Adventures of a swimming hole aficionado

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.
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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.

( Click here for the full trip report with pictures and videos )

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.