Covid Escape Hatch Round 4

Onward we go.  Boring life with flashes of excitement via roadtrips.  Enter covid escape hatch round 4, this time to Wilbur Hot Springs in NorCal and then further north to Mt Shasta, about an hour from the Oregon border.  Similar to Esalen, Wilbur is a hot springs destination with some cool history dating back to the late 1860s.  Mt Shasta is a very small town of about 3K people, and I ate in pretty much every restaurant there by the end of the trip.  It did provide what I was looking for in a few ways:

1) Chilled out town.  A restaurant I wanted to check out closed at 2pm and I noticed at about 1:50pm while in my cabin.  In typical LA style, I quickly jumped in my car and sped to the restaurant.  When I zipped into a street parking spot outside the restaurant, I felt the stares and it dawned on me.  People don't speed to restaurants around here.  People don't speed anywhere, unless it's an emergency.  I chilled out after that.

2) Fresh drinking water.  I had heard the main park in Mt Shasta is the headwater location of the water system that provides drinking water to Sacramento & other towns.  I visited and found people with water bottles and jugs filling up.  At first I thought it was kinda gimmicky, but by day 2 when I was considering going to the store to buy some water, I realized I should just go to the headwater park.  It's free and way better!  Ended up going and filling up bottles every day.

3)  Naked bodies.  I went for a hike around Heart Lake and before hitting the trailhead which goes into the mountains, I stopped by an opening in the shrubbery to check out the beautiful, clear lake.  As I walked up, a naked woman was slowly walking out of the water, the sun glistening on her skin, something out of a movie.  She walked by me and I spent a little more time staring out at the lake, realizing how much I loved Mt Shasta lol.  I assumed she had walked off to get dressed, but I turned around and she was sitting on a log staring at me.  "How does it feel?" I said.  "Amazing" she said, in the slowest, hippiest voice ever.

I continued on my hike and on the way down started thinking I should have spent more time with her, there was definitely a cool vibe going on.  Then I remembered these hippie chicks don't have anywhere they need to be, and she might still be in the same spot, doing yoga or something, and probably still naked!

Coincidentally, I met a girl from LA on the walk back down the trail, she was on a similar "escape from LA" spiritual journey, hiking solo.  I would have loved to spend more time talking to her (suddenly there were chicks everywhere!), but I was too focused on getting back to scene of the mermaid interaction.

Sure enough, she was still there, though now dressed.  "You're back", she said.  We ended up talking for a couple hours.  She's on a spiritual journey from Sioux Falls, SD to Telluride and now Shasta.  She's been sleeping outside with no tent, under the stars, for three months, eating whatever she can find (she was eating pine seeds on the ground as we were talking).  She spent quite a bit of time up on Mt Shasta, which is no joke, and is spirtually connected to "her" (the mountain) and the mountain is guiding her on how to live and what to do.  She said the first time she went into a building with a ceiling she fainted because she had been outside for so long. 

After all the hippie posers in Venice, Topanga Canyon and even Joshua Tree (myself included), it was great to get up to Mt Shasta to meet some real hippies!