It’s only a five-hour drive from San Francisco, most of which occurs along I-5, hottest and most boring interstate highway in America. We had no trouble making our hotel reservation only two weeks before the trip, which is a very strong clue that Lassen is the most underappreciated national park in the United States. On the other hand, everyone goes to Yosemite. They pour into Yosemite by the millions, Lassen by the thousands. The other difference between the two parks is, of course, the noxious gasses, which I’ll get to later. Our hotel was in Mineral, California, just outside the park entrance. The sign says that Mineral has a population of 70, but I think that might include the road kill. The hotel is next to the restaurant, which is next to the gift shop and the general store. The nearest gas station is located in the town of Chester, 30 miles away.
We checked in at the general store, whereupon a man standing behind us reached out and pinched Cindi in the butt. My first reaction was to be shocked and appalled. Then I realized that it was Cindi’s friend Shaul, who, along with his friend Anthony, was staying at the nearby campgrounds. Relief then settled on my face. We had agreed to try to meet Shaul and Anthony when we got there, but coincidentally they happened to be in the general store at that very moment when we arrived.
We piled into Shaul and Anthony’s rental car and headed into the park. It was cold and windy that day, and this being July, we were surprised to see snow on the ground in several areas. From the winding mountain road, the snow was often pretty to look at, but otherwise seemed only to serve the needs of certain unnamed, childish people who threw snowballs at one another whenever we stopped our car from time to time to check out the scenic vistas. I was, of course, above such nonsense, except of course when acting in self-defense.
Our plan was to go on a hike on the Bumpass Hell trail, if for no other reason than because we liked the name. Mount Lassen, the tallest mountain in the park, was the site of a 1915 volcano eruption, and there are many places in the park where hot gasses steam out of the ground. Bumpass Hell is one of those places. I thus was looking forward to experiencing my first noxious odors of the day. When we got to the parking lot, Shaul asked if he ought to take his cell phone with him.
“Sure,” I said. “You never know if we might need it in case of an emergency.”
Unfortunately, we found a big orange sign at the trailhead that said ‘Trail Closed’. The fact that the signpost was poking out of a snow bank might have had something to do with this. Nonetheless, we were disappointed. I went to the porto-potty. I came back to the car and found that everyone was standing outside the car.
“What’s going on?” I asked
Cindi broke the bad news to me. “The keys are locked in the car.”
Being stuck on a desolate mountain road, more than 30 miles from the nearest gas station, locked out of our car, was almost as sickening as breathing those noxious gasses would have been. Fortunately, Shaul had the cell phone. Unfortunately, the reason he left the keys in the car in the first place was that I told him to take the cell phone with him, which distracted him enough to leave the keys on the seat. So of course it was all my fault. Shaul called AAA
“Hello, Welcome to AAA. At the tone, please give the name of your nearest cross street.”
Apparently no one told AAA that emergencies sometimes occur on desolate mountain roads.
Cindi and I huddled together in the piercing mountain winds, kept alive by munching on our rations of Balance Bars, and by maintaining the sheer determination to survive. Entire tens of minutes dragged on in the cold of a 45-degrees-above-zero wind chill factor. After 60 minutes, the truck arrived, and it was the longest hour I had ever endured, with the possible exception of the time I was home sick from work and accidentally watched the Donnie and Marie Osmond show.
We drove back the way we came, which happened to take us through a area called the Sulfur Works, so we parked there and checked it out. There was a short trail that wound its way through an area of boiling land and steam vents, which was all very interesting, except for the fact that I nearly threw up. Cindi, Shaul, and Anthony blithely walked through the noxious steam as if it was nothing. Right then and there, I came to the conclusion that it wasn’t so bad that we missed the Bumpass Hell trail.
And on that note, we headed off to Chester for dinner.
The next day, Cindi and I were on our own. Upon finding out at the ranger station that yet another of the trails that we were interested in was closed because of snow, Cindi and I drove up the main road with the intention of climbing the Chaos Crags trail, at the opposite end of the park. However, along the way we found the parking lot for the trail to the top of Lassen Peak, and decided to stop there and take a look. The bottom part of the trail was on a snowfield, but we saw little specks of people higher up on the mountain where there was actually no snow.
I wasn’t exactly shod for mountain climbing—I was wearing sneakers—but I didn’t feel so bad when I encountered other climbers wearing not just any kind of sneakers, but Converse All Stars. I happen to own a pair or two of those myself, and they look especially cool, but they aren’t exactly designed for hiking up mountainsides. Neither was my cardiovascular system, I realized, as I had to pause occasionally to recover from the altitude sickness. Every once in a while a skier to the left of us would hurdle down the mountainside, avoiding as best they could the boulders and trees that poked out of the perilously thin layer of snow. That was certainly a faster way to go down than to hike, and might be useful if you had a strong urge to use the porto-potty at the bottom of the mountain. The trail was crowded with hikers, and finding a private place to do one’s business seemed a little unlikely. Not that something like this would occur to me, except for the fact that I have a bladder the size of a pea. After what seemed like a very long time, we found a sign that said “2 miles”. Did that mean we two miles to go, or that we had already climbed two miles? We sat there and admired the view. To our right we could look down on the valley and Lake Almanor, the large reservoir that filled it.
When we found out we had two more miles to go, and that we had only climbed a half mile of the trail, we decided to turn around and resume our original plans of exploring the Chaos Crags trail instead. This was very embarrassing, because people all people we passed on the way down, who were heading up, kept asking us about our trip to the top, and we had to sheepishly tell them that were wimps who had only done the first 20% of the trail.
The road to the Chaos Crags trailhead passes through a devastated area of densely strewn boulders, which are known as “jumbles”. The Jumbles were apparently created by an eruption at Chaos Crags some 300 years ago. Just outside the trailhead, we found a different kind “jumbles”, namely a pile of densely strewn pine cones, apparently created by an eruption of a pine tree some 9 months earlier. The cones were the size of the souvenir mugs available for sale at the nearby gift shop. We paused to take pictures of Cindi lying on the ground, covered with pine cones and feigning unconsciousness, an apparently victim of a vicious pine cone attack. This is the sort of thing we sometimes do to amuse ourselves.
The trail runs for two miles, a gradual climb through a mostly wooded area. Because of the trees, we could not see what lay ahead of us. However, near the end of the trail, we started walking through jumbles, and suddenly the view opened up before us, a rock-strewn mountainside that towered above a blue lake. It was beautiful.
The next morning, we ventured back to the park one more time. We took the trail leading off from the visitor’s center, which promised a waterfall after a couple of miles of hiking. Like the Chaos Crags trail, the waterfalls were not visible until we reached the end of the trail. The view was truly stunning, if not a little scary as we stood on a precarious slope looking out upon it. The weather was much warmer, and the hike in both directions was pleasant.
We headed for home, and we were already scheming to return so that we could climb Mount Lassen for real. On the highway to Red Bluff, we noticed a tree on the side of the road that had hundreds of shoes hanging off its branches. On a long and boring trip, you go for any diversion you can get, so we turned around and stopped there to admire the tree. Sneakers, boots, you name it—there were hundreds of them, put there by God knows who.
We continued on to Red Bluff. To our right, in the distance, we could see the snow-capped peak of Mount Shasta. The descent into the Central Valley brought a little sadness, as we left so much beauty behind and returned to a more mundane existence, where gas stations are legion and snowflakes are hard to come by.