My 3 Best Kept Northern California Travel Secrets

That's what Tom of Top Backpacking Destinations said when he challenged me to share My 3 Best Kept Northern California Travel Secrets.

And it's all about sharing! You see, Katie at Tripbase had the idea to get travel writers & bloggers to share their 3 Best Kept Travel Secrets.

When all is said and done, Katie will be producing a lovely ebook with travel highlights from some of the WWW's most experienced travelers and destination afficionados!

Sound's like fun, don't you think! So here's My 3 Best Kept Northern California Travel Secrets:

OOPS - FIRST AN UPDATE: The promised Travel Secrets Book has turned into seven Travel Secrets Books & they're all free! Just click on the Author's Badge below & get yours!

And, when you do, Tripbase.com - creator of this project - will donate $1 to Charity: Water, helping to provide clean & safe drinking water to people in developing nations!

So get your free book(s) and help a good cause! And thank you!!

You might find it hard to imagine that crowded California could possibly have any "undiscovered" places left, but it does!

And one of the most isolated and rugged of those is The Lost Coast, a 90 mile stretch of Northern California coastline between Ferndale and Rockport.

Because no one has yet forged a coastal road through the intensely rugged terrain, The Lost Coast has remained undeveloped and untamed - the last of the Last Frontiers. And it couldn't be more dramatic or more beautiful!

Inhabited by a few scattered ranchers, a handful of retirees, and some aging Hippies who grow a crop which isn't legal in the State of California except with a doctor's prescription, the Lost Coast provides wild landscapes - shipwrecked steamers, battered Sea Stacks, jagged cliffs, pristine beaches, talus pipes - and tons of solitude to go with your hiking, fishing, backpacking, beachcombing, and camping.

Visit the little village of Shelter Cove, explore the Siskyone Wilderness and King Range National Conservation Area, check out Cape Mendocino (most westerly point of California), or hike the Lost Coast Trail . . .

But don't be surprised when you discover that the wildlife inhabitants - mink, bear, elk, river otter, deer - outnumber the human variety, and there are more cows lying on the beaches than there are people!

It's amazing to me how many Californians have never even heard of Lassen Peak and its park!

After all, Lassen Peak erupted on May 22, 1915 - making it the southernmost active volcano in the Cascade Mountain Range.

Prior to Mount St. Helens' eruption in 1980, Lassen's powerful 1915 explosion (which shot debris 7 miles into the Earth's atmosphere) was the most recent to occur in the continental United States.

Visit Lassen Volcanic National Park and you may feel as if you've warped back in time to the boiling cauldrons that seem representative of the beginnings of the Earth! It contains your usual parkly features, such as wildflower-laced meadows and lush forestland to entice the hiker in you to take to the trails, but there's much more to Lassen than beautiful scenery!

It's also home to steaming hydrothermal vents, bubbly-boiling hot mud pots, thundering fumaroles, and smelly sulfurous springs that burn your nose - all of which should serve to remind us that Lassen Peak is still very much a live and active volcano!

A very unique attraction of Lassen Volcanic State Park is the Drakesbad Guest Ranch hidden in a high mountain valley at the end of Warner Valley Road within the boundaries of the park.

Stay at the Ranch and imagine yourself living as John Muir might have - residing in a rustic cabin, reading by kerosene lantern at night (there's no electricity in your cabin), riding horseback across the meadow, fishing and hiking and canoeing, communing with nature (like the Drakesbad resident Yellow-bellied Marmot picture here), and getting rid of the day's kinks by soaking in the hot springs fed pool!

Just to give you an idea of how remote Drakesbad is, the directions for getting there include "Turn right" (or "left," depending on your direction of travel) "at the Fire station and proceed to Drakesbad."

I might be kind of cheating a little here since Mono Lake & Bodie are technically two separate places, but they're so close in proximity, and they both have a unifyingly eerie, ghostly, other-worldly quality that I think binds them together - so I'm treating them as one travel secret.

Now, having said that, I have to confess that - except for the eerie factor - the two are nothing alike! Let me explain.

Mono Lake (pronounced MO-no - both O's are long and the stress is on the first syllable) is a natural phenomenon.

Created by a combination of Ice Age and volcanic activity, this inland sea has nowhere to go.

So evaporation occurs, leaving the waters salty and alkaline - perfect conditions for the breeding of brine shrimp and alkali flies. These creatures, in such great numbers, provide an excellent food source for millions of migratory birds.

It's the abundance of minerals in the water which gives the lake its other-worldly quality; edged with tufa spires jutting up out of the water, it's hard to believe you weren't transported to an alien planet while your back was turned!

For a real treat, explore the lake from the water - take a guided canoe trip with the Mono Lake Committee.

And speaking of being transported; 41 miles to the North of Mono Lake (about an hour's drive) you'll find an honest-to-goodness ghost town!

Bodie State Historic Park has preserved the Gold Rush era town of Bodie in a state of arrested decay, meaning that the buildings are being preserved in their arrested state, but no renovation is being done.

Walk the board sidewalks and peer into the buildings of the town - the stores, a saloon, barbershop, schoolhouse, the mill, outhouses, private homes.

Hope chests filled with linens, schoolbooks neatly stacked on a desk, china sets waiting to be used, coffins, a roulette table in the saloon, a well-stocked general store, all under a thick layer of dust - the town looks as if its residents were all beamed up by Scottie to the USS Enterprise, never to be seen again!

Well, there you have it! Now that I've shared My 3 Best Kept Northern California Travel Secrets, it's time to pass the torch. My assignment, should I decide to accept it, (and I do, of course) is to challenge 5 more travel bloggers. So, Tag, You're It!

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MY 3 BEST KEPT NORTHERN CALIFORNIA TRAVEL SECRETS