The (other) California Road Trip

Sunset at Cottonwood Lakes, California

It had been a minute since we stuffed our kids in a van for a roadtrip. Kids’ sports, friends, and birthday parties had made it difficult to get everyone on the same trip for longer than a day. So we dedicated the last week of June to a road trip along the entire length of California. 

Lake Siskiyou’s trout were hungry

When they hear “California Road Trip”, most people think about the coast. Southern California, Santa Barbara, Big Sur, San Francisco, the Lost Coast, and the northern-most California coast are all awesome, but we’d done that. We had not, however, been to California’s most prominent mountain, Mount Sasta.

We spent nights at Lake Siskiyou, the McCloud River, North Lake Tahoe, and the Mammoth Lakes area. We finished with a backpacking trip in the Cottonwood Lakes area of the Golden Trout Wilderness. 

Volcano, snow, lake, heat, good boy. Everything needed for an epic trip.

For a few hundred dollars in gas, a handful of $45 campsites, and another $100 in marshmallows, we had the roadtrip of a lifetime. Check out a video of our trip here.