McCloud Falls

[flyminion]

Today, Cade and I kicked off our third annual California swimming hole marathon. The first two times, my excuse for going to California was that I couldn’t do my Tennessee swimming hole marathon because of the weather. This year, the Tennessee trip worked out, but I came to California anyway, because screw it, I love me some California swimming holes. I thought I might be burnt out from traveling at this point, given that I had only a week of downtime between getting back from Tennessee and leaving for California, but as soon as I got back to work Monday, I was ready for another vacation. I was burnt out from work due to all the overtime I worked over the winter, so I figured this month I would use the comp time I earned to do some swimming hole overtime.

For this trip, I didn’t really feel like doing a lot of researching, and Cade generally prefers to leave the trip planning to me, so I whipped up an itinerary of loose ends and places we didn’t get to on our first trip back in 2017. We also had some loose ends from last year’s trip since our plan to go to Yosemite was foiled by the wildfires, which we plan to remedy at some point, but this time I wanted to focus on the area between Sonora and Chico, as most of our favorite swimming holes thus far have been concentrated in that area. Cade had also expressed a desire to go further north than we had before, and I did have a few places I wanted to check out near Redding and Mt. Shasta, so we decided to start there and work our way south to the Sonora area so that we could save Blue Streak, our favorite California swimming hole thus far, for the finale.

I flew into Sacramento yesterday and met up with Cade. My layover was in Las Vegas, and a fair amount of people were intoxicated on my second flight from Las Vegas to Sacramento. When the flight attendants were trying to give their pre-flight spiel about the safety features of the aircraft, half the people were cutting up like a class of high school freshmen, and someone just got up and went to the bathroom while we were taxiing. I guess that's Vegas on a Saturday.

Anyway, after I got into Sacramento, Cade and I drove to Redding and checked into the Super 8 motel. Our room looked like it had been renovated a few years ago but has become a little beaten up since then. It was also super stuffy inside, despite being hot and dry outside. We got dinner at the Olive Garden, which was also stuffy and musty inside, and I left with garlic burps from their breadsticks.
___

Today, we started things off by going to McCloud Falls on the McCloud River near Mt. Shasta. This place looked nice but not super spectacular from an aesthetic standpoint, but it looked like a good place for jumping. It has a lower, middle, and upper falls. The lower falls has some lower jumping opportunities around 10-15 feet, and the middle falls has some bigger jumps of about 25 feet and higher. Timothy Joyce rates the water temperature as moderate in his Swimming Holes of California book, so I figured it would be a fun water playground. We were also going to be passing through the town of Mount Shasta, which has a canyon called Box Canyon that was featured in a Rescue 911 episode, so I wanted to check that out even though I didn't know of any swimming opportunities there.

We ended up dilly dallying (mainly trying to figure out what hotel we are going to stay in tomorrow night after we leave Redding) until about noon, and we drove about an hour north on I-5 to the town of Mt. Shasta. We could see the namesake mountain/volcano in the background for most of the drive up, and it had a fair amount of snow on it.



We then drove a few minutes east past the town of McCloud until we reached the recreation area with the falls. All three of the waterfalls have parking lots with overlooks. We parked in the lot for the lower falls. I took a few pictures and then climbed down to the river.

Watch on YouTube

There were a lot of yellow jackets hovering around and landing on the wet rocks alongside the river. I waded across to get a better vantage point.



The water was so cold that it was physically painful, even for my feet and legs. It felt maybe a tad warmer on the sunny side of the river, but still mostly like ice water. I guessed the water temperature was 59 °F, but it was actually 56 °F. This was on the shaded side of the river, so I waded back over to get a reading from the sunny side, and it was 57 °F. I wanted to jump, but I had heard reports of a boulder falling into the pool sometime this past winter, sending several jumpers who landed on it to the hospital, and I wasn’t sure exactly where it was. I won’t jump into anything without personally scoping it out (except for that time two weeks ago at Rock Island), but I wasn’t going to be swimming around in this water, let alone putting my face in it, long enough to take a thorough look at the landing zone. There were also a few people fishing off the cliff, so there was also the risk of getting snagged on a hook. A couple of people jumped while I was there, but I still wasn't going to do it myself without depth-checking, given the boulder in the pool.

We decided to move on to the middle falls, in hopes that maybe that pool got more sun and that the water might be warmer. We took about a 1-1.5 mile trail, which was paved part of the way, to get to the middle falls. Unlike many of the areas we visited on our past vacations, this part of Northern California was heavily forested with pine trees (the pine scent was easily detectable), and the river was pretty narrow, so it was shaded for most of its run. Also, this was a heavy snowfall year like 2017, so there was probably more snowmelt feeding into the river than usual for this time of year. That combined with the shade might explain why the water temperature was a far cry from “moderate” today.

We reached the middle falls and had to scramble over some lava-rock-looking boulders to get to the base. There were even more yellow jackets around the puddles in the rock pile next to the river than there were at the lower falls. This was the highest and widest of the three waterfalls, and there was a ledge for jumping on the river-right side of the pool.

Watch on YouTube

The river-left side of the pool was pretty shaded, but the river-right side was bright and looked inviting. It only looked inviting, though. I took the temperature here, and it was 55 °F. There was also another ledge above this ledge, and a couple of teenagers jumped off it. I saw a jump of maybe 20 feet that I thought I might be able to do, but I still couldn’t bring myself to stay in the water long enough to depth check it. I sort of crouched down and put my face in the water and looked across the water from about 10 feet away with my diving mask, and it looked like the area beneath where I wanted to jump was only 6-7 feet. The teens who had jumped off the high ledge went to the lower (and by lower I mean 40-50 foot) ledge a couple of times and did backflips. I probably could have done one of the lower jumps and then exited the pool quickly, but I still couldn’t bring myself to get into the water to depth-check, so I didn’t try any jumps here. I went in up to my shoulders and swam a few feet out and back one time, and that was enough for me. I decided to give it up and just head to the upper falls. I didn’t have any hopes of swimming there at this point, but I wanted to see it for completion's sake. We could see overlooks 100 feet or more above the middle falls, and we knew we were going to have to hike switchbacks to get up there if we continued on foot, so we decided to be lazy and just drive to the upper falls.

We were hoping the fishermen would be gone when we returned to the lower falls, but no such luck. I could sort of see what I thought was the fallen boulder near the whitewater of the waterfall.



We got in the car and drove to the overlook for the upper falls. There was a slot canyon with whitewater and some smaller cascades before the main drop.





The pool actually looked really nice, so we took a short but steep and dusty trail down to the river.



The upper falls looked like a larger, prettier version of the lower falls with higher surrounding rock walls. The waterfall looked to be about 15-20 feet high.



There weren’t really any jumping opportunities, except for possibly one large boulder about 6 feet high on the river-left side of the pool.



Here is a video with various vantage points of the upper falls:

Watch on YouTube

I was hoping this pool might be a tad warmer since it was getting a lot of sun exposure, but no such luck. I still couldn’t bring myself to get in, so I took some pictures (which was rough because of the light and shadow contrast), and then we scrambled back up the hill to the car.
___

I wanted to stop by Box Canyon Dam in the town of Mt. Shasta on the way back to check out the area featured on the Rescue 911 segment, and it was only a 12-minute detour. It actually turned into a 25-minute detour because we missed a turn and ended up going south on I-5, and it was about 5 miles before we got to an exit where we could turn around.

We got turned around and drove to Box Canyon Dam. We parked up the street and walked down to the bridge over the dam, which forms Lake Siskiyou.



It was hard to take a good picture of Box Canyon because there was a chain link fence along the sides of the bridge, and the bridge was the only good vantage point. I tried to get some pictures through the holes in the fence.

Watch on YouTube

There was fencing along the drop-off to the spillway that continued into the woods, seemingly preventing access to the rim of Box Canyon.



I later found out that there is actually a Box Canyon Trail along the north (river-left) rim, but we were unaware of it at the time and didn't notice it while we were there.

We crossed the bridge and walked down to the shore of the lake. The lake water was 75 °F, and I wanted to get in, but neither Cade nor I brought a towel, which would mean I would have to sit in his car with a wet swimsuit the whole way back.

When we got back to Redding, we ate at Woody’s Brewery. I got a burger that was thick and tasty but super greasy, and some super greasy tots with a “hint” of garlic. After that, we went to a Safeway grocery store to get Clif bars after the sun had gone down. We surmised that this was a sketchy area because there were shady characters loitering shirtless in the parking lot, and there was a security guard just inside the entrance. After that, we returned to the Super 8 where we continued our next-hotel search until about 11:30 PM before deciding on the Quality Inn of Chico. So far I’m not feeling Redding. The three things that have made the biggest impression are the relentless sun beating down, stuffy musty building interiors, and greasy dinners that give me garlic burps.

In summary, I was pretty disappointed with McCloud Falls from a swimming hole standpoint, because the water was way too cold for swimming to be pleasant. I could have done the jump in, jump out thing if I had been able to scope out the depth at potential jumping spots, but the water was so unpleasant that I couldn’t even bring myself to do that. Plus, half the fun of jumping is the refreshing plunge into water on a hot day, but it’s not very fun when the water feels like needles. I think it’s idiotic to jump into water without depth-checking it first, but I can see why people would just want to jump into water like this, as there's really no easing in when the water is this cold (not that that makes skipping depth-checking excusable). I’m hoping this ice water problem was just a McCloud Falls thing and isn’t going to plague us for the whole trip. Our first trip in 2017 was also during a high snowmelt year, and we got mostly moderate water temperatures then, so I’m hoping the waters get warmer as we move farther south.