Toad lake and Porcupine lake near Lake Siskiyou and Mt. Shasta

My friend knows how to get there so I've been there twice now in the last 5 to 10 years. But, it is up past the end of Lake Siskiyou across a few bridges and then you turn onto what must be called "4 wheel drive roads unless you like trashing your car. I took my 4 wheel drive Tundra. You need at least the ground clearance of a pick up truck to not tear out your oil pan or transmission or rear end differential on some parts of this road even though some of it is okay too, and a section of a mile or two is even paved (however, I'm not sure why unless it is because of it's steepness during winter months or something like that during rain or snow or something. But, it takes off from where you leave the paved road and is about 1 1/2 hours of driving about 10 miles per hour or less mostly unless you are driving a "Crummy" which is a truck so shot you don't care what happens to it really with fenders coming off and holes in the floorboard and all that. Also, it might snow up there at 7000 to 8000 feet Sunday as well so we might have been the last people this season to have attempted this travel this year and might be the last until the next spring or summer as well.

Anyway, I hadn't been this remote anywhere in a long time and we literally saw NO ONE for about 5 hours from the time we left the paved road until we returned to it at about 7 pm tonight.

I forgot just how quiet it is with literally no one for 10 or 20 miles from you, and maybe you might hear a plane go overhead once every hour or two if that.

I found the largest field of Venus Flytraps (or whatever they call the alpine version of these. They have some in one section of Castle Lake too but just a few. Whereas this was hundreds of them near toad lake this time. It was great to see so many of them growing wild. I could sense bears and mountain lions in the vicinity and told my friends to watch out and be ready for some kind of nature contact too. But, likely the storm and the temperatures will soon drive them to lower altitudes even though it was 66 degrees at this altitude today which is very unusual for this late in the year. Normally it should be 40s or lower by this time at this altitude.