Good Riding at Redding, California
Near to Yuma, Arizona is the good place of Redding, California where the sun shines an average of 88 percent of the time. Donna White, 71, a children’s librarian, moved to Redding from Ridgecrest, Calif., when she retired in 2005. She hikes every day, year-round, and especially enjoys the Sacramento River Trail, which overlooks California’s largest river. “You can watch the change of the seasons here,” she says. “We also have a river and green trees, grass, and flowers.”
This town, founded in 1872 and situated on the upper reaches of the Sacramento River and on the edge of the Sierra Nevada, is particularly important because of its favorable position as a starting point for numerous excursions into nearby districts: Lake Shasta (its famous caves are only 16mi/25km away), the 14,170ft/4,317m high Mount Shasta (about 6mi/10km away), Whiskeytown Shasta Historic Park with its gold-digging past (6mi/10km) and Shasta Trinity National Forest. Redding is also well-placed traffic-wise being at the junction of several highways: the U.S. 5, which runs south to San Diego via the county capital of Sacramento, the CA 299 to the Pacific coast via Eureka and the CA 44 to Lassen Volcanic National Park.