A soft, cool Autumn breeze ripples past my ears, gently rustling the hood of my jacket. It’s just the temperature where you wonder whether a jacket or a vest is the right attire for an outdoor stroll. Puffy cumulus dot the skies, and now and then they meet many of their friends and darken the blue to a dull steel gray. But it’s only pretend – there’s no rain above the clouds, and patches of sun open here and there all day long. Just enough to tease Howie’s solar panels into life, and then put them back to sleep twenty minutes later.

Whiskeytown Lake is just 10 miles west of Redding, CA, and is clearly a popular place in-season. With summertime temps in the 100F range, a big body of water near a town of 80,000 will get populated pretty quickly. Our camp site is really just a parking place 20 feet wide, surrounded by 35 other parking places. Not our favorite kind of camping environment, for sure. Make no mistake — it’s a nice forest and a nice lake, but honestly the crowdedness would tend NOT to recommend it.

Today, however, it’s a Friday in mid-November, and there’s hardly a soul around. The huge marina parking lot, just down our access road, is vastly empty, with tiny little Ralph forlornly holding a lookout perch near the vacant boat ramp.

We declared a “lazy day” today. It’s a lot like a DS day (do something), but the “something” is, by definition, whatever it was that you did when the end of the day rolls around. Turns out, we just drove Ralph around the lake and took some walks. Lazy.

The road to the southwest of the lake is called, cleverly, South Shore Drive. Once past our camp (Brandy Creek), the road goes rutty dirt all the way up to the northwest end, where it joins CA-299. A few nice views along the way, ample payment for the tiny bumpy road. (Ralph doesn’t mind it anyway.)

There’s a power station and mini-park at the northwest end, and some tall (elm?) trees are in full Fall color. The flirtatious wind is having a ball, making a playful snowfall of the big five-pointed leaves. Karin waves a branch up into the leaves and briefly competes with the wind’s product.

There’s few folks down at the water fishing – and with good cause, for the water is alive with jumping fish (trout?). They are seeming to like the shallow, warm water and modest population of insects. The ringlets in the picture are from three fish that jumped just before the shot.

Back near camp, a viewpoint near the dam shows off the “Glory Hole” structure used to overflow at high water levels (click/zoom to read the placard). An old sun-battered photo shows the overflow at capacity on the day 10,000 people gathered to hear JFK dedicate the facility.

Both the air and water temps are in the 60’s, with weather predicted to be dry. We’ll see what the weekend, the winds, and our mood produces, but it looks like a kayak day is also in the forecast.