Author of New Book on Mt. Shasta's Artistic Legacy to Speak at COS May 18

William C. Miesse, art and rare book dealer, art publisher, and lecturer, will present a program about Mount Shasta and its artistic legacy on Sunday, May 18, 2 to 3 p.m. at College of the Siskiyous Weed Campus, Life Science Building, Room 3. The subject of Miesse’s talk is also the subject of his new book, Sudden and Solitary: Mount Shasta and Its Artistic Legacy, 1841-2008, coauthored by Robyn G. Peterson and released this month by Heyday Books. The program is sponsored by the COS Library.

Miesse will show selected slides of paintings and other artwork representing the mountain which was produced over a span of more than 150 years, from the early explorers and artists of California such as Albert Bierstadt and William Keith to the many visionary artists who have been inspired by the mountain.

According to Miesse, “The book is an attempt to characterize what Mount Shasta meant to the nineteenth-century American and Californian, and how those ideas have evolved in the visual arts up to the present. There are many mountains in the West, but few offer the experience that Shasta does of being in a place apart and unique; it is no surprise that it has generated an artistic legacy of such grandeur.” Sudden and Solitary includes contributions by other Northern California writers including William (Bill) Hirt, Neil Schanker, Lee H. Simons, Floyd Buckskin, Frank LaPena, and Caleen Sisk-Franco.

The book will be available for purchase following the presentation and Miesse will sign copies, if desired. The cost of the book is $37.54, including tax. The book is also available for purchase at local bookstores and at the Turtle Bay Museum in Redding.

For more information about the program, contact COS library director Dennis Freeman at the Weed Campus, (530) 938-5331 or by email: freeman@siskiyous.edu

LAKE SHASTINA PARK RIBBON-CUTTING SET

The Ribbon Cutting Ceremony for Hoy Family Park will be held on Thursday, May 15th at 3:30 P.M. The ceremony will be held at the park in Lake Shastina. Included in the ceremony, are the William Hoy Family, members of the Board of Supervisors and other representatives from Siskiyou County. Lake Shastina Property Owners Association Participants will include the Lake Shastina’s Cub Scout Pack, Pastor Nick Toroni of the Lake Shastina Community Bible Church and Kaylee Pimentel, who will sing the National Anthem.

The Park is located off of Everhart Dr. at the corner of Pinehill and Autumn Rd. Following the ceremony light refreshments will be served and there will be time for exploration of the park. Lake Shastina has dreamed of developing the park for years and it is finally becoming a reality. Plans are in place to fund additional amenities for the park. The Hoy Family Park Committee will appreciate donations from businesses and residents. For further information please call the Lake Shastina Administration Office, 938-3281 or Kay Short, Park Committee Chairman, at 938-1777.

Chili Dump is a Sellout

Our 6th annual Chili Dump was a great success with 16 incredible chili's entered. This year's first place went to Sharon Beaudry (see picture below, boy does she look happy!). Roman Dobratz snagged the second place prize and Trish Toler nailed the third. Pictures and details will be in the next Lake Shastina News.

The committee that puts on the event voted to purchase items for the Community Center with the proceeds so that other groups could enjoy the facility as we did. Among the things considered were cold drink dispensers, coffee maker, chafing dish pans, and tables. Proceeds from this latest event are being tallied and we are collecting prices for various things. More details will follow later.




The cook-off contest went so well this year that the planners are giving serious thought to making our next year's event a full-blown Texas-style chili cook-off, with all the proud cooks lined up and serving their own creations. The audience could sample their way down the line and vote for winners on a secret ballot. Again, more details will follow as they develop.

Finally and certainly not least, we planners would like to thank all those who contributed their time and efforts to make this such a continuing success. And especially you, the public, for coming by and enjoying this annual party with us. We look forward to seeing you again next year!


All photos courtesy of John Diehm

Bruce Batchelder and the other Chili Peppers; Ted Pfeiffer, Mike Anderson, Al Brezinsky, Marv Zeman, Art Ackerman, Nick Toroni, Craig Thomsson, Ed Vrable.

This annual event promises a lot of activities and fun. It begins at the Refuge Visitor Center on Hill Road in Tule Lake and looks like it could run most of the day with guided bus tours, mist netting and banding, airboat rides, morning bird walks, live blues music and even food.

We have been to this refuge, which is located on Highway 161 right on the Oregon border. To reach it one drives north on Highway 97 from Weed, through Macdoel and turn east on 161 just a few miles beyond Dorris. It took us about 1-1/2 hours from Lake Shastina.

If you don't have a county map call me at 530-938-0385 and I will mail you one.

The article in the paper recommends calling 530-667-2231 for more info and their website is helpful too: www.fws.gov/klamathbasinrefuges.

Kentucky-Fried

My darling wife of 48 years asked the other day what I wanted for my 68th birthday dinner and I foolishly said "either mac and cheese or KFC". She, being a world-class cook said something like "I can't believe you want that garbage??!!"

So I naturally took the fore-doomed 'it makes all the sense in the world' approach which, after 48 years of marital bliss I should have known was dead before birthing.

"Why honey, it saves money and is what this meat-and-potatoes honey of yours really wants." Right. Those of us who are maritally-challenged may not recognize right off that otherwise bullet-proof arguments simply do not belong in romantic relationships.

Logic, as we were taught in school at least, simply does not work in situations like this. Try the $6 barber haircut vs the $50 hairdo argument if you doubt this wisdom.

But she went to KFC and (I can actually see this in Technicolor) grits her way though an order . . . a big bucket of that yucky fried THING with smaller buckets of gluck (mashed potatoes, gravy, coleslaw, etc.). This was hard for her and in retrospect, I appreciate the sacrifice.

As payment we are having clumpy fried chicken with that brown gravy that looks like drained motor oil for breakfast, lunch, dinner, and yes, breakfast again until I've paid for my error.

This is how it works people . . . take the offered gourmet dinner instead next time.

Trust me on this.

And then a Crewman Came Knocking on our Door . . .

After our story got in the papers I got an intriguing call from a man in Yreka. His name is Verne Kendall and he told me the most amazing story:

In June of 1943 Verne and his parents were living in a trailer alongside Highway 99 where Summit Drive now dead ends. There are some homes there now and the Kendall barn is still standing on the site.

Anyway, they were awakened around 2:30am by the roar of airplane engines overhead. "The sound was deafening" Verne says, "it actually rattled our trailer home it was so loud." Running outside in their pajamas the family looked up and saw a huge bomber above them, heading north with very obvious engine trouble.

It disappeared into the night and then, moments later, they heard it coming back towards them and then the crash and explosion perhaps a mile to the north of their home.

Then, not long after going back in the house they heard a knock on the front door. Mr. Kendall opened it to see a man in an olive drab uniform who very politely asked him for a ride into town, saying he had just bailed out of the plane that crashed nearby.

Verne remembers his dad doing just that and seeing the burned crash remains the next morning from the highway. He also remembers finding 50 cal shells right in his yard, saying "they were jettisoning everything they could to keep altitude so there was stuff scattered all over the area."

While we're pretty sure now that part of the impact site now rests under the southbound lanes of Interstate 5 this last remark further supports our hope that local residents may possess such things. I again appeal to any reader(s) who think they might know someone with such an artifact to contact me, Bruce Batchelder, at 938-0385 to discuss loaning it to the museum.

The most remarkable part of the story of course is that Verne actually saw a survivor and is alive and able to tell about it. Verne and his wife run the Coca Cola Shop in the Bottling Works Mall in Yreka and happy to share the memory with others who are interested.

CC&R Corner for May 2008

By Will Bullington, CC&R Compliance Officer

May 2008

Up Coming Vote on Changes to the CC&Rs

Our current Environmental Control Committee (ECC), in cooperation with the current Board, has developed some proposed rule changes to the CC&Rs. In 2000, the membership of the LSPOA adopted our current CC&Rs. It has been eight years and we have seen some need for changes. The ECC met in 2007 with realtors and contractors, and then in May held a town hall meeting on fences. Through these meetings and literally hundreds of comments, complaints and requests for variances from the rules, developed the proposed CC&R changes.

First you must understand that the CC&Rs are developed by a committee, staff input and association attorneys. It took four years and $40,000.00 just to get enough of the membership (50% plus one) to approve the new CC&Rs. Each unit of the subdivision had to approve at this ratio. These new adopted CC&Rs differed from the original rules in which the old rules said you could have no fences, no restrictions on overhangs and roof pitches. Now the total membership not based on each unit, must vote 50% plus one. Now that we have a much higher population of people who actually live here and over 1,000 homes, I believe the vote will be easier to achieve to pass these changes.

Now, the current CC&Rs have Sections that lay down the restrictions and rules, how assessments are collected, how the Board is elected, etc. There are By Laws that also do much of the administrative part of the Association. For instance Article V of the CC&Rs tells you how an improvement is approved, by whom, and what an improvement is: house, deck, pool, etc. Article VI tells you what the minimum construction standards are: roof pitch, overhangs, minimum size of a garage, etc. The ECC must only approve those improvements that meet the minimum construction standards (MCS). The MCS are very important to planned unit developments like Lake Shastina because they help maintain higher property values than other communities.

Even small sub-divisions have CC&Rs when you build a house because an 800 square foot home is not as valuable as a 2,000 square foot home (duh). O.K. so we have a class act going on here. The original developers had enough forethought to put the power lines and all utilities underground, prohibited fences for a more open “rural” looking community, used a designer from Disneyland to put in ponds and waterfalls, and had engineers develop a master plan for drainage, etc. Once you realize this you really take a harder look at other communities when you are out and about: the solid fences jump out at you like a stockade, and the power lines blot out the skyline, or you see a neon bright yellow house.

As you drive back into Lake Shastina, especially if you have been gone for a while, you smile when you turn off of Big Springs Road and onto our streets. You can’t even find a pot hole in our roads (never noticed that till you are in some of our neighbor cities, huh?)

As we are filling in our empty lots with homes, minimum construction standards and CC&R enforcement are going to become more important. What one person got away with for 20 years all changes when they share a back yard with their neighbor. The ECC recognizes the fact that most new homes require new improvements after people have lived in them for awhile: a new fence for the kids and the dog or a storage shed for tools and lawn furniture because they won’t fit in the garage. The ECC has proposed changes to the CC&Rs in three sections at this time: new rules for storage sheds, fences and for overhangs.

The proposal is to have these three sections of the CC&Rs be regulated by architectural rules that may be changed by the Board. Rule changes would be posted to the membership for 30 days advising the members that the Board is considering a rule change. The Board then holds a hearing and decides on whether to change a rule. Currently, the Board may not create a rule that conflicts with the CC&Rs. Past rules that allowed for 2 x 4 inch mesh wire fences conflict with the CC&R that states the maximum size of wire fencing is 2 ½ inches. The proposal of the ECC is that the membership vote on the following changes to the CC&Rs:

1. Article 6.4: Change “No Temporary Structures” to “Temporary Structures and Outbuildings.” Add: “Outbuildings and sheds shall be built in accordance with the architectural rules adopted by the Governing Board.”
2. Article 6.12: Change section to read: “Eaves and Overhangs. All eaves and overhangs to be built in accordance with the architectural rules adopted by the Governing Board.”
3. Article 6.15: In first paragraph delete “under the following conditions:” and insert “in accordance with the architectural rules adopted by the Governing Board.” Also delete 6.15 (b) and (c). 6.15(d) to become (b) by default.

Please look for your ballot about voting on these important CC&R changes. If you would like to view the CC&Rs go to our web site at: lakeshastina.com. You may also contact staff through this web site for any question you may have.