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There is a Great Place to Swim in Upper Bidwell Park in Chico, California. The Lava from Mount Lassen Flowed down there and Crystallized into Black Rocks.

I swam thru the Lava Tubes... They are Now Closed because a Student Drowned... But in 1973, they were safe... Lava Rocks cool and harden Outside first and the inside Lava keeps on flowing... creating a Lave Tube... and there is one underwater in Chico.

There is a Giant WPA Pool at the Legendary One Mile Recreation Area on Chico Creek. It's Open All Night... Most Parks, like Oak Meadow, are Closed at Night. What were they thinking? I remember Butte Creek was a Blast to go Tubing on. A Wild Ride in the Spring with Snow Melt. There is a Big Tubing Event on the Sacramento River as well, but I never went.

Just for Your Information... There is a Great Swimming Hole on the Big Sur River just Upstream of The Pfeiffer Campground... and a Hot Spring twelve (12) miles in at Sykes Camp. I have very few regrets in life but, Once someone invited me to go to the Esalon Hot Springs because it was free of charge after Midnight... and I declined... OOPS! You can see it in the Movie "Celebration at Big Sur" with Joni Mitchell, CSN and Joan Baez... That's an Epic movie as Joni Plays the Piano and sings her brand new song "Woodstock." When I left Los Gatos in 1973 I went to Chico State and then returned in the Late 1990s...

Bear Hole in Chico, California - Upper Bidwell Park

My Favorite Place to Swim is Upper Bidwell Park near Chico, California. The Lava from Mount Lassen flowed down there and crystallized into large black rocks.

In the Summer the Rocks absorb sunshine and become too hot to sit on unless you splash some water on them from the Creek. The Place called Bear Hole (Diversion Dam) is the Best of the Easily Driven to Spots. However It Does take some crawling over the rocks to get in. Last time I was there, at AGE 62 it was more than I could do so I went swimming at Alligator Hole Instead. That one has a gentle beach to wade into the water. I saw a Duck and a string of Ducklings there. That Gave Me an Emotional Feeling of Being One With the Universe... Sunny Day, Trees, Lava Rocks, Ducks and ME... All One...

Bear Hole, Chico Creek California

Another EPIC Swimming Place is the One Mile Recreation area. During the Depression of the 1930s the WPA built a Giant pool there out of concrete. They Built a Dam Across the Chico Creek and the pool is Very Very Long and Wide... One thing that is wonderful is the Park is open 24 hours a day. Swimming at Night is Special.

One Mile Swimming Pool Chico Creek California

Butte Creek is wonderful for Tubing. It's a Wild Ride in the Spring with Snow Melt.

I lived in Chico in 1973 and 1974 and then again for about 5 years in the late 1990s early 2000s...

Link to Everything I've Written about Chico: https://gvan42.blogspot.com/search?q=Chico

Camp Fire Map 11/14/2018 and 11/19/2018 So far the Fire has not gone into the Bruce Road area of Chico or Upper Bidwell Park.

The Fire is on the Paradise side of Highway #32. It Has Expanded near Lake Oroville and Up Highway #70 Towards the Town of Cresta... The Perimeter of the Fire near Bruce Road has not Changed in Two Days. Nor has the Edge Near Upper Park. I assume the Firefighters Have stopped it in those locations because a lot of people were in danger there.... Thank You.

Camp Fire 11/14/2018

Camp Fire 11/19/2018

SOURCE: Click Here for Updates ----> https://www.google.com/maps/d/u/0/viewer?ll=39.74374516454513%2C-121.60018286738284&hl=en&z=11&source=embed&ie=UTF8&mid=1HacmM5E2ueL-FT2c6QMVzoAmE5M19GAf&output=embed

In the late 1990s I moved from San Jose to Chico. I took my acoustic guitar, some clothes and lived in a cheap motel.

It was called the "Club Chico" motel on the Esplanade at East Ave and the manager was a skateboard rat. I was glad to live alone after having roommate problems in San Jose. I was drinking heavily at that time and one night I fell asleep while smoking a cigarette and caught the mattress on fire. The manager woke me up and hauled the mattress out into the parking lot. He replaced the mattress with a spare and I stayed there for a couple more weeks. I was expecting that he would be upset about the fire but he just shrugged it off... That motel was often visited by the police... So, just a fire was no big deal to him.

One Mile Pool - Looking Upstream - Photo taken while wading

One Mile Pool - Looking Downstream - Photo taken while wading

I sold my stock in Radio Shack (about $6,000 worth) before I left San Jose but the Investment company was very slow to pay. I ran out of money before I got paid. Without money I couldn't pay the rent and so I went camping in Bidwell Park at Picnic Area 37 - The Grove of Redwood Trees. I called the investment company every day and yelled at the man who answered the phone. I believe it was a standard company policy to delay payments a couple of months in order to increase profits. They hired college students to answer the phone and make up excuses...

I showered at the One Mile swimming pool and ate at the Jesus Center. I also ate at "Food not Bombs" in Train Depot Park and on Sunday I ate at the Salvation Army... with organ music. It was "Chico on Zero Dollars a Day"... I picked up cigarette butts from ashtrays...

I started going to AA meetings every day and stopped drinking. One big influence was New Years Eve 2000. I was in my motel room, alone, drinking and watching the VH1-Behind the Music show. Every band's biography had drug and alcohol abuse problems and then they either stopped using or died. I did a little introspection and saw that I too had a drug and alcohol abuse problem... As a matter of fact, AA has some excellent parties for New Years Eve, Halloween and Christmas.

I remember that there were terrible forest fires in the mountains behind Chico. The air was filled with smoke and the Summer heat was over 100 degrees... I spent every afternoon inside the library playing with the computers. They had the internet for free if there were no students that wanted to use the terminal. Since it was Summer, there were very few students... I also went swimming in Chico Creek a lot. I had to take some defensive action (like swimming) due to the smoke and heat.

In the Fall it started to rain and I moved into a cheap motel. Then I rented a room from some gay women for a few weeks... then I moved in with Victoria... I bought her $300.00 worth of propane and so she had heat in the winter. It gets really cold in Chico in the winter... maybe 30 degrees... cold enough that without propane, you could die... We lived on Highway 99 north of town a few miles in a "granny shack" in the middle of a corral with horses. And Almond Orchards... I got a Job at WREX Plastics as a machine operator...

One night Byron ( another pal from AA) and I went out into the orchards to watch the Perseid Meteor Shower.

Read more of my autobiography at:
http://gvan42.blogspot.com/2018/03/growing-up-in-los-gatos-california-in.html

https://gvan42.blogspot.com/2018/08/lets-build-solar-powered-desalinization.html
Solar Powered Desalinization Factory converts Seawater into drinking water... Good for making Ice Cubes for a Scotch on the Rocks or for Showering, watering plants and livestock...

My Webstore on Zazzle...
https://www.zazzle.com/gregvan

Free Winplot Art for use in your own creations. Pirate at will, Matey It's Fun!

https://gvan42.blogspot.com/p/go-ahead-and-pirate-any-of-these-images.html

Read More on My Facebook Page:
https://www.facebook.com/GregoryVanderlaan

Numbers have cultural meanings... For Example 5150 meaning is Danger to self and others.
1,4,9 is the shape of the TMA in the movie 2001... The Big Black Box.
This is my list of every number I can think of and what they mean...

https://gvan42.blogspot.com/p/for-example-and-its-one-two-three-what.html
0: number invented by Indian Mathematicians. Brought to the middle east and then Europe by an Arabian named Al Khwarizmi. (Algebra). Handy for expressing BIG numbers like, 1 followed by a hundred zeros – a googol. A googolplex is 1 followed by a googol zeros. Spelled differently than google.

007: James Bond, a secret agent for her Majesty in England. A Character played in the movies by Sean Connery... and a gazillion other wanna-bees.

half pipe: a skateboard word referring to a part of the skate park made out of a concrete pipe sawed in half... a big concave area remains.

¾ waltz time… 4/4 rock music and folk… 5/4 Dave Brubeck’s “Take Five”

1: The traditional beginning number used when counting. For Example: One for the Money, Two for the show, Three to get ready, now GO CAT GO! But don’t you, step on my Blue Suede Shoes. also: And it's 1, 2, 3, what are we fighting for? Country Joe and the Fish.

1,1,2,3,5,8,13,21,34… Fibonacci sequence… add together any two consecutive numbers to calculate the next term.

1/20/09 date Obama moved into the White House.

1.44 - Size in Megabytes of a Floppy Disk. According to Larry Niven - Science Fiction Author it's the minimum size needed for a Neutron Star. 1.44 times as large as the Sun. "The Chandrasekhar limit ." The currently accepted value of the limit is about 1.39...

1.618 Phi the golden ratio - found often in art and nature

Photographs of the One Mile Pool in Bidwell Park. Chico, California - Open Day and Night - WPA built the Sycamore Pool

Chico Creek Looking Upstream

Chico Creek Looking Downstream

I waded out to the middle of the pool to take these pictures.

Both taken from the same spot...

It's a BIG POOL.

Built by the WPA during the Depression of the 1930s.

Bidwell Park is open at night.
The Movie "Robin Hood" with Errol Flynn
was filmed here... about a mile upstream...

WPA Sycamore Pool - Photographed from the Bridge over the Dam

What I've been doing since 1972. by Greg Vanderlaan - the Chico Years

After high school I went to Chico, California to attend college. My major was biology and I found out that I had no interest in studying that subject or ANY subject... I spent a lot of time smoking marijuana, drinking and playing music with my friends. After two years I flunked out. However, I did get to experience swimming in Upper Bidwell Park where the Black Lava Flows from Mount Lassen are. I really enjoyed swimming at One Mile Pool, Day or Night. Not many Parks are open all night long but Bidwell is so long and thin that a fence is impractical. Plus, a fence is, like, totally rude! I remember riding my bicycle everywhere. I also got to go on a Bus Ride with a many other students to go hear The Grateful Dead in Reno. My friend Jimmy played his guitar and I played the Harmonica while everyone else sang along... Then we stayed at a cabin on the North Shore of Lake Tahoe and the next day I ate some LSD and went to hear the legendary "Wall of Sound" at the University of Nevada football field. The Dead had a lot of trouble making that absurdly large public address system work but... we all had fun anyway... Especially playing slot machines after the show and driving down that street where they have giant sculptures of Showgirls.

In the springtime Chico State has a week long celebration called "Pioneer Days". My friends and I decided that the last place we wanted to be was in town when it was invaded by drunken strangers. We went camping at Yosemite, took LSD and climbed the trail to the top of Yosemite Falls. The higher we got in elevation the Higher We Got... By the time we arrived on top of the mountain it appeared to be moving wildly... as if the granite was dancing. I lay down on my belly and crawled to the edge... That's a great view but really dangerous because it's a tall cliff with no guard rail. We walked down to the valley floor and rode the double-decker bus around... sitting on the top, with no roof... bliss... we also walked to the base of Vernal Falls on the mist trail. I looked at my arm and it looked like a bear, with claws... I went fishing in the river and slapped a fish out onto the shore... just like a bear would. That evening we were playing guitars and my harmonica around the campfire when a ranger ran out of the darkness and tackled me... We were passing around a joint and I was holding it. He gave me a ticket for "Disturbing the Peace" and told us that we had to leave the park the next day or he'd change the charge to possession... In my humble opinion, The Ranger was the one "disturbing the peace" by tackling me...

The next Year we took a camping trip to Hetch-Hetchy reservoir. Another beautiful granite mountain near Yosemite. We took LSD and went free-climbing up a chimney and then hiked around above the tree line. I went down to the edge of the river to admire the bubbling water and accidentally slipped in. Could have died as there was a large waterfall downstream. The water out powered me and took me to the bottom of the pool. I gave up, accepted death and bubbled up to a place on the far shore where I climbed out. A cosmic near death experience... Hey Kids, Don't Do This!

I lived in Chico in 1973 and 1974 and then for a few years in the late 1990s early 2000s. I Joined AA and quit drinking Alcohol. Chico has a big active AA community. Going to meetings at Campfire Council Ring behind Caper Acres, Bidwell Park is an experience I will always treasure. I spent one summer "Rent Free" camping outdoors at Picnic Area 37 in the grove of 13 Redwood Trees.

Mural in Chico by Gregg Payne. Birds, Nature on Freeway Underpass.

Chico Creek One Mile Pool built by WPA

Chico Creek Looking Upstream

Chico Creek Looking Downstream

I waded out to the middle of the pool to take these pictures.

Both taken from the same spot...

It's a BIG POOL.

Built by the WPA during the Depression of the 1930s.

Bidwell Park is open at night.

Read More at:
https://livingnewdeal.berkeley.edu/projects/sycamore-pool-chico-ca/

WPA Sycamore Pool

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Works_Progress_Administration

You may use the links below to visit pages about similar subjects.

One Mile Pool Chico California Bidwell Park Picnic Area 37 Redwood Tree Grove

Students "Horsing Around" at the pool

Students competing in a "fill up the bucket with a sponge race'.

Three teams. A person runs to the pool, soaks sponge,
run back to bucket, empty sponge...
repeat with next team member...

much shouting needed... I Guess...

My Staircase... No Diving, so I just crept in Gradually...

When the Lifeguard is Present, no bicycle riding allowed...
This Kid is taking advantage of the LACK of Law Enforcement
to have a great time... Also, no smoking in the park... I lit up
since there was no-one to enforce the rules.

Picnic Area 37. Redwood Trees.
These trees were brought from the coast where they are a
native species and planted in Bidwell Park.
Note how the forest floor is swept clean...

Photo taken from within the Redwood Grove.
Note that the native trees are Not Redwood.

Train Depot Chico, CA

Caution: Don't stop on the tracks.

https://gvan42.blogspot.com/search?q=Chico
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Upper Bidwell Park Chico California. Swimming thru lava rocks at Bear Hole.

Bear Hole

Upper Bidwell Park

On the Trail to Bear Hole, Chico

When Mount Lassen Erupted, Lava flowed to Chico
and left Black Crystal Rocks...
The sun makes the rocks too hot to sit on
so swimmers splash water onto the rocks to cool them down.