Day 44

I started today with a leisurely drive through Lassen Volcanic National Park. I didn’t feel like hiking or walking, so I didn’t. The joys of traveling alone! The park features small geothermal vents and an area decimated by an eruption a hundred years ago; maybe I’ll return to explore those at a later time in my life. 

The next hour was a maze of sloped, rail-less roads that took me 8,000 feet down the mountainside. It was a joyous and, at times, chest-tightening ride through loose pine forests, by quiet streams, and aside the occasional cliff. I broke through into the Sacramento Valley and stopped for lunch in Chico. This city of over 100,000 residents has very little urban sprawl: a bead of population strung along CA-99. I found out why when I visited the only real suburb, Paradise.

Paradise is the location of a November 2018 fire that basically leveled the town. Its position at the seam of The Valley and the forest made it especially susceptible to such disasters, and a spark from a malfunctioning transformer led to an incredibly deadly and destructive blaze. Four years later, the population is only a tenth of what it was before. Those who remain are rebuilding, with signs that read Hope is Eternal and Paradise Strong. It’s a bold effort, if perhaps a foolhardy one. To quote a Sacramento fire chief, “There’s just some places a subdivision shouldn’t be built.”

Along the road to Paradise, perhaps symbolically, I found a spot where disaster had turned to beauty. Lookout Point was, until the late 2000s, a tragic turnout; people frequently tried to end their lives by driving off the road and into the canyon below. The government bought the land in 2008, placed interpretive signs and fencing, and brought safety to the area. In time, the spot took on new meaning. The fence is now covered in thousands of padlocks. Some are engraved as memorials, but most are symbols of love, stretching out unbroken along the skyway.