Pedaling the Lower Sacramento River Trail

Hi Blog!  Today is Tuesday, October 1st - the day the government shut down.  It feels more like The Day the Earth Stood Still.  Well, at least our world is standing still.  It's hard to RV around the country to visit all the National Parks when they are all closed!  Enough said.  We feared this would happen, so we decided to stay away from the National Parks and Forests today.  Instead, we headed to Redding to cycle the southern part of the The Sacramento River Trail.  This paved bike path runs 19 miles from the Shasta Dam to the Sun Dial Bridge in downtown Redding.

We started at the Hilltop Trailhead.  It was a half mile down switchbacks until we leveled out next to the Sacramento River.  All along the trail were hysterical markers filled with all kinds of information on the flora and fauna, history and geology of the river canyon.

The trail soon crosses the world-famous Sundial Bridge.  I know, we never heard of it either until we got to Redding, but it's pretty cool.  It is the tallest working sundial in the world.  Or, so they say.  However, it only really works one day a year - the summer solstice.  All the other days of the year, the time is off.  Today, it was 25 minutes fast.  But we won't quibble about a few minutes because it looks so cool.

Here is a view of the dial from the east side of river.  After a quick stop for lunch at the Thai Cafe, we headed back across the Sundial Bridge to head north along the west side of the river.

We stopped to watch a bunch of fisherman.  They parked their drift boat in some shallows and got out to wade.

As we entered Caldwell Park, we stopped to chat with Chauncey Carroll Bush - judge, entrepreneur, banker and first Mayor of Redding.

He has a great view of the Redding Dam.

The west side of the trail ends at the trailhead for the FB Trail, a gravel mountain bike trail.  So, we crossed back over to the east side of the river on the world famous Stress Ribbon Bridge.  I know, we never heard of it before getting to Redding, either, but it's really cool too.  This pedestrian bridge is a concrete stress ribbon structure.  The first of its kind in North America.  Apparently, this type of bridge is very popular in the Czech Republic, Switzerland and Germany.  In fact, Redding hired Dr. Uri Straski of Bruno, Czech Republic to design it.  Both the Stress Ribbon Bridge and the Sundial Bridge were specifically designed to minimize the impact of each bridge on the river and the riparian environment.  It's really cool that the city of Redding was willing to so far to leave the river untouched - and the city got a bonus of world recognition for the designs of the bridges.

We continued our trek northward on the Sacramento River Rail Trail.  We soon came to the Keswick Dam.  Keswick Dam is a concrete gravity dam on the Sacramento River about 2 miles northwest of Redding, California.  The dam is 157 feet high and impounds the Keswick Reservoir, which has a capacity of 23,800 acre·ft.  Its powerplant has three turbines with a generating capacity of 117 megawatts uprated from its original 75 MW in 1992.  The Keswick Dam is part of the North Coastal water management system.  Along with Shasta Dam and some other, smaller dams and pumping stations, it manages the flow of water on the Sacramento River to achieve three goals:  enhance hydroelectric power, support irrigation for agriculture, and preserve the natural ecosystems through which the river runs.

The dam and resulting reservoir flooded the old rail line, which meant the trail had to be re-routed.   We had to climb up the side of the canyon.  The hill was aptly named "Heart Rate Hill."  The trailhead sign calls it "a stationary cardiac tread mill." Signs along the trail tell you when to take your pulse, set time; results are on top of the hill, with the heart rates - measured according to Bruce Protocols which evaluate cardiac health.  Here is Kathy slogging up the last switchback.

On the way back to the truck, we stopped at Turtle Pond to visit with a couple of the locals, who were just hanging out like bumps on a log:

We had one more heart-rate raising climb ahead of us to get back up to Hilltop Drive.  Great White never looked so good.  It was a great ride and we look forward to exploring more of the northern end of  the trail.