Friday, October 31, 2014

Mt. Shasta Vista Point (on a cloudy day)


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So here are a couple of old photos from the Mt. Shasta Vista Point along I-5 in Northern California, a bit north of Yreka. As the name suggests, on a clear day you'd get a view of Mt. Shasta and the southern Cascades from here. Obviously it was not a clear day when I took these. It was still reasonably scenic, though; you can see a bunch of smaller mountains,, and you can sort of vaguely tell where the larger mountains are obscured by clouds.

It took me a while to figure out exactly where I took these photos. I wasn't being that meticulous about tracking locations, since I was kind of busy driving a Ryder truck across the country at the time. These were originally film photos, so they obviously weren't geotagged, so I didn't have that to go by either. So I looked at the state's list of highway rest areas and concluded it was probably the Randolph Collier rest area, by process of elimination since it's the only one in the rough vicinity. The viewpoint here apparently doesn't count as a rest area, per se, so it wasn't on that list.

I even had a fun naming situation to puzzle out about that other rest area. Sources including Google Maps insist it's spelled "Randolf", but the state DOT and Collier's Wikipedia bio insist it's the traditional spelling. I even did an image search and found a photo on Wikimapia that looks a lot of like mine, labeled "Randolph E. Collier Rest Area". Though other sources indicate Collier's middle initial was 'C', not 'E'. Guy sounds like a shady character to me. Anyway, I thought I had a definite match. But it turns out all of the other photos of the wayside look anything like this, and Yelp reviews explicitly say it doesn't have a view, so I'm pretty sure that one photo was actually taken at the Mt. Shasta Vista Point too, and someone labeled it wrong, and I almost propagated the mistake. I had an entire post written up and I was about to hit publish when I decided to double check the location and realized I had it all wrong. Posting that would have been really embarrassing.

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