This page is here because I want to share with you something really special that happened in my life, recently and unexpectedly. Those of you who know me well will know what I mean by "unexpectedly". I was inspired by a couple of pictures I took from high points in the Grouse Ridge area over the last two summers, where Lassen Peak was clearly visible to the eye, if not to the one-time-use camera I carried. I decided to spend my fifty-fourth birthday ( 9/21/02) hiking to the top of Lassen. I'm assuming that you all know about this fear of heights that I've been struggling with for some years. My strategy for the last two years has been to confront it, part of the reason for those trips to Grouse Ridge and my mission to Lassen. Little did I realize that I was on a pilgrimage shared by many others. Everybody has their own reason for doing this. I learned a lot about myself.

I read up about it first, of course. I had spent time in Lassen Park twice before, and still have a collection of materials -- books, brochures, maps, etc. -- actually I added to it again this time. I also found material on the Internet that helped me be prepared. There's a link at the bottom. And I trained for it physically. It wasn't necessarily about the difficulty of it (I would rate it as "moderately difficult"). I took me just shy of two hours to make the 2000' in 2.2 miles. The majority of you reading this could do it. I saw a lot of other pilgrims coming up to the top who had struggled harder to get there, but they did. I think the elevation is a large part of the challenge. You start at around 8500' and go to 10,457 at the official peak. I gave myself one day to acclimate to the 7000' level. I started out way too fast, had to reset my pace, but when I got to the last half-mile I didn't even notice it any more. I did hear that it's usually a lot colder than when I was there, from a neighbor in camp, who said she had done it three times previously, "and it's the first time I didn't freeze my ass off."

Lassen is a geologic and scenic wonder, a place of nature in change, and of abundant life. These are my pictures.

Click on the picture to enlarge, then use your "Back" button.

I camped at Summit Lake, about ten miles north of the peak at about 7000'. As I drove up for the hike on Saturday morning, this is what it looked like from the road. At the top, I would call your attention to the knob, left of the saddle where the long "j" shaped patch of snow starts, and then to the crag on the right. I will refer to the patch of snow again, as well as the knob, saddle and crag -- what I think of as the three components of the peak.

If I hadn't made it to the top, there probably wouldn't be a story here. At the official marker on the knob, looking north at the crag. The saddle is hidden in between. On the way up, which took me the better part of two hours, I encounter a lot of other people on the trail. I realize that many of them, too, are on a mission, a pilgrimage. That made it special, too.

When I got to the top, my first inspiration, when I got out the camera, was to find a good place to look down. Lassen is pretty conical, and this is a minimally-obstructed view down one of the side slopes. You can see a little piece of the road down there on the upper right, approximately 2000' below. You can see, in the foreground, what Lassen Peak is mostly made of -- lots of busted up rock. Much of what you see from here is born of both fire and ice, volcanos and glaciers.

My favorite of the pictures I got, taken from the east side of the base of the crag. The mountain below center is Reading Peak, no slouch at 8701' itself. There are a couple of tiny patches of snow, but almost all of the light color you see is the morning light on the volcanic rock. You can see the road snaking around it on the right. The trail starts down there. The big lake on the right horizon, 25 miles off, is Lake Almanor.

I decided that the best paths going up the crag were the ones on the west side, so I went that way, and looked for a higher place. There were teenagers scrambling over the tops of the rocks I'm standing in. I handed the camera off to a fellow pilgrim and asked her to "shoot me". In the notch of the crag where I stopped climbing, I'm facing west (the camera is looking east), with Reading Peak at my knee. The highest I've ever been in my life.

When I got my picture taken, I was looking across the maw of the crater from the west side of the crag, and what I'm looking at looks a lot like what I'm standing on. I'm facing to the northwest, and Mount Shasta was in sight on the upper right. The camera did not capture even a fraction of the majesty of what the eye saw. Shasta wasn't just in sight, it was awesome, it was present. On the left horizon is probably the Trinity Alps.

Now I head back the other way towards the knob, looking south across the saddle. Note the top of the patch of snow on the left. That's the "j"-shaped patch of snow I pointed out in the first picture.

On the saddle at the top of the "j"-shaped patch of snow, with some humans added for perspective.

From the knob, looking across the south end of the crater, towards the northern Sacramento Valley. Again, the camera does not capture the majesty of what the eye sees. The views are superlative.

As I'm getting ready to head back down, I've got a great view of the base and Lake Helen. That's Bumpass Mountain at 8753' in the left background. I find a new layer of meaning in the word "comeuppance", as I am met by the leaders of the Lassen High School girls cross-country team as they come running up the final stretch of the trail. I stuck around long enough to learn that their best time was 53 minutes and change.

This is the best link I found, and they have good pictures, too. They also refer you to everything else you need to know. http://vulcan.wr.usgs.gov/Volcanoes/Lassen/Locale/framework.html

Disclaimers, denials, alibis...

This page was created for the gratification of my ego. I took the pictures using a disposable Kodak camera, had them developed to cd, edited them using an old demo version of Lview Pro, created the page in a demo version of Symantec Visual Page, and some in Netscape Composer, and posted it to my website using a simple FTP program I also think I got for free, using the 10 Mb that my ISP, cwo.com, gives me for my monthly fee. You can do this, too. Why not?

This page has been visited times since October 2002
Didn't I admit it was an ego thing?