absolutely love, and I thank my dear friend Stephanie Hoffman for spawning my interest in exploring these magnificent locations.
Please check out my video below and see some additional scenes of the areas we explored... including some drone video footage.
Safe Travels all!
Eric and Remi too!
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