Mt. Shasta – photo by Liz Merry
Have you ever been to Mt. Shasta during their July Fourth festivities? They close a couple blocks of Mt. Shasta Blvd. and Castle St. for a street fair for 4 days. There’s music, vendors, food, and fun. I bring my little booth up there every year for a “workation”. Last year was canceled due to two fires – one in Weed and one in Shasta Lake City. The year before was Covid, so it’s been 3 years since the event was held.
Some generous friends let me stay in their cozy office/apartment on the lower level of their gorgeous home near Shastice Park. As I was driving there Friday night after work and a scrumptious dinner at Mike and Tony’s, I noticed a trash container overturned curbside up the block from our friends’ house. Then another and another. Finally I saw the vandal – a roly poly younger bear dining out at The Trash Can Buffet.
It’s always a happy surprise to spot a bear – from inside a car. A good omen. But a neighborhood bear is a potentially dangerous nuisance. Maybe he can be lured back up the mountain with a pic-a-nic basket like Yogi and Boo Boo.
On Wednesday, Mr. Standish and I hiked the Nobles Emigrant Trail in Lassen Park just inside the North entrance by Manzanita Lake. It’s an old wagon route and you can read more about it here. (Thanks Bob Nolen.) The trailhead is a half mile down a service road and we didn’t see another hiker all day. The first couple miles to Nobles Pass are awesome. Beautiful healthy forest, lightly treed, stunning views of Lassen Peak and Chaos Crags. Descending the other side of the pass, the forest gets funky and not in a good way.
Photo by Aaron Standish
Chaos Crags and Lassen Peak photobomb – Liz Merry
It’s heavily forested with too many trees too close together blocking all light below. No new growth on the forest floor, just dead branches and limbs in the understory reaching halfway up the still living trees to the green canopy far above. Like a fire waiting to happen. We saw some cool fungi.
Photo by Liz Merry
Epcot Center? No – Giant Puffball. Photo by Liz Merry
Photo by Liz Merry
The trail then crosses the park road a couple times and that’s no fun at all. The last thing you want to do on a hike is dodge RVs. Plus you can hear the traffic. Ew. By all means do that first couple miles sometime, but I don’t recommend the 9 or so we did. There are prettier places.
We got home and turned on a faucet and got only a dribble of water. Then none. I got a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach. No water – what? We have a well and an irrigation ditch. The well has fantastic water percolated through the mountains of Lassen Park and is delivered to us via lava tube almost 300 feet underground. We use the well water for inside the house and the irrigation ditch for gardens, critters – all the outside stuff. The ditch water is not potable for humans without a filtration system. It is gravity fed from a pond uphill from us. Frog parts and all.
I was panic-stricken. Mr. Standish diagnosed the problem and had it fixed in no time, but it gave us a better understanding of what the dry well folks in the valley have been experiencing for years now.
The Tehama Groundwater Commission met on Wednesday the 6th and I listened to the audio Thursday. On the agenda was a presentation on proposed regulations governing new and replacement agricultural and domestic wells, followed by a public hearing.
In a nutshell, the new regulations require new ag and domestic wells to be dug deeper with minimum screening depths. That is what they came up with. Drill deeper. Once your deep new well is drilled, go ahead and pull all the water you want out of it. This would be acceptable if there was an infinite amount of water underground, but of course there is not.
There were many insightful comments by the public. Ian Turnbull of Capay talked about the lack of an allowance to replace an existing healthy well. There are varying minimum depths for different areas of the county, but the map showing them was created by consultants who have no proof of their estimated data. The new regulation would require doubling of the depth in some areas, regardless of land use, creating a hardship for small ag users. They would have to go through the appeals process, which could take months.
A man named Andrew laid out some truthiness. He brought up the fact that as long as the Groundwater Commission has been meeting, they have insisted there is no proof that ag wells are drawing down the aquifers and affecting domestic wells. Now they admit it all the time, as if they had never lied about it. It is reminiscent of the tobacco companies who insisted cigarettes don’t cause cancer long after they knew the truth.
He also pointed out that domestic well use statewide accounts for around 2% of water use, ag around 80%. Everything here is done to keep Big Nut profitable. No talk of metering ag wells or even monitoring water depths. Just drill all the new ag wells you want but make them deeper and try to keep them from affecting domestic wells. The sealing and screening requirements will help, but not mitigate 100%. If you pull water out of the deep lower aquifers, the upper ones will be affected. The land above, too. Subsidence is already occurring and recharge takes decades.
The makeup of the GC is a part of the problem. Chairman Clay Parker gushed about the diversity of the commission and claimed “nobody here has a majority,” as if calling it diverse made it so. There is also a tendency to shame people with older wells that are now considered shallow. Duh. Wells didn’t need to be as deep before because the water was closer to the surface. Victim blaming anyone?
In other Tehama outrages, a number of county employees were spitting mad over Consent Agenda Item 19 at last week’s Supervisors meeting. The item was for the County to pay the Corning Healthcare District upwards of $50,000 a year for a Lobby Navigator for the Social Services office in Corning, which has been closed for over 6 months. Corning SS clients have to come to the Red Bluff office now, although over 90% of services are done online or by phone. The county provides free transportation to those clients wanting to see someone in person.
One assumes there has been a note on the door of the office since December, informing people of their options. The proposed Lobby Navigator would provide “a personal experience” for the south county clients. How nice. The District Manager of Corning Healthcare District was chosen for the job, but we have no idea how or by whom. She already has a well paid position at CHD.
An anonymous county employee brought this item to my (and others’) attention. It would have slipped right by and been approved if someone hadn’t noticed. Sneaky, huh? The employee is afraid of retaliation – sad and scary – but many colleagues aren’t and spoke out in anger against it on a public Facebook post.
The item was pulled from Consent, but wasn’t moved to the Regular Agenda for discussion as is typically done. Maybe that’s because the prospective subcontractor is a close relative of lame duck Supervisor Bob Williams, who pulls stuff like this all the time. This is not the woman’s fault and nobody is blaming her. It’s probably just a parting gift from Uncle Bob before he leaves office. It will be brought back at a future meeting once everyone gets their stories straight.
Negotiations to purchase the Courthouse Annex are ongoing, even though the public vehemently opposes it. County Counsel reported that the state cannot sell it below market value, so forget about getting it for a buck. The public will have a lot to say about that, too.
Courthouse Annex – photo courthouses.co
If you missed the fireworks in the sky Monday, there will be plenty in the Tehama Supes Chamber soon.
