Color spotter Ruth Hartman reports that Coffee Creek in the Shasta Cascade is nearing peak with lush bigleaf maple draping back country roads with bright yellow color.
She said this past week’s rain “made all the maples turn bright yellow all at once… Dogwood are all different colors from red and green, pink, faded pink and still green.”
Jeri Rangel sent these images of dogwood and bigleaf maple peaking. Other foliage still to peak include chartreuse climbing cucumber and orange black oak.
To get to Coffee Creek, from Redding, take CA-299 west to CA-3, then north. Along the way, you’ll pass Trinity Lake, the Trinity Alps.
In the Trinity Alps — “One of the rarest and most beautiful trees on the continent, though not deciduous, is Brewer’s weeping spruce, picea breweriana, with its dark green boughs hanging in abstract, Seussian forms.”
This western side of the vast Shasta Cascade region is wild, beautiful and so lightly traveled that few photographers or leaf peepers get there.
We wrote last year, “The drive to Coffee Creek is along narrow roads that are flanked with bigleaf maple that dance and sway, littering the road with a carpet of spent leaves that swirl up in spirals as you pass.”
Ruth Hartman’s Coffee Creek dude ranch is best known for its stable of horses. There are miles of trails to ride on 367 acres of ranch property and the Trinity Wilderness area.
Coffee Creek – Near Peak (50-75%) GO NOW!
