I-5 Mt Shasta & Siskiyous

North of Redding, I‑5 stops being a valley freeway and becomes a mountain road. The interstate climbs past Lake Shasta into the Sacramento River canyon at Dunsmuir, crests Black Butte Summit (3,912 feet) between Mount Shasta city and Weed, and rolls through Yreka toward the Siskiyous — the snowiest, most chain-controlled stretch of I‑5 in California, driven mostly by people just trying to get between California and Oregon.

Chain controls here are routine from December through March: the feed's checkpoints run from Fawndale north through Dunsmuir, Mt Shasta, Weed and Yreka, and a single storm often restricts forty miles of interstate at once. Anderson Grade north of Yreka and the climb to the Oregon border finish the gauntlet — and on the far side, Oregon's Siskiyou Summit (4,310 feet, the highest point on all of I‑5) is frequently worse.

The cameras run south to north, Fawndale to Yreka, under a live chain-control banner from the Caltrans feed. Mount Shasta itself — 14,000 feet of weather-maker looming over the road — is the reason this corridor gets buried while Redding gets rain.