Drive from Parks Creek Trailhead to Etna

Woke up to a cool morning (compared to the balmy mornings of the last week in the Burney/McCloud area) at about 7800ft, so didn't waste much time moving on with the car heater going, which I managed to develop the rationalization for doing while trying to rehearse my plan of the night before, and settle some of the details. Whereas yesterday I had planned on first leaving a food cache at the Park Creek road summit before moving on to do the same at the next two road crossings (AKA summits AKA trailheads) between here and the Etna (road) Summit, namely: Scott Mountain and Carter Meadows.

This was based on my still somewhat muddled conclusion yesterday that I might just have to do the entire 100mile Castle Crags to Etna route without interruption.  But that left the problem of how to stretch my 7 camera batteries and 200GB of memory (normally I figure one battery and 32GB per day) over the dozen to fifteen days that would take me, at 13-15 miles/day.

So I would likely split it in two, either at Parks Summit or Scott Mountain Summit. (These are Road Summits, not trail summits; from the trail's point of view, the road summits are saddles - the trail essentially traverses the slopes of ridges from saddle to saddle.)

I need to have one end of my loops accessible my bicycle. One way I can split a long section that has both ends accessible is to leave car at high point in the middle and hike in opposite directions from lower bicycle-accessible trailheads. Parks Creek meets this criteria, but leaves an assymetrical split, thus I was considering Scott Mt would be the ideal split point (but with an assymetrical bike loopback: first a longish trek via Callahan, Etna, bus via Yreka to Dunsmuir, then bike to I5 Trailhead at Castle Crags, but for second half a bike-only Callahan to Etna then hitch to Etna summit.)

What I realized overnight was that Parks Creek Summit was the ideal split point, mainly because the 5600ft climb to get there from Castle Crags would multiply the effort to do that first 30 miles to balance the 70 mile remainder.  Also, the bike loopback via Weed to Dinsmuir from Parks Creek Summit would be simpler than the longishroute via Callahan, Etna, Yreka to Dunsmuir from Scot Mountain Summit.  Further, I could split off the Parks to Schot 25 miles into two day-hike round trips from each end, leaving a Scott Mt to Etna Summit loop that would have a simple bike-only loopback (um, except for the taken-for-granted hitch from Etna to Etna Summit, which I read was an "easy hitch", since Etna is a "hiker friendly" town with a "trail angel".

So I wouldn't be leaving a food cach at Parks.   Well, so I drove down the west side to the junction that goes south to Weaverville and north over Scott Summit to Callahan, stopped at the Scott Summit campground to "clean up" a little - and forgot to leave a now "contingency" cache, and on to Etna.

Chatted with a number of people various places in Etna, getting lots of good info, some of it surprising.

[But I'll leave that for another post, as it's getting late as I'm leaving this post-dated post at the McD's in Weed late evening of Tuesday 5/27.]