Day 5---more nice farmland, and a little bit about this part of California

I was up and out today by 7, and headed north out of Red Bluff along the Sacramento River.  Red Bluff was as far as steamboats could navigate the Sacramento River, and the evidence of its prosperity is everywhere in the grand buildings, parks and trees from the 19th Century.  It's a very pleasant town to ride through early in the morning.

I stopped at the lovely Ide Adobe State Park, with its iconic 400 year old valley oak tree shading the old adobe, which sits overlooking the river.  A gorgeous river up in these parts, but one of the most abused rivers in the US, converted into plumbing for the lawns of the Southern California desert.

At 7:15 AM it was already bright and warming up, but the park itself was quiet and empty.  Standing by the adobe, which sits next to a perennial creek, I tried to imagine what the river was like in 1850, when millions upon millions of salmon ran up the river every year, once in the spring and once in the fall.  How bounteous California must have seemed to those early eastern settlers.  Fish for the taking, and everything you put in the ground and watered flourished.  Surely the beginning of the American love affair with all things Californian!

Unfortunately, modern California intruded----as soon as I got on the bike, I realized my back tire was squishy.  Another flat....this time from a tiny piece of metal that was probably part of a truck's rebelted radial tire that was left on the side of the road.  You see hundreds of bits of truck tires every day on the busier stretches, and you have to wonder why the US, alone among developed countries, allows its highways to be strewn with so much of this type of debris.  You just don't see it anywhere I've cycled around the world.  Maybe one of my friends has the answer to that question!

The next couple of hours were a pleasant rolling ride along the Sacramento River, where the volcanic flows from Mt. Lassen have very clearly cut the river off at various times in its history.  Super interesting geology, and volcanic rock studded pastures.  It reminded me a lot of the foothills around Chico, for those of you who've been lucky enough to do the Chico Wildflower.  Mts. Lassen and Shasta were always in view.

A very protective mama bird on the Jellys Ferry Bridge over the Sacramento.  Any idea what bird this is?

The last hour was a boring ride through some of the worst of the American built environment.  Ugly sprawl along the old US 99.  How a city of 100,000 can have so many miles of sprawl is a testament to the failure of planning!

I'll have some more to say about planning and economic development, as I've found that the I-5 corridor here in the valley is a good example of how badly the current model functions.  No time for that tonight, as I have to get to bed by 830, so I can be up early to beat the heat on my big climb up into the Cascades.