Today . . .   was an amazing day. For one, it did NOT rain. For two, we toured the Shasta Lake Caverns.  The lake is not nearly full as you can see in the next pictures, the water in the spring is up past the red rock.  I think it looks so cool with this ridge of rock showing.

the water would be up past where I was standing in the spring

There are  30 kinds of fish in this lake, it has four arms and each arm of has different species.  There were tons of houseboats tucked away that people rent in the summer.  The water temperature was 76 today which is pretty warm - I am so confused with the temperatures being in Fahrenheit and the speed in MPH.  I am metric in these and it is difficult to convert now.We walked down a long way to get to the water where we went across the lake by boat, and then up about 700 feet to the cave entrance by bus.  That was one narrow windy road!  Apparently they do get snow but not that often.  No chance would I go up there in snow!  Last year 55,000 people toured these caves.
We went into 3 "rooms" and each had different types of deposits.  Apparently there are 30 different types of formations in these caves- stalagmites, "tites" and what not,  and usually there are not more that 10 kinds in an area so they are very special caves.  There were popcorn, bacon, drapes etc.  and one cave was just beautiful crystals.
We were so lucky as we were the only ones on the tour ( the tour in front of us had 50 kids - can you say lucky?)  We had our tour guide Jeremy all to our self which was way cool.
This tour involved a lot of stair climbing, and it was excellent to get some exercise after all the days of rain and driving we had before this.

 These are the sparkles you can see in one of the caves.

I have already forgotten the name of these formation but they grew in all directions.

   

 These are called drapes, so amazing, there was a whole room of these formations.

This was written in the side of one of the caves by the fellow, CM who discovered the cave and the expert he had to help him explore the cave.  It was written on Nov 11, 1878









We also got to see a very different type of forest than I have ever seen.
These beautiful trees are called Manzanita.  The bark is a really deep rusty red and the leaves are very interesting.  They have many types of oak, including black oak and poison oak.  Another really pretty tree was called a grey pine. It is really delicate and well, fluffy!

Then we drove out to the Shasta dam.  It is the second largest dam in the US. We saw these little black tailed deer grazing on some green green grass.