Sundial Bridge and McArthur-Burney Falls

Wednesday, June 14, 2017

  

Our last day in Redding with temperatures rising into the low 90’s after having cool days since our arrival last Thursday.  It will be nice to be up in the mountains again today where temperatures are at least 10-15 degrees cooler.

Before heading out of town, we go to the Turtle Bay Exploration Park where we find the Sundial Bridge which connects the two sides of the river park.  This one of a kind and interesting structure is a glass decked pedestrian bridge which serves as the entrance to the Sacramento River National Recreation Trail.  

The unique design of this bridge was done by Spanish architect Santiago Calatrava.  It is the first bridge of its kind in the U.S. (opened in 2004) and the tallest working sundial in the world.  

The 217’ pylon leans due north and functions as the gnomon (the raised part of a sundial that casts the shadow) of a sundial casting a giant shadow on a garden bordered dial plate at the north end of the bridge. 

Interesting structure and well worth the stop to see.  The Exploration Park also has a museum, a nursery and walking trails, benches near the river and picnic tables for people of all ages to enjoy the area.  There are people of all ages walking on this bridge and enjoying the morning air and sites.  

Now take SR299 which takes us on a two lane highway that again winds, twists and turns and has many blind curves where you hope cars or trucks coming toward you around the curve are on their own side of the highway.  For part of the 70 mile drive to the Falls, we had fairly large shoulders but the higher we went (only to a bit over 4,000 feet) the narrower they got.  This seems low after living for over 3 decades above 5,000.  We did have to stop three times for road construction with one lane and a pilot car to lead us.  One area they were working on was a rock slide or mud slide area where they were getting ready to add large rocks, etc. to retain the hillside.  Lots of traffic on this road including large semis and logging trucks.  There was a lumber mill in one area.  The road takes us through several little towns including the town of Burney. 

The McArthur-Burney Falls can be found in the McArthur-Burney Falls Memorial State Park located a short distance from the town of Burney.  The Park offers camping, fishing and water sports of all kinds and today is quite busy.  Lovely area and gorgeous Falls.

While this Falls is not the largest or highest waterfall in the state of California, people consider it the most beautiful.  The water flows at the same rate (100 million gallons daily) all year long and the water temperature is always 42 degrees.  The 129 foot high waterfall cascades into an almost iridescent pool beneath and includes many other waterfalls many coming out of the side of the mountain.  

President Teddy Roosevelt call Burney Falls the “Eighth Wonder of the World.”

A nice day and worth the rather long drive to get there.  We will be off to Oregon tomorrow.