On Northern California's Lassen Peak, a sense of ... Paradise lost and regained

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A couple head toward a bend in the trail a half-mile from the top of Lassen Peak. Even on clear days, cool breezes blow on the mountain, making a coat standard equipment. The trail to the top is popular, but challenging.Photo by Steve Dieffenbacher

July 27, 2007

By Steve Dieffenbacher

Mail Tribune

From the summit, all looks calm. To the north, Mount Shasta fades into a blue haze. To the south, the green thrust of the Sierra Nevada falls away until it is only a faint ridge line in the distance. To the west, beyond faraway blotches of receding forest, is Redding, Calif. To the east, high peaks fall away in tiers toward the Nevada border.

Here atop 10,457-foot Lassen Peak, I am at ease. Thirty-four years ago, in my early 20s, I climbed this Northern California mountain for the first time, and now I'm back.

Half a lifetime has passed, and things, it seems, haven't changed that much. The stony gray-brown slopes, the blinding patches of snow and the wind-sculpted whitebark pines below all seem familiar.

I stand quietly reveling in the panorama, the vivid light, the dry, cool mountain air.

Things HAVE changed, though. When I climbed this mountain in July 1973, few people spoke of global warming or international terrorism. I was young then, still riding the idealistic afterglow of the 1960s. Thirty-four years later, in a far less secure world, I am much less optimistic.

Somehow, atop this mountain, at the boundary between two worlds — the volcanic Cascades to the north and the granitic uplift of the Sierra Nevada to the south, I feel these winds of change keenly. Seasoned by loss, facing an increasingly unstable world, it seems right to pause for a moment and take stock.

Considered the first mountain in the Cascade Range, Lassen Peak and the mountains around it have long been fulcrums of change.

Born of fire, the national park that contains the peak, called appropriately Lassen Volcanic National Park, encompasses 150 square miles. A place of startling contrasts, it is both an alpine paradise and a post-cataclysmic wilderness.

Beginning on May 30, 1914, the peak awoke from centuries of silence with a small burst of steam. During the following year, it became increasingly active until two dramatically destructive blasts sent ash and lava into the valleys below.

The first, on May 18, 1915, created a mudflow of lava, debris and melting snow that surged down nearby Hat Creek, destroying its plant and animal life and inundating four nearby ranches.

On May 22, another eruption threw a tower of ash and steam 30,000 feet into the air. As the ashy cloud began to fall, it rolled over the side of the mountain, turning into a pyroclastic flow — a searing river of gas that followed a much wider path down Hat Creek than the previous mudflow. The surge completely leveled swaths of forest on the peak's slopes, then rolled down to wipe out meadows and farmland below. Miraculously, neither eruption killed anyone.

Until Mount St. Helens erupted in 1980, with far deadlier effects, killing 57 people, the eruptions were the most recent in American history, continuing off and on until 1921.

In parts of the park, it's easy to forget this. Entering from the south, there are groves of red firs, Jeffrey and lodgepole pines, slopes full of wildflowers. Slow-moving streams meander through lush meadows dotted by an occasional crystalline lake. But always there is a sense of flux.

At the Sulfur Works just off the highway not far from the south entrance, denuded knolls and steaming vents attest to the area's hydrothermal activity. And only a few miles from Lassen Peak itself, lies Bumpass Hell, a large thermal zone of mud pots, steaming vents and hot pools.

To view it safely, visitors walk on an elevated boardwalk where signs caution them continually not to go off the trail — no idle warnings. The mountain man and hunter the area is named after, Kendall Vanhook Bumpass, was giving a tour of the area in the 1860s and accidently stepped through the area's thin crust, suffering a burn so severe he lost his leg.

By the time visitors from the south have driven to the northern entrance of the park near Manzanita Lake, the effects of the mountain's violent past are all-too clear. Two large zones, Chaos Crags and the Devastated Area are made up of massive gray-tan boulders, residues of the destruction wrought by the 1915 eruption. Already, though, these barren zones are being repopulated by trees and other plants.

The park's biology is as diverse as its geology. Because it lies at a crossroads between the Sierra Nevada and Cascades, it includes plants common to both.

On the eastern side of the park, there is something else as well — a high desert community of juniper, rabbitbrush and sagebrush, vegetation native to the Great Basin area to the east.

Elevation adds more variety. Conifer species range from mid-elevation ponderosa and Jeffrey pines to high-elevation red firs and whitebark pines. And at the north end of the park, dense chaparral thickets of manzanita, ceanothus and chinquapin dominate the area just beyond Manzanita Lake.

Wildlife abounds. There are golden eagles, California tortoise-shell butterflies, Clark's nutcrackers, red foxes, mule deer, Columbia black-tailed deer, mountain lions, black bears, coyotes and an occasional pronghorn antelope. Smaller mammals such as brush rabbits, wood rats and golden-mantled ground squirrels also thrive in the park.

As I catch my breath on Lassen Peak, thinking of what I have seen, heard, touched and read about it in the few days I've been here, I realize that I'm just beginning to understand its complexity.

What I will take home from this brief getaway, as brief as my first visit in 1973, is mostly a sense of nascent power. I see more clearly why I've always had such mixed feelings about this park and its dominant peak. It unsettles me. The Lassen summit, with its broad notch, seems bare and unforgiving. It hovers over the landscape like a silent threat.

My first two days in the park I didn't give it my full attention, and felt oddly frazzled. On the first, preoccupied with job concerns, I drove off with a 28 mm lens still on the trunk of my car after changing lenses to take a picture of the Devastated Area. Miles down the road, after stopping to take another picture, I realized it was missing. I went back to look for it, but couldn't find it.

A day later, coming out of the parking lot at the Manzanita Lake Visitor Center, I drove into a fence post, scratching and denting my car.

I brooded over both incidents, chastising myself. But then, driving toward the peak on the afternoon of the second day, a sense of suspended dynamism came over me. I became aware of the park and its surroundings as a landscape both ancient and immediate.

In it were lessons about acceptance and moving on. Within it, the past and present, the living and nonliving are bound inescapably to each other. The landscape that exists today stems from natural processes begun millions of years ago just as my youthful exuberance has been tempered by what has happened to me in the years since.

As I began to descend the mountain in the afternoon's lengthening shadows later that day, noticing the sometimes barren, sometimes forested landscape below, I saw it as a place in perpetual transition. Wherever I looked, what had been lost, was slowly being regained. Someday, it would be lost again, and regained once more.

Step by step, renewal would happen, and life would come back, given half a chance. Far above treeline, walking down the mountain's world of tumbled rock, I had every reason to hope.

Steve Dieffenbacher is a Mail Tribune page designer/copy editor. Reach him at 776-4498 or sdieffenbacher@mailtribune.com

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