This past weekend I celebrated Memorial Day by going to Shasta Lake with Natasha and watching a bunch of post-frat boys play drunken frisbee in a motel parking lot. Okay, that was only five minutes of the whole trip. What happened the rest of the time?

This gnome actually was one of the last things we encountered on the trip. On Saturday, we drove to Shasta Lake and saw Shasta Dam… the 2nd largest dam in the United State. I guess they don’t have too much of an inferiority complex about it’s second best status, becasue there was a museum and lots of enthusiasm on the part of the Bureau of Reclamation (read: the government agency responsible for covering things in water).

Although it is hazy, you can make out Mt. Shasta in the background of this photo from near the dam:

After seeing the Dam, it was on to our accomodations at Shasta Lake. The next day we rented a canoe and went up the upper Sacramento River arm of the lake. The lake is very pretty and is great for paddling in a canoe, however if the wind comes up in the middle of your trip it’s a lot of work to paddle back to the dock. There are also a lot of jet skis and wakeboarders, so it’s best to stay on the quieter parts of the lake if you don’t want to capsize or be run over.

After returning the canoe, we went up to Mount Shasta, the most spectacular mountain I’ve seen in person. There was still a good deal of snow on it, even though the winter was exceptionally mild this year. The parking lot at 6700′ was the highest point on the mountain accessable by car at this time of year (the entire mountain is over 14,000 feet tall). Within a short walk from the parking lot, snow drifts were still melting. It was refreshing to be in the cool air on the mountain, since the daily temperatures near the lake were over 90 degrees every day we were there.

The last day of the trip we stopped at Turtle Bay, a park in Redding CA. The part was nature-themed and included a number of very friendly and hungry birds:

This park is also home to Spanish architect Santiago Calitrava’s famous Sundial Bridge. It was interesting to see that the deck of the bridge is actually made out of glass, something I didn’t know from the images I had viewed in magazines. One of my coworkers said that Calatrava claimed it was done that way so that a shadow wouldn’t be cast on the river- he wanted to avoid scaring the fish. This seems pretty ridiculous to me, but I’m sure he had to find a way to justify a glass deck in client meetings and that probably sounded as convincing as anything else he could think up.

The it was back to the Bay Area with a brief stop at the Petrified Forest. For $6 you can walk through a forest trail that features a number of suprisingly large petrified trees that were buried in a volcanic eruption about 4 million years ago. I spent a good portion of the walk on the lookout for rattlesnakes (there is a big warning sign at the entrance), but I did enjoy the petrified wood:

I also, of course, spotted the gnome and his donkey pictured at the beginning of this post. It was a very eventful weekend, and now I am back in freezing cold San Francisco studing for the architecture registration exam. Yay!