Category: Travel

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The I-5 Trivia Files: Self-Interview

Q. So what’s the topic?

A. I was thinking about driving up Interstate 5 and all those passes you cross.

Q. Yeah?

A. It’s a flat valley drive until you get to Redding. That’s 200 miles from the front door. Then there’s some climbing and lots of twisty parts around Lake Shasta. And then you go up some more, past Dunsmuir.

Q. Dunsmuir?

A. Dunsmuir’s about 50, 55 miles north of Redding. LIttle town on the upper part of the Sacramento River. Popular place during trout season. Elevation up there is about 2,500 feet.

Q. What then?

A. Mount Shasta. You can see the mountain way down in the Valley. Once we saw it clear down by Dunnigan, which is 180 miles down the road from the peak. But when you get into the hilly country around Redding, you lose sight of the mountain until you’re much closer. And then, bang, there it is.

Q. Big.

A. Very big. Very impressive. A 14,000-foot peak standing out there pretty much by itself. Anyway, the highway goes up past the town of Mount Shasta, which sits on the eastern base of the mountain. At about 3,500 feet. Then I-5 goes up crosses Black Butte Summit. About 3,900 feet. That’s the first real pass, maybe 50 miles south of the Oregon border.

Q. Black Butte?

A. It’s a volcanic cone of some kind. Next to Mount Shasta, it’s the most remarkable sight along that part of the road.

Q. OK. You’re still going north. What’s the next pass?

A. Well, the road loses some elevation first. You go through Weed, which is mentioned in passing in “Of Mice and Men,” the Steinbeck story. It’s a place Lenny and George had to leave before they landed in the Salinas Valley, where the story takes place. Then you go through Yreka, which ought to have a bakery because it it did you’d have a good palindrome. The road goes right up after you pass Yreka, up Anderson Grade. There’s a nice view of Shasta to the south, and somebody put a dragon sculpture along the highway there. You climb up to Anderson Grade Summit. Maybe 3,100 feet.

Q. Not a big deal?

A. Well, it’s steep coming up from Yreka, and the road winds, and there are plenty of slower trucks up there, and then the road plunges down toward the Klamath River. There’s an exit right along the Klamath with a rest area. Good place to stop, though I only remember doing it once.

Q. Still in California.

A. For a little while, maybe 10-15 miles. The road goes up and down for a while, you pass a weigh station, and then you start climbing again. The last town in California is called Hilt. Milepost 796, I think. And then you’re on the Oregon border.

Q. How far from home?

A. About 320 miles. That climb that starts in California is the Siskiyou Summit climb. That’s two syllables — SISK-you.The summit is the highest point on I-5, 4,300-some feet. Doesn’t sound that high — all the well-known passes in the Sierra Nevada are in the low 7,000 to 10,000-foot range. But Siskiyou is far enough north and gets enough wet weather in the winter to make it a barrier. I know plenty of people who’ve gotten stopped there during snowstorms. Or at least a couple.

Q. How about you?

A. Never. We always had great luck driving through there in winter. The road always seemed to be dry and clear when we went through on our way up to Eugene.

Q. Where’s the road go next.

A. There’s a steep drop with a couple runaway-truck ramps down to the town of Ashland, where the Shakespeare Festival is. Elevation there is probably 1,500 or 1,800 feet. Then you’re in a valley through Medford, the big town in the region. Then you noodle around through Grants Pass before you come to the three summits.

Q. Three summits?

A. Well, you hit them one right after another. I always tried to keep the order straight. Northbound, I think you hit Sexton Mountain first. Then … Stage Road, I think. And last … Smith Hill. I think the last is the highest, about 2,000 feet. Then there’s a little break crossing a valley, and then you hit a fourth pass, Canyon Creek, which is also not very high but has a long, long descent to Canyonville and then the Seven Feathers Casino.

Q. How many times have you done this drive?

A. Over the last four or five years maybe 20, 25 times. Enough to get to know it. That’s the last named pass that I know of, Canyon Creek. Though there are rivers.

Q. That’s a different species of geographic phenomenon. Which ones?

A. Well, from the south, you’ve got the Sacramento, which you cross and recross half a dozen times from Red Bluff up to Dunsmuir. Then the Shasta, which is a tiny thing, and maybe the Little Shasta. The Klamath. Bear Creek between Ashland and Medford; has enough water running to be called a river. The Rogue. The South Umpqua and the North Umpqua. The Coast Fork of the Willamette, and the southern end of the mainstem Willamette just as you get into Eugene. Maybe other rivers. But a whole bunch of creeks, too. One name that comes to mind: Jumpoff Joe Creek, north of Grants Pass before you go up Sexton Mountain.

Q. Creek names are a whole other subject.

A. True. We’ll get to them later.

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Snow Again

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Here’s what that Friday morning snow in Mount Shasta looked like. Not sure when it started, but it was over by 10 a.m. By noon, it was turning into a nice day. I spent the afternoon on a ranch north and east of town, and it was dry and warm there.

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Snow

Drove up to Mount Shasta last night and didn’t get in until very late. I’m up here to do a radio story on a recent Nature Conservancy land purchase that aims to restore some valuable salmon spawning streams up here. But the news right now, as I look out my window onto Mount Shasta Boulevard, is that there’s a steady and from a lowlander’s perspective pretty heavy snow falling. I don’t think it will last long, but I didn’t really expect to see it. It’s beautiful, and I’m hoping that it won’t get in the way too much of my handling a tape recorder and microphone. Pictures later.

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Mixed Marriage, Revisited

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I’ve written about this grave before. About five years ago, my dad and I spotted it while visiting the Mother Jones Memorial in a union miners’ cemetery just outside Mount Olive, Illinois. The Cardinals and Cubs logos got our attention, of course. Last week, I stopped there again with my brother Chris and son Liam. After we got done gazing upon Mother Jones’s final resting place, we went across the road to the Kalvin grave. Chris noticed a metal capsule on the back of the stone, which happens to be the side facing the road. It has a hinged cover. Beneath the cover is what I take to be a picture of Steven and Verona, some time during their long marriage and lifelong residence in Mount Olive. A date is noted below: their wedding day. For a little historical baseball perspective, Steven Kalvin was born three years before Wrigley Field opened (and five years before the Cubs made it their home); Verona Kalvin was born the same year the last Yankee Stadium opened. They were married three seasons after the Cubs’ last pennant.

Verona, here’s hoping you don’t have to wait too much longer.

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Road Blog: Ode to California

(Upon crossing the Colorado River)

Ah, California!
Your fiscal mess, your taxes, your repossessed homes;
Your Governator, your initiatives and your political schemes;
Your freeways and traffic and drivers yearning to speed;
Your 36 million people and all that they want;
Your deserts, your mountains and valleys and rivers, your dams;
Your stunning weather, your drought and your thirst;
Your condors and salmon and spotted owls, your smog and wildfires;
Your ports, your cities, your suburbs flung every which way;
Your towns: Beverly Hills, Oakland, Weed, and Shafter; Berkeley, Compton, Taft, and Fort Bragg;
Your prisons and prisoners, your guards, your cops;
Your students, your teachers, your school segregation;
Your sunshine and field workers and endless farms;
Your agribusiness, your entrepreneurs, your next big things;
Your visionary schemes and your reluctance to pay.

The limitless dream, the busboy, the kid who can’t read;
The redwood, the dead mill, the air you can’t breathe;
The surf, the oil spill, the guy asleep on the street;
A million reasons to stay and a million to leave.

On the prairie and over the mountains I roam;
Crossing the Colorado, California, I’m home.

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Road Blog: Jolly Kone

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One more from the road: a drive-in we passed in Wasco, between Highway 99 and Interstate 5 north of Bakersfield. The featured role of pastrami is notable, but pales next to the claim, “The Best Food in Wasco.” I can’t testify one way or the other.  

We pretty much stuck to the route that Google Maps or Mapquest might give you between Barstow and Berkeley: Highway 58 to Bakersfield and Highway 99; then up to Highway 46, through Wasco to I-5. Then all the way up the San Joaquin Valley to I-580, which takes you into Oakland. The route is simple and it is fast, and the traffic in the valley mostly behaved itself. We hit the front door here at about 5 p.m. straight up. Total driving for five days: 2,685 miles. Not a killer, but in a mini-Toyota it was a little bit of a challenge. Now that I think of it, I don’t recall seeing a single Echo on the road between here and Chicago (plenty of Priuses, though).

More tomorrow. I get to sleep at home tonight.

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Road Blog: Grants, New Mexico, to Barstow, California

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Short one tonight: Mostly Interstate 40 all day, and even through stunning country, that can drain most of the fun out of the trip. Fast, though, and that’s good when you want it.  

Started out in Grants, about 85 miles east of the New Mexico-Arizona line. Instead of getting on the interstate, we looped south and west on a state highway and stopped (not long enough) at the Malpais and El Morro national monuments. We crossed into Arizona without knowing it and cut north a little ways to find I-40 again. Then up through Flagstaff and through a mini-snowstorm and down to the Colorado River and into California. Then tomorrow, across the little patch of desert between us and the Tehachapis, over the mountains and down into the Central Valley. Maybe another little detour or two. We’ll see.

[Above: An ocotillo flowering at a roadside rest area about 30 miles east of Needles, California; below, a sign from the some stop. (Click for larger images.)]

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Road Blog: Lamar, Colorado, to Grants, New Mexico

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Above: Just outside Wagon Mound, New Mexico, a town on Interstate 25 about 105 miles from Santa Fe. Wonderful day on the road: wind, sun, clouds, the overawing and heartbreaking beauty of the country. We ended up in Grants, about 100 miles east of the Arizona border, after having one small adventure with the car. Won’t go into the long version here, but we had a check engine light go on just about the same time we were passing a Toyota dealer in Raton, just south of the Colorado state line. The mechanic there agreed to check us out right away, and suffice it to say (a longhand version of the story might find its way here) that the car’s six salty Chicago winters exacted their toll today. But in a small way. The shop got us on our way in an hour or so. No more problems, and now I know what a coil assembly is.

Below: Marchiondo’s Store, Raton, New Mexico. There’s a story there, too, which I shall relate. It’s connected to that whole car deal, but it’s got its own twists and turns. Note: the store’s been closed since 1986. Still full of “merchandise,” as the owner described it. It’s the “A Rose for Emily” of the retail world.

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Road Blog: Kansas City to Lamar, Colorado

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Got a late start from Kansas City this morning, and took our time in Chase County–home of the Tallgrass Prairie National Preserve–before doing some serious driving starting at about 2:30 in the afternoon. Well, we had lunch in Cottonwood Falls, the Chase County seat, and since we had just one key for the car and were concerned about locking it in the car–we stopped by a general dry good store with a sign that said it made keys. Getting the spare key was a half-hour process that involved the store proprietor expressing doubts about his ability to cut a two-sided key, a long search through the blanks he had in stock, and a digression about a locking gas cap that once had failed him. We did not hurry him along. Finally, he chose a blank he thought might work since he didn’t have the one specified for our Toyota Echo, and cut it with no problem. He said he thought it would work in the car, took our buck-eighty, and we were on our way. The new key works fine and all we have to remember to do now is not to leave the spare key in the car where we won’t be able to retrieve it when we lock the other one inside the vehicle.

We also wasted some time trying to locate Kansas Highway 150, which our map sort of implied might head west from Cottonwood Falls. Eventually we found it, but not before driving back and forth on a back road that goes past the town fishing lake and through a dying hamlet called Elmdale–still on the map–just off U.S. 50.

Elmdale looked desolate and much the worse for wear. Only one business appeared to exist in town–a grocery that except for the soda vending machines outside looked like it might be shut down. Just down the main street from there was a small edifice built from the same sandy-colored limestone that appears in many substantial buildings in the area. It was the city hall, built (according to an inscription at the lower right of the picture) by the Works Progress Administration in 1936.

Chris remarked that the place reminded him of a desperately poor town in eastern Kentucky, Pineville, that we had driven through with our dad in 1966. The shattered houses, some abandoned, some still occupied, reinforced the impression. So did the scruffy city park and the nearly empty streets. The one sign of activity was someone unloading a truck full of wooden pallets, adding them to the hundreds of pallets already stacked near one home. I wondered whether they were intended as firewood.

There’s a story to the town, one that naturally is not evident from a five-minute look at the place. By way of the town’s Wikipedia entry, I came upon a terrific (though undated) story from the Emporia Gazette that chronicles the town’s decline over the past 60 years, mostly due to a series of floods. The piece is accompanied by some nice shots from a Michigan photographer, Galen Frysinger.

Trip coordinates:

Departure point from Chicago: 42 degrees, 0 minutes, 32 seconds N. latitude
87 degrees, 41 minutes, 21 seconds W. longitude

Day One stop: 39 degrees, 6 minutes, 52 seconds N.
94 degrees, 45 minutes, 46 seconds W.

Day Two stop: 38 degrees, 6 minutes, 13 seconds N.
102 degrees, 37 minutes, 6 seconds W.

Home (Berkeley): 37 degrees, 52 minutes, 39 seconds N.
122 degrees, 16 minutes, 53 seconds W.

Comment: We’re within a quarter degree of our destination latitude. We’re about 20 degrees east of it. I don’t believe we’ll find a straight-line route.

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Road Blog: Chicago to Kansas City (Kansas)

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My brother Chris, his son Liam (he’s 12), and I started out from Chicago to drive to California. I’m actually doing an errand–picking up my dad’s car and bringing it out to Berkeley–and since it’s spring break for them, they’re along for the ride.

To break up the Interstate highway slog, I like to get off on side roads occasionally. I suggested the possibility of driving out U.S. 20 through northern Iowa and northern Nebraska to northeastern Wyoming, and then making our way down to Interstate 80 near Rawlins. What I liked about the route: it would take us within about 30 miles of Wounded Knee, on the Pine Ridge Reservation of the Lakota Sioux; it would also take us right past Fort Robinson, Nebraska, the site of a tragic episode in the 1876 saga of the Northern Cheyenne attempt to return to Montana from a reservation Oklahoma.

But the weather along that route: not good. It was supposed to be fine through Wednesday, at which point we’d be starting across Wyoming. But rain and snow, and then heavy snow, are forecast for much of the corridor we’d be taking. The weather along Interstate 40 and other central and southerly routes seemed much less problematic. So we headed southwest from Chicago this morning in the rain.

We stopped early in the afternoon at the Union Miners Cemetery in Mount Olive, Illinois. I happened across this spot with my son Eamon about five years ago when we spotted a highway sign pointing us to the “Mother Jones Memorial.” That had to be investigated, and it turns out Mary “Mother” Jones (1830-1930) is buried there along with many members of the United Mine Workers and other coal-mining unions.

Maybe someday I’ll make a day of it down there. Today, we stopped for 15 or 20 minutes, not really long enough to take in much more than the main attraction. The marker above, with the Leaning Jesuses, is along the lane to the Jones monument (which is just visible in the left distance).

After this, we took state routes and country roads to Grafton, where we took a ferry across the deceptively calm-looking Illinois River (the image below; the river is running high, and much of the lowlands east of the river are under water), then to the Golden Eagle Ferry, which crosses the Mississippi on a bend south of, but upriver from, the mouth of the Illinois.

On the Missouri side the boat unloads you onto a floodplain road that’s less than a 10-minute drive to a freeway that leads into I-70. We skipped a detour to a temporary Missouri River ferry (in Glasgow, where a new bridge is being built), stopped in Independence to see Harry Truman’s place, looked at some of the important Mormon-related sites in town, then crossed the river after dark into Kansas.

Tomorrow we might cross paths with John Brown.  

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