CALIFORNIA


BEYOND THE REDWOOD CURTAIN


UPSTATE IS A WORLD APART FROM CLASSIC CALIFORNIA. A BUCOLIC, FORESTED WILDERNESS, IT’S HOME TO SLEEPING VOLCANOES, GLASSY LAKES AND SULPHUR SPRINGS


“Everything moves so fast these days,” announces Julie, looking across the lake. “I wanted to find somewhere people could stop for a while.” We fix our eyes on three canoes cutting a


slim furrow across the mirror-blue expanse; lone vessels dwarfed by clay-red mountains rising up above from the shore, their peaks — some still snow-capped — layered endlessly as far as the horizon. It’s summer, and hundreds of flat-topped,


shed-like houseboats populate Shasta Lake; its 370 miles of sharply snaking shoreline accommodating them in hidden bays. A huge dam — America’s second tallest aſter the Hoover Dam when it was completed in the early 1940s — sealed off part of the Sacramento River to form this tangle of a lake. This corner of Northern California is


where redwood trees vastly outnumber people and the trappings of modern life melt away. Above the lake lies Tsasdi Resort, owned and run by Julie and her partner, Scott. Its hillside log cabins are furnished with wrought-iron beds, patchwork quilts and pastel-coloured, mid-century kitchenettes. “Generations of the same families have been coming to Tsasdi since it opened in the ’40s,” says Scott. “And while we’ve updated, we’ve aimed to retain the spirit of the place.” I too, have fallen for ‘upstate’ California,


with its forests and undulant, picket-fenced farmland. There’s even a charm to the cheery, cursive 1940s fonts found on the welcome signs at ranger stations and state parks, which make up the bulk of its landmass. “People think Northern California is San


Francisco wine country, then the Oregon border. But there’s so much in between,” says Scott. And it’s true. Despite covering around a quarter of the landmass of a state almost twice as big as the UK, Northern California’s population barely exceeds Peterborough’s. To get here, I’d driven for days before the fields of wheat, vines and olives gave way to


the wild; soon, my car was burrowing through dense tunnels of redwood and fir up to snowy passes where sheets of sleet flung themselves at the windscreen. The weather cleared as I arrived in Lassen Volcanic National Park, where the ground steamed, from both the returning sun and the sulphur springs, hissing fumaroles and boiling mud pots that perforate the ground, burping up such brilliant place names as Bumpass Hell, Black Butte and the Devastated Area. Lassen is a curiosity — a place made for


short scenic drives, yet also somewhere you could get lost in for weeks, hiking its hundreds of miles of trails, overnighting in wild campgrounds amid frozen lava fields and sleeping volcanoes. “There was heavy snow overnight,” says


a park official as I wait on the valley floor to drive up to a mountain trailhead that kicks off at 8,000ſt. “We’re clearing it now, so you can get in there but I wouldn’t hang around. More’s coming.” She has the no-nonsense look of someone used to shovelling snow in June. I confine my hike to a walk round the lake before beating a retreat into the nearby ‘town’. Chester’s Main Street — pretty much the


sum total of ‘town’ — offers a handful of diners serving old-country fare. At Cravings Cafe, I decline the Settler’s Breakfast (hash, sausage gravy and eggs over easy with Applewood-smoked bacon), but can’t resist a souvenir — a mug that reads: ‘Relax and shit’. It’s about as far from California’s overly worthy, self-help motivational mantras as you can get. But then again, upstate is a very different California. SB


Where to stay


Tsasdi Resort. tsasdiresort.us Plumas Pines Resort. plumaspinesresort.com


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