Chris’ mom, who lives in the Seattle area, was having a medical procedure in late January, so we decided to make the drive up north to help her get settled through her recovery. We made the trip in semi-leisurely fashion, spending a couple of nights at hotels along the I-5 corridor on the way. Our first night was spent in the Sacramento Valley town of Willows, and this fine Saturday morning saw us rise reasonably early and drive roughly two hours northward to the Soda Springs trailhead, where the PCT crosses I-5 near Dunsmuir. The trailhead lies adjacent to Castle Crags State Park, and our original plan was to hike the PCT west and south into the park, then follow the steep park trail up to Castle Dome, one of the area’s most notable features. There were a couple of vehicles in the gravel parking area when we arrived about 10:30am, some old snow and ice covering the initial parts of the trail that was quite slippery in the chilly shade as we started out. The trail immediately starts southward above the freeway, increasing its gradient quite sharply for 200 vertical feet until it reaches an old logging road, where it turns west and begins a mile-long traverse that is virtually level. Near the end of the traverse, the trail bears northward for a short distance before doubling back south, leaving the old road in favor of a pretty singletrack that gently ascends to the level of the ridgeline immediately to the south. As we met the ridge, we arrived at the turnoff for Castle Dome, but we’d decided at this point to forgo the steep (and, we thought, icy) 2,000′ climb. Instead, we followed the trail eastward to the park’s upper parking lot and viewpoint, where we found the only other people we’d see on the hike, admiring the views west to the crags and northeast to Mt. Shasta. We had considered retracing our steps back to the car, but we saw an alternate route on our map marked as the Kettlebelly trail, that would drop us south off the ridgeline and loop back around to the east and north where we could again pick up the PCT. This section was the prettiest of the loop, sunny now where most of the ascent had been in deep shade. Once we’d regained the PCT, it was a short hop down the hill to the trailhead. In total, we spent just under two hours on the route covering about 5 miles with maybe 500′ of total elevation gain (the GPS mistakenly captured a non-existent descent/ascent in the first half of the hike). The only casualties of the day were Chris’ trekking poles, which he apparently left leaning on the Explorer before driving off, an error he would not discover until the following morning when we were several hundred miles north near Salem, OR (we did stop here a couple of weeks later to see if maybe someone had found and stashed them somewhere, but no such luck). There are other options for short loop trips from the Soda Creek TH that make for a great way to stretch one’s legs and break up a long drive, so maybe we’ll get back to Castle Crags at some point, ideally with some warmer weather.