Shasta County, California in the context of Plumas County, California

Redding is a city in and the county seat of Shasta County, California, and the economic and cultural capital of the Shasta Cascade region of Northern California. Redding lies along the Sacramento River, 162 miles (261 km) north of Sacramento, and 120 miles (190 km) south of California's northern border with Oregon. Its population was 93,611 at the 2020 census.

The August Complex fire was a massive wildfire complex that burned in the Coast Range of Northern California, in Glenn, Lake, Mendocino, Tehama, Trinity, and Shasta Counties. The complex originated as 38 separate fires started by lightning strikes on August 16–17, 2020. Four of the largest fires, the Doe, Tatham, Glade, and Hull fires, had burned together by August 30. On September 9, the Doe Fire, the main fire of the August Complex, surpassed the 2018 Mendocino Complex to become both the single-largest wildfire and the largest fire complex in recorded California history. On September 10, the combined Doe Fire also merged with the Elkhorn Fire (originally a separate incident) and the Hopkins Fire, growing substantially in size. By the time it was extinguished on November 12, the August Complex fire had burned a total of 1,032,648 acres (417,898 ha), or 1,614 square miles (4,180 km), about 1% of California's 100 million acres of land, an area larger than the state of Rhode Island.

The fire largely burned within the Mendocino National Forest, with portions spilling over to the Shasta-Trinity National Forest and Six Rivers National Forest in the north, as well as private land surrounding the forests. Large areas of the Yolla Bolly-Middle Eel Wilderness and Yuki Wilderness had also been burned. Rugged terrain combined with consistent high winds and record heat had complicated firefighting efforts. Although more than 2,900 personnel were deployed to the fire through mid-September, it took almost three months to fully contain the fire. The U.S. Forest Service managed the firefighting effort, with assistance from the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection.

The Allen Telescope Array (ATA), formerly known as the One Hectare Telescope (1hT), is a radio telescope array dedicated to astronomical observations and a simultaneous search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI). The array is situated at the Hat Creek Radio Observatory in Shasta County, 290 miles (470 km) northeast of San Francisco, California.

The project was originally developed as a joint effort between the SETI Institute and the Radio Astronomy Laboratory (RAL) at the University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley), with funds obtained from an initial US$12.5 million donation by the Paul G. Allen Family Foundation and Nathan Myhrvold. The first phase of construction was completed and the ATA finally became operational on 11 October 2007 with 42 antennas (ATA-42), after Paul Allen (co-founder of Microsoft) had pledged an additional $13.5 million to support the construction of the first and second phases.