May 3, 2015
Wow, let’s see what’s been going on!
We left Redding on Hwy #3 with plans to camp somewhere along Trinity Lake. We wanted to get out of the city … and get out of the heat! We found out that the day before they burst the last record high by 6°F!!! That’s not good.
Anyway … according to my maps, there are TONS of campgrounds as well as dispersed camping in the National Forest at and around Trinity Lake. It looked HUGE.
The reality? There ARE lots of campgrounds but most are closed till May 15th at the earliest and just as bad, Trinity ‘Lake’ is practically dried up! All the boat launches are closed … and with good reason … the level in the lake is about 100 feet below what it should be. And this is in MAY … when you’d think there’d be lots of water rushing down from the melting snow in the mountains. But water is scarce everywhere. California is in the middle of a huge drought and no end in sight!
Low water levels at Trinity Lake
So … what to do for camping? Plan B. We’d just drive till we saw something that looked promising … a small road leading off into the woods and hopefully near a river. That had water in it.
In the meantime … we almost had a huge disaster! We’re driving down the road and I’m hearing something not right. Something is dragging … I know it.
But there’s nowhere to stop on the highway to check it out – no shoulders at all – so we’re looking for a place to pull off and we come upon a flag person signaling a stop for a highway work crew. She ran up to us and started shouting … “Your propane tank is dragging on the road!!!”
AAARRRGGGHHH!
Our 20lb propane tank that we use for the bbq and our propane campfire is attached to the rear of the RV when traveling. It’s on a stand and is secured by a bolt and screw. Never had a problem with it. We also have it secured by a locking
Propane tank on back of RV
cord – just so no one can walk off with it. We’d just started using a ‘butterfly’ bolt to make it easier to remove when we need to … and it had somehow worked itself loose and the tank had ‘jumped’ off the stand and was dragging by the locking cord behind us!
We were very lucky. The tank didn’t explode … and only had a huge amount of wear and tear. So … warning to all you RV’ers with propane tanks … now we use tape on top of the screw so it can’t shake loose!
Anyway … once that disaster was diverted we carried on. We did find a nice spot off the road on a little dirt-rutted track that led to a spot on the Trinity River. We settled in and Bruce got out our gold pan and tried to do a little prospecting. He tried for about 15 minutes and got bored when he didn’t find that giant gold nugget he’d hoped for. Oh well, at least we got to use our gold pan!
Bruce looking for gold
Campsite on the Trintiy River
We had a nice evening by the campfire and off early the next morning.
Nooooo!!!!
It’s a good thing we stopped for the night when we did … as the road turned VERY VERY narrow, twisty and huge gains/losses in elevation. Best done when good and rested!
There were times we were only able to move ahead at about 15mph! I really think it might have been even worse than Hwy #1 … and you know how bad that was!
We were shooting for Eugene, OR along the I-5, but only got about ½ way and decided to call it a night. We’re camped in an RV park near Rogue River, OR. We’ll start early tomorrow and see how far we get!
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