Day 2: Shasta Dam, Lake Shasta Caverns

Today we visited Shasta Dam, Shasta Lake, and some caverns next to Shasta Lake.  Everything was nice and close, within about 30 minutes' drive from Redding.

Shasta Lake, which was basically created when Shasta Dam was built, holds 4.5 million acre-feet of water and has about 360 miles of shoreline.  (Click for Shasta Dam info.)  Shasta Dam is taller than the Washington Monument, and its spillway is three times the height of Niagara Falls.  The dam contains enough concrete to build a sidewalk 3 feet wide and 4 inches thick around the world at the equator.  Unfortunately, due to security concerns there were no dam tours and no one was allowed to walk out onto the dam.  But there was some very interesting information and historical pictures of the dam in the visitor's center.

An interesting project was begun on the dam about 10 years ago.  It was discovered that an endangered species of salmon was dying out, partly because of the effect the dam was having on downstream water temperatures.  So a "Temperature Control Device" was built, which allows water to be drawn in from either near the surface, or deeper below the surface, of the upstream reservoir, depending on the season.  This way they were able to benefit the salmon while not hurting the power generation or water delivery control functions of the dam.

Since Shasta Lake is a water reservoir, the water level varies significantly through the seasons, and through the years (wet versus dry years).  Right now the water level is about 40 feet lower than normal for this time of year, and you can see the red band around the shore of the lake in many of the pictures below - that band is exposed dirt that would typically be underwater.

Next we went to Lake Shasta Caverns, which is owned by a private group that runs tours.  (Click for info on the caverns.)  One interesting thing is that the caverns are high up on the side of a hill on the opposite side of Shasta Lake from the main road (I-5).  So the only way to get there is to take a short bus ride down to the water, then get on a boat that takes about 15 minutes to cross the lake, then on the other side of the lake the company has two 30 person buses that climb 800 feet up from the lake along a very narrow, very windy road that was built just for this purpose.  That second bus ride was a bit scary.

Here is the boat ride across the lake:

Here's the view looking back at the lake from near the entrance to the caverns.  You can see it's quite high up from the lake:

Below are pictures from inside the caverns.  A couple of them used flash, but in general I really like to capture the natural lighting in situations like this, so I used pretty slow shutter speeds (~1/8 to 1/15 sec) and braced the camera on whatever railing I could find.

And here is Isako after the boat ride back across the lake.  The caverns were roughly half-way up the hills you see in the distance.