Highlights: Highway 49-Yuba Pass • Moonshine Rd • Marysville Rd Bullards Bar Dam  • Oregon Hill Rd • Forbestown Rd • Oroville • Cherokee Rd • Pentz Rd • Skyway Rd •  Highway 32 • Mill Creek Rd • Mount Lassen • Highway 36 • Lanes Valley Rd • Wildcat Rd • Black Butte Rd • Inwood Rd • Ponderosa Way • East Fern Rd • Oak Run to Fern Rd • Shasta Dam Tour • Highway 299 • Highway 3-Hayfork Pass • Highway 36 • Platina Rd

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Did you know that one of the tallest and largest concrete dams in the United States is in the center of one of our favorite riding regions? Ever wondered what’s inside & how it all works? We’re going to find out with an all new motorcycle tour for the 2026 ride season. 

Join Pashnit Tours as we pay a visit to the Shasta Dam, descend 400 feet inside the dam to the base and explore the interior of one of the most impressive engineering achievements in California. 

Built as a public works project 1938 – 1945, Shasta Dam created the largest man-made lake in California. When full, Lake Shasta holds 4.5 million acre-feet of water, enough to fill more than 4.5 million football fields one foot deep. The lake’s shoreline stretches about 370 miles, longer than the California coastline from San Francisco to Los Angeles. It contains 6.5 million cubic yards of concrete, enough to build a 3-foot-wide sidewalk around the Earth at the equator. The dam’s spillway can release up to 186,000 cubic feet of water per second, more than 100 times the flow of Niagara Falls at low season. 

To build the dam, the longest conveyor system ever built at the time was constructed. The conveyor belt was 9½ miles long, running from the aggregate plant in Redding to the Shasta Dam construction site. The conveyor system efficiently moved crushed rock directly to the dam site, saving enormous time and labor compared to trucks or railroad tracks for the delivery of the building material to construct the dam. 

Northern Sierra Foothills...

But wait. There's more...  Did you notice where this tour begins? 

Nevada City is nowhere near Lake Shasta. And if you know anything about what we do here at Pashnit Tours, you already may have figured out what that means. It means riding hundreds of miles of twisty backroads to reach Redding. And yes, we'll take the long way.  

The Diggins...

This tour begins in Nevada City in the heart of 1850s Gold Rush country; after local streams & rivers were panned out by Argonauts, holes were dug into the hillsides around Nevada City & Grass Valley by the hundreds known as spider holes. All in search of that colorful metal which was discovered embedded in quartz rock. See our visit to Empire Mine SHP.

At the terminus of a dead-end road at 3200 feet is North Bloomfield, a preserved gold rush town. To reach the gold, miners blasted hillsides away, literally, with high-pressure water lines. The result created an exposed canyon devoid of any vegetation, 7000 feet wide and 600 feet deep. They got the gold, millions of dollars' worth, but all the sediment & debris washed into the Yuba River System, settling out in the Central Valley below. The mining company claimed the tailings & sediment wasn't their problem and continued blasting away at the hillsides in search of more gold using up to 100 million gallons per day during peak operation years in the 1860s–1870s sourced from reservoirs built higher up in the Sierra Nevada. Each water monitor could discharge up to 16,000 gallons per minute, at pressures reaching 150–300 psi.

By the late 1860s below Malakoff Diggins in the Central Valley, sediment became so deep in area rivers, ships could no longer navigate the rivers in the Sacramento Valley. Downstream orchards, grain fields and entire towns were buried under 25 feet of mud & easily flooded during seasonal rains. Wooden towns simply floated away, along with livestock, the picket fence & even the wood pile out back. Despite the ecological disaster created by hydraulic mining, steam locomotive lights were brought to the mine site and used to illuminate the water monitors at night, allowing the mine to work 24 hours a day, washing away the mountainside. All this to get the gold.

Tired of the flooding, farmers organized to fight against the hydraulic mining companies. By 1880, even San Francisco Bay began to fill up with silt. Hydraulic mining ended up being the first ecological lawsuit ever filed against mining companies responsible for creating the disaster. Hydraulic mining was finally outlawed in 1884, yet the scar is still etched into the surrounding hillsides around North Bloomfield. 

The irony is 80% of the gold is still there in the hillsides surrounding North Bloomfield. Roughly 14,000 – 20,000 pounds of gold was removed from Malakoff Diggins during its main years of operation. And it’s generally accepted that 80% still remains- that projects out to 80,000 lbs of gold still remaining just here at Malakoff Diggins – it’s simply gotten too expensive to extract it.  

Lake Oroville...

Moonshine, Oregon Hill, Bullards Bar, Forbestown, Cherokee Rd? Anything? Anything at all? Nothing? Good.

 

We’ve got some twisty foothill roads to explore.

Our day consists of remote backroads through the Northern Sierra Nevada Foothills making our way north staying well below the snowline in the mountains above us and riding along the edge of Lake Oroville- site of the largest earthen dam in the United States at over 770 ft high. It's even taller than the Hoover Dam. Oroville Dam was built in the 1960s to create Lake Oroville. It’s an earth and rock-fill embankment dam, not concrete. This makes its sheer size even more impressive — it contains over 80 million cubic yards of material & supplies water to 27 million people as far away as Los Angeles 450 miles away.

Leaving Chico, our route climbs nearly 5000 ft in elevation following the contours of Deer Creek. The canyon section is known for sharp turns, steep cliffs, and dense forest — popular with motorcyclists and photographers. With sweeping turns, elevation changes, and minimal traffic, it’s a favorite route for sport-touring motorcyclists (like us). 

Mount Lassen...

The Mount Lassen region is volcanic in origin and Mount Lassen dominates the area with a dormant volcanic peak that reaches 10,457 ft in elevation. The sides of the mountain are still steaming with mud pots and hot springs. Lassen Peak is the southernmost active volcano in the Cascade Range (the same volcanic chain that includes Mount Shasta, Mount Hood, and Mount Rainier). It’s one of the largest plug-dome volcanoes in the world, formed from thick, viscous lava that piled up rather than flowing outwards like nearby Glass Mountain. The summit looms over 8,000 feet above the surrounding valleys of the Lassen Volcanic National Park region. On clear days, you can see Mount Shasta (~100 miles north) from the top.

In May 1915, a powerful explosive eruption at Lassen Peak devastated nearby areas, and it rained volcanic ash as far away as 200 miles to the east. This explosion was the most powerful one in a series of eruptions during 1914 through 1921. The Lassen region has produced at least 30 volcanic eruptions over the last 300,000 year. So on average, that means an eruption about every 10,000 years — but that’s just a rough long-term average so we've got a few more years to go. 

 

You can even hike to the summit of Mount Lassen if you're feeling adventurous. But not in Sidi motorcycle boots… another time. Our base for this weekend tour is Redding and we'll take in even more curvy backroads dropping from Mount Lassen into Redding.

 

Shasta Country...

A few miles away is Lake Shasta. We'll spend some time here at Shasta Dam learning how the dam was built and descending 400 feet into the bowels of the dam to view the massive generators that produce power for many people. As a major hydroelectric power source, it produces enough electricity to power roughly 180,000 households, or about 450,000–500,000 people.

Shasta Dam is not only one of California’s most iconic dams, and it's just up the road. ​

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