Day 3: Railroad Park Resort

On the third day we drove from Redding to Dunsmuir, a small town about an hour north of redding.  (Click for Dunsmuir info.)  I believe about 1000 people live in the town.  Dunsmuir sprang up in the late 1800s as a stop along the railroad line going up the west coast, and turned into one of the most well-known fishing destinations in northern California.  Unfortunately I think it is now most well-known for an accident that happened there in the late 80s - a train derailed and dumped a lot of toxic chemicals into the river, killing all of the fish in the whole river (the poisons finally diluted when they reached Shasta Lake) and killing much of the vegetation along the river.  A lot of work went into helping the wildlife and vegetation recover, and when we were there we didn't see any sign of the accident (though of course we don't know what it looked like before).

We checked into the Railroad Park Resort (click for info), which I had stumbled across doing web searching before our trip for places to stay.  This place was just awesome, it was the most fun I've had staying in a hotel/motel in a long time!  They have a small lodge, but mainly they have about 20 cabooses, each of which has been converted into a motel room.  Not all of the cabooses had this, but ours had an observation deck, in the middle of the caboose you could climb a ladder up about 5 feet into a small alcove on either side, where there were small bench seats and windows.  It turned out to be a terrific place to sit and read and relax.  The other nice thing about the Railroad Park Resort is that, while it's right next to I-5, there's really nothing at all next to it except woods and mountains, and a small stream running right by it.  So it is very dark, good for looking at stars, and felt almost like we were camping.  Also, the rates were very reasonable, just under $100 per night.  As you can tell, I highly recommend this place to anyone traveling through the area.  Now, some pictures...

Here are a couple of pictures of the observation area:

This is the view from the window in the observation area:

Here's our room, good old "Cotton Belt":

This is the stream that runs right next to the resort:

I thought this was an interesting comparison of two different rotations of my polarizing filter:

Here's an old locomotive they have on the grounds:

In the background here you see the peaks of Castle Crags State Park, which is just a few miles from the resort:

This is me sitting in the observation area:

I took the picture below using my tripod and the timer on my camera.  I had thought that I could run from the camera around the side of the caboose, climb up the steps, go through the bedroom, and climb up the ladder to the observation deck in 10 seconds so I could get a picture of both of us in the two windows... but I nearly killed myself and got a picture of Isako in one window and the other window empty.  ;-)  I almost made it, I saw the flash out the window just as I grabbed the ladder going up to the observation area.  So, I took this picture instead.

Another picture of Castle Crags: