Road Trip — Coleman National Fish Hatchery
(Click photo for all 29 photos)
Today Lisa and I headed north to start a week-long road trip to Oregon to see what there was to see. After driving Interstate 5 for a couple of hours, we sidetracked off the main road to check out the Coleman National Fish Hatchery, which is the largest Chinook salmon hatchery in the lower United States. The fish weren’t spawning on this day, but I bet it’s something to see when they are. The salmon travel from the Pacific Ocean up the Sacramento River to here. There were numerous fingerlings in the raceways and when the time is right, they will make the trip to the ocean and only a small percentage of them will survive. There was absolutely nobody in sight, so we walked around and toured the hatchery on our own. We had lunch and the nice picnic tables area and watched the various types of birds running around.
Lassen Volcanic NP - Perseid Meteor Shower
I drove up to Lassen Volcanic National Park in Northern California to join Maria, her son Francis, Paul, Lisa and her friends Elliot and Aleece for a weekend of camping, hiking, swimming and star gazing. I arrived late at the Summit North Campground, just before Maria and Francis were going to bed. I quietly pitched my tent at Maria’s campsite and then grabbed my lawn chair and went down to the lake to wait for the annual Perseid Meteor Shower later that night. The meteor shower happens over several weeks, but the peak was to be that morning from around 2am to 4am. Only one other soul across the lake appeared to awake at that time; on my side of the lake the grazing deer and I kept startling each other in the dark. The night temperature dropped down way colder than I anticipated, so I only made it to about 2:30am before I crawled into the relative warmth of my tent. I saw the beginning of the show and tried my hand at some night photography, but only succeeded in inadvertently changing all my camera settings. Still, it was fun to see the beginning of the meteor shower–next year I’m in a warmer place!
