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Years ago we visited the Marble Mountain Wilderness on a backpacking trip.
I had wanted to visit its neighbor to the south, the Trinity Alps Wilderness,
for many years but kept putting it off. One of the main reasons is that
we usually camp/hike in the summer, and it's hot in the summer there. It's
west of Redding, which frequently reaches 100 degrees in the summer.
But I decided to bite the bullet this year and just go for it. With
temperature projections of nearby Weaverville to be in the low to mid 90's
during the week, we prepared ourselves as best we could, packing up
and leaving on Saturday afternoon. We got started at 2:30pm thinking we
wouldn't run into much traffic, but we were wrong. We hit traffic
in the Bay Area, then again near Fairfield. Thankfully after that it was
mostly smooth sailing.
We stopped for gas in Redding around 7pm and were considering stopping to
eat dinner at the nearby Subway, but we spied some suspicious characters lurking
around outside the restaurant and decided to just keep going to Weaverville.
I was mindlessly following the GPS, and took a right onto Trinity Dam Blvd.
before I realized the GPS was taking me on a shortcut that would bypass
Weaverville completely. Since we hadn't eaten or bought groceries yet (and
I wasn't sure what was available in Lewiston), that wasn't a good option. So
I turned around after a mile and headed back onto 299 and continued to Weaverville.
Weaverville is large enough that it has a large grocery store that happened
to even have a Subway right next to it. Their toaster oven wasn't working,
but we were ok with that. After eating we hit the grocery store. There was
a disconcerting sign outside the left door of the store which read "Because of
the high rate of theft in this county, this door is locked." We shopped as
quickly as we could, then finally made it into camp (Alpine View campground)
around 9:30pm. It was still quite warm as we set up camp. For one of the few
times ever, we slept without the rain fly on because of the heat, and were
not tempted to put it on the rest of the week. I'm guessing it was in the low
80's when we arrived, and probably never got below 70 during the night.
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