Road Trips and Bucket Lists (Part One-The Mountain)

My husband and I do road trips together very well and this has been the best Christmas present we have given ourselves for the last couple of years.
This year's agenda was to get to Shady Cove, Oregon to visit an old friend of his, an adopted second mother.
We began looking at maps and thinking about what we could see along the way.

Since Mt. Shasta was on my "bucket list" we decided to include that for sure on the way up.
The weather reports showed that rain was likely on Wednesday and after, so we decided mid-day on Monday to take off so that we could make the 7 hour drive that far, spend the night and be ready for a good hike Tuesday morning when we awoke. We were blessed with a warm and wonderfully sunny day.

We drove to the southwestern slope of the mountain to the Bunny Flat trailhead (6,950 feet). In the winter, this is as far as you can traverse by road. Our 3 hour hike took us in zig-zag fashion a short distance up the mountain. With several inches of snow already on the ground, trails were hard to follow.  I found that  the countless hours of playing in the snow as a child had really taught me something about snow.

Some areas were hard-packed, some had drifts and we had to look for passable routes. Adventure!  When possible, we followed someone else's foot tracks. These were left some time ago and had filled up with interesting little bits of nature.

Frequent stops along the way were required to take in all of the breath-taking scenery!

When finishing up our lunch in Mt. Shasta City afterwards, we took one last look up at the mountain before climbing in the truck to drive on. Oh, look! It's cloudy up there now! We were lucky, weren't we?

The return trip was left largely up to chance, with additions and subtractions made up in the moment all along the way. In the next post, I'll show you a few of the amazing discoveries made along our meandering homeward part of the journey.

If you read the above and asked "What is a bucket list?" give yourself a great treat and watch this movie. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0825232/  This link just shows you the movie trailer and hopefully entices you to download it, rent the video or find it in whatever form you choose. It was wisely recommended to me by my mom and dad years ago.