Sacramento River
— — the slow water California is built on.
Not only on a wall.
“It begins as cold meltwater under Mount Shasta and runs four hundred miles south, past the orchards, through Redding, under the I Street Bridge in Sacramento, out into the Delta and the Bay. Salmon still climb it in the fall. From the levee road at dusk you can watch a tug push a barge upriver and the colour leave the water at the same speed.
Sacramento River, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
The Sacramento is California's longest river, running about 400 miles from headwaters on the southern slopes of Mount Shasta down to its confluence with the San Joaquin in the Sacramento–San Joaquin Delta, then out through Suisun Bay into San Francisco Bay. It drains roughly 27,000 square miles of the northern Central Valley. Shasta Dam, completed in 1945, sits about nine miles upstream of Redding and regulates flow for the federal Central Valley Project. The river passes Red Bluff, Chico, and the state capital on its way south.
Chinook salmon return to the river in four distinct runs — fall, late-fall, winter, and spring — making the Sacramento the only river on earth with a winter-run Chinook population. The winter run is federally listed as endangered. Cold water released from Shasta Dam is metered to hold the temperature low enough for spawning gravels downstream. Steelhead, green sturgeon, striped bass, and the imperilled Delta smelt also depend on the system. Migrating fish are counted at the Red Bluff fish ladder each season.
The river has two seasons that matter to the eye. In late October and November the fall-run Chinook climb past Verona and the gravel beds below Keswick Dam, the cottonwoods along the bank turning the same yellow as the willows. In the wet winter the tule fog settles into the valley for days at a time and the river runs grey and quiet. Spring snowmelt from Mount Shasta lifts the levels. Summer is hot, slow, and tied to dam-release schedules from Shasta.