Here are pictures of some of the wildflowers I took photos of while circumambulating Brown Mountain. I'm not great at identifying wildflowers, so many of these are just guesses. If you recognize anything that I'd identified wrong, let me know!
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Updated: Jul 18, 2020
Begrudgingly, I extricated myself from the tent so as to better face the morning.
I wasn't particularly surprised to find that I felt like I'd been soundly beaten while I'd slept. In fact, considering everything that had happened during the night, and that I'd topped it all off with well under four hours of sleep on badly uneven, rocky ground, I was actually less sore than I'd expected to be.
As I stood up outside the tent and looked around in the slanting rays of just-post-sunrise, I couldn't help but laugh at my choice of site, revealed for the first time in the light:
On one hand, it wasn't much to look at. On the other hand, there was no wind.
Typically, when I'm out backpacking and I wake up feeling run-down, I compensate with an extra-large breakfast. In this case, though, I was in such a hurry to move on from my improvised camp site that I stuffed a CLIF bar into my face and called it breakfast, packed all of my camping gear back up -- only slightly more slowly than I had at 2am the previous night -- and then struck out toward the car, about twenty minutes after I'd woken up.
In the light of day, it was clear that descending the remaining portion of the ridge to Highway 89 and then following the road around to the car was actually going to be much more work than climbing back up over the top of the mountain and then hiking back the way I'd come the previous afternoon. So, ridiculously, I started my second morning in Lassen National Park by summiting Ski Heil for the third time in about twelve hours. On the upside, I got to take in some gorgeous sunrise light on the surrounding terrain as I climbed back down to the saddle between Ski Heil and Eagle Peaks and then back down into the shadow of Lassen Peak.
Here's a sunrise view of Brokeoff Mountain, which was ostensibly one of my goals for this second day:
And here I'm once again crossing the Ski Heil snowfield that leads down to the saddle:
If making my way down the boulder field and across the rocky meadow between the parking lot and Eagle Peak had been difficult the first time, it was much worse crossing it from the other direction, hungry, tired, and with the snow refrozen after the night underfoot. At one point, I found a fifteen-degree-or-so incline in the meadow so icy that I was unable to "scale" it without slipping and falling over and over again. I had to descend fifty feet or so and scramble up some rocks to find a way around it as it was literally impassible without crampons.
I chose to bypass the boulder field entirely, which added some distance and more on-ice travel to my trip. But, finally, I stood on top of the rise west of the trailhead, looking down at a parking lot that was significantly emptier than it had been when I'd left it late the previous afternoon.
But my car was there, which was all that mattered.
Once I crossed the parking lot, the terrain underfoot strange after an hour spent navigating uneven boulders and ice, I flopped down unceremoniously on the asphalt behind the car's back bumper. I just sat there for a moment, catching my breath, and then proceeded to prepare an actual breakfast.
My big target for the day was Brokeoff Mountain, the very same mountain I'd originally planned to climb during my aborted 2012 trip. It only tops out at 9,235 feet, but the approach, at three and a half miles, set me up for another seven miles of hiking and nearly five thousand more feet of elevation exchange. I was excited to do the hike mentally, but was a little worried about what my physical endurance was going to be like after the previous night's shenanigans.
That wasn't going to stop me, of course -- at least not yet -- but I was sure as hell going to eat a big chunk of my food reserves before taking it on.
So I did. For almost an hour I sat in the parking lot, alternating between reading a novel and scanning maps, slowly eating my way through a huge breakfast as the asphalt heated up in the light of the rising sun. At some point, the tourists started filing into the lot for the day, and I realized that I felt much less comfortable among them than I had the previous day. Maybe it was just my imagination, but passersby seemed less than thrilled with me sitting in the middle of the parking lot dirty, probably-smelly, and red-eyed, cooking a pot full of oatmeal directly on the asphalt, a buffet of fruit and breakfast bars laid out across my car's back bumper. The charitable part of me smiled and waved. The less-than-charitable part of me wanted to shout "You try spending all night getting blown off of a mountain you climbed without the aid of a trail and see how you look and smell!"
I didn't, though. Obviously.
Instead, I took the influx of visitors to mean that it was time to end my luxurious breakfast break and find a road less traveled. I stuffed most of my gear into the back of the car haphazardly, planning to sort through things once I reached the Brokeoff Mountain trailhead. First, though, it was time to briefly reenter the world of cars and highways.
I drove a few miles south and west along the winding park highway, cognizant of every dip in altitude the road presented: every foot lost on the road meant another foot I'd have to climb to the top of Brokeoff. Academically, of course, I already knew the trailhead elevation, but it was hard on morale to watch as the Lassen Peak trailhead rose behind me and my car dropped lower and lower below Brokeoff's summit: Brokeoff's trailhead was almost two thousand feet lower than Lassen's, and I would be gaining all that elevation back with my own two legs.
As it turned out, the trailhead was also rather unceremonious: it was more of a short asphalt strip extending from the shoulder of the highway than it was a developed location like Lassen's had been. I was thankful that I'd thought to use the pit toilets at the previous trailhead one last time before I'd driven away.
Shifting my gear around for what I assumed would be the final time, I prepped my daypack for a medium-length hike. Even loaded with water, an extra jacket, and some slightly unnecessary but fun accessories, the pack was noticeably lighter than my overnight pack had been. I might have been dragging energy-wise from the night before, but the relatively light load certainly helped.
I hit the trail.
The first thing that struck me about the Brokeoff Mountain trail was how much greener it was for being only a few miles away from the bone-dry lunar slopes of Lassen and the scrub-and-rock flanks of Eagle Peak. This was the view that greeted me almost as soon as I'd crossed the road from the car and joined up with the trail proper:
It would continue to be a trail chock full of trees, grasses, and high-altitude wildflowers for nearly its entire length. In retrospect, I'm sure this had something to do with the trail's paralleling the Forest Lake drainage. At the time, I just enjoyed the verdant scenery and kept my mind off of how leaden my legs felt.
At times, the wildflowers became so thick that the air was suffused with the smell of them:
It was an amazing and unexpected part of the hike, and I definitely remember it as fondly as the summit itself, if not more so.
Eventually, my surroundings dried out a bit as I hiked above Forest Lake, and the summit of Brokeoff came into view for the first time:
As I ascended, it became harder and harder to not think about how tired I was. Being able to see my goal seemingly right out in front of me made it frustrating and difficult to put up with the trail as it switched back and forth and then eventually passed to the side of the summit, leading to a portion of the ridgeline that could be surmounted only by yet more switchbacks.
I get the point of switchbacking trails, I really do, but when you're in the state of mind I was in at that point in the day, they can make you want to tear your hair out.
That said, eventually, inevitably, my boots ate up enough stone and dirt to bring me high enough on the mountain's northwest ridge to see the false summit. It wasn't very far from there.
At just under 9,000 feet, I was feeling the altitude much more than usual (I blamed the previous night's "sleep" for this), and so things got a little wobbly and a little headache-y as I neared the crest of the ridge. But I kept going, and was rewarded with a fantastic view of the area I'd come to know so intimately during the previous day's adventures.
In the distance, I could see the massive shoulder of Lassen Peak, complete with Vulcan's Eye staring me down. The ridgeline that spooled out in front of my eyes clearly led over the hump of Diamond Peak and back to Ski Heil and Eagle Peaks, now looking like tiny bumps of rock to my eyes.
I took in the summit for a few minutes, stopping for a brief snack and water break, but a large party of talkative hikers had taken up residency on the summit block before I'd arrived, and showed no signs of leaving any time soon. I didn't want to risk getting stuck behind them during my descent, though, so once I felt like I'd paid the top of Brokeoff Mountain its due, I commenced to speed back down the ridge.
There is a secondary highpoint along the mountain's ridge, and on a normal day I would have scrambled up the extra hundred-ish feet to get a better view back across the expanse to the main summit, but standing there at the base of the rise, I couldn't talk myself into it. I continued down.
For awhile, I descended in a bit of a haze, my tiredness really catching up with me as I retraced my recent path down the side of the ridge. Eventually, though, I caught a second wind after enjoying another long rest break with a gorgeous view back down the mountain to the surrounding forest:
The rest of the descent passed in a bit of a blur, and then I was back at the car.
I'd been awake since 6am and had just finished my first mountain of the day at 2pm. The Brokeoff hike had taken me much longer than I'd thought it would, and I certainly hadn't gained any energy along the way. I'd originally planned to try to hit a second peak before heading home, but with everything that had happened so far, my resolve was waning. Plus, I was lower on water reserves than I'd expected to be, and there wasn't a way to refill my water bottles that didn't involve a lot of driving through the park or melting snow: both time-consuming activities that would put me further behind schedule.
On the other hand, I'd been fawning over pictures of the park's Cinder Cone summit for two years...aaaand you see where this is going.
I got back in the car and pointed it at the Cinder Cone trailhead, even though my right leg didn't even really want to push the pedal down anymore.
In addition to all the aforementioned problems with this plan, the other problem was that accessing Cinder Cone's trail was going to take me a lot of driving, and thus a lot of time. I would have to drive back through the park the way I'd come in the day before, then head east on highway 44 away from the road I'd have to take back to K-Falls later that night, then drive a rough, undeveloped road for a few miles south to the Butte Lake campground.
I made it as far as the intersection between highways 89 and 44 (after an overly melodramatic good-bye to the park back at Manzanita Lake) before my doubts caught up to me.
I was far more worn out than I was used to already, and the summit of Cinder Cone was another four mile round-trip hike and a two thousand foot elevation exchange away. To top it off, the only trail to the summit was "made" of a loose bed of cinders, which meant that all the climbing would be of the "two steps forward, one step back" variety. I'd be lucky to get to the trailhead by 3:30pm, which meant that, conservatively, I'd be leaving the park between 6pm and 6:30pm, and be getting home by 10pm or so. I was a bit concerned with my ability to drive safely that late at night based on how tired I already was.
But, of course, there was also a mountain to climb. So.
I sat in the car, pulled off on the shoulder of highway 89, having already made the turn toward home but unwilling to commit to following through yet, for nearly a half-hour. The irony of wasting thirty minutes making a time-sensitive decision was not lost on me.
After a lot of head scratching, soul-searching, and yawning, what finally made up my mind was the thought of having to wait another year to come back to Lassen. I wanted to squeeze as much experience out of the park as I could, now, before it closed again early in the fall and remained inaccessible for most of the ensuing year.
I groaned, hauled the car through a u-turn, and headed back toward the park.
The drive took even longer than I'd thought it would, but packing for the hike at the trailhead was easy: this was the end, and all I had left was a CLIF bar and one water bottle anyway. I threw them into my small pack and hit the trail, feeling a little bit like Sam realizing that he and Frodo didn't actually need food for the return trip from Mordor. It was almost 4pm.
At first, the Cinder Cone trail paralleled an enormous old lava flow that reminded me of the area around South Sister in Oregon:
The trail surface was a mixture of sand and cinders, but though it was loose under my feet, it was also relatively flat and would have been easy going but for the things I'd already done to my legs over the past twenty-four or so hours. As the route led out of the well-populated Butte Creek campground, it was packed with weekend-warrior campers who were easily and lazily ambling along the terrain at a speed that seemed double mine. Each time the sun came out from behind the clouds to beat down on me, I felt like a punch-drunk boxer trying to find the way back to the center of the ring after being knocked down.
Then I came around a corner and got my first real glimpse of Cinder Cone, and I sped up involuntarily.
It was just so weird looking, it was irresistible. It was quite literally a cone of cinders. I knew this, of course, from reading about the park. But seeing a picture and seeing it in real life are two different things.
Like an eager mummy I lurched across the open area and got onto the summit trail, and then began to climb.
It was so bad.
As you can probably guess from the above picture, the terrain is incredibly loose. I've hiked the Lost Coast Trail, so I'm no stranger to hiking on sandy terrain, but at no point on that trail do you have to freaking climb nine hundred feet up on sand. The footsteps, hammered into the trail by the thousands of walkers who'd made their pilgrimages to Cinder Cone before me, actually made it worse. I was postholing in sand and cinders. Before long, I was climbing using rest steps as if I was at 13,000 feet or something. There were times when I'd only climb fifty feet before having to stop for yet another extended break. I may have set the record for the slowest ascent of Cinder Cone ever.
But, eventually, I made it to the top. And it was definitely worth it.
The rim of the caldera is uneven, so after topping out I still had to climb up another fifty feet or so to get to the highest point of the mountain, but then I had a great view across Cinder Cone's phenomenally weird summit.
Following the trail around the summit's rim, I was able to look back down over the edge and see others approaching via the Butte Creek trail:
An offshoot of the main trail clearly led down into the caldera to the cone's heart. I had some serious doubts at that point about my ability to find the energy to climb back out of the caldera, but I definitely wanted to climb into it. So I did.
At the bottom, past hikers had arranged a rock garden of cairns made of grey, brown, and orange (?!) volcanic rocks:
Climbing back out of the caldera (after a brief break to appreciate Vulcan's work) wasn't as bad as I'd feared. It was probably a one hundred foot gain, at most, and just involved a bit more rest-stepping and heavy breathing. I'd left my pack at the top of the rim, so I snagged it back as I topped out again.
As I circled around to the other side of the rim, I finally got a good look at what is possibly the most impressive part of this surreal landscape: The Painted Dunes.
I'd originally planned to descent the Cone the same way I'd ascended, but there appeared to be a "back door" route that ran right past The Dunes, and I couldn't bring myself to pass it up. It would add just a little more distance to the hike back to the car, but at this point I was beyond caring: I'd done so much in the last thirty hours that it was hard to imagine that this would be the thing that undid me.
So I descended the opposite side of the Cone, and had my first experience glissading on volcanic cinders. It probably would have seemed like more of a bigger deal had I not been dozing off and on by the time I reached the mountain's base.
The trail too-slowly circled around the bulk of Cinder Cone, and as it did, I was able to get a view of the face of the mountain, unbroken on this side by foot trails and adorned by one off-center tree that somehow managed to find a foothold just below the summit. I'd love to know that tree's story.
On this side of the Cone, a whole trail network opened up into the Dunes and the Lava Beds, and I made a mental note to come back and check them out some day. For now, though, I was done pushing my schedule, and my luck. I turned toward the Butte Creek campground and the car.
I was, unfortunately, not done pushing my body. It was an almost-flat hike for the two miles back from the base of Cinder Cone, but I absolutely felt every single small rise in the trail throughout my legs. It was one of the very few hikes I've done in my adult life where I had to take rest breaks on flat terrain because my legs had simply stopped working.
By the time I ambled back to where the trail came alongside the lava flows, the sunlight was slanting low out of the sky and I was absolutely beat. I staggered back into the Butte Lake campground, hoping I didn't look as bad as I felt.
Back at the car, I took a brief rest break, eating the last of my CLIF bars and enjoying a moment of stillness before beginning my long drive home. In the next parking spot over, some REI employees had set up an impromptu promotional kiosk in the time between I'd left for Cinder Cone and now. Snaking out behind it was a long line of recreational-looking types taking turns signing something and then getting little goody bags in return.
I'm an REI member, and so it crossed my mind to see what was going on, but after a moment's deliberation, I realized I'd feel more than a bit out of place in the line full of clean, energetic-looking, well-attired catalog models passing in front of me in my dirt-and-sweat-plastered two-day-old outfit. I walked awkwardly around the display on my way to the pit toilet, and then again on the way back. Then I got in the car and pointed it toward home.
I don't remember much of that drive all that well: I made it home safe, but I spent a lot of the next three hours in a bit of a daze, relying a mountain of caffeine purchased at a gas station off of highway 89 to keep myself awake. I spent a lot of the time thinking about what I'd just been through, and how my first trip to Lassen National Park had turned out to be even more of an adventure than I'd imagined, or hoped for.
All told, I'd climbed five mountains, each one beautiful and challenging in its own way. I'd ascended around 7,000 feet, and hiked something like twenty miles. And all over the course of thirty hours, with a little sleep crammed in there in the middle. I'd planned on this being a difficult and exhausting trip, but I hadn't expected it to test me as much as it had. On the backside of it now, though, as I drove north away from the park and toward home, that didn't seem like such a bad thing: I'd made it through safe and sound, and even the frustrating parts seemed much smaller now that they were (literally) in my rear-view mirror. My struggles with the wind, and the routefinding, and plain old exhaustion didn't seem nearly as important as the excitement of blasting up the side of Lassen, or the smell of Brokeoff Mountain's wildflowers, or the awe I'd felt at my first view of the Cinder Cone.
A little less than an hour after leaving the park, shortly before I'd lose sight of it completely, I got one last, solid look at Lassen Peak, the masthead of the park, rising up out of the valley behind me, the patches of snow on its flanks glowing in the dusky rays of the setting sun. I returned its erstwhile salute, already looking forward to a time next July or August when I'd be able to visit the park again, and discover new sights and new heights.
As the mountain disappeared below the horizon for the last time, I shifted my legs to ease the aching pain that was settling into them, and smiled as the first stars came out.
"Invincible gladness," indeed.
Updated: Jul 18, 2020
The wind howled.
The wall of my tiny, one-person tent curled and snapped against my back as I sat bent to the contour of its southwest corner. The poles hadn't buckled yet, but I suspected they would the moment I stopped supporting the tent with my spine.
This was bad.
I grew up in the midwest, and growing up in the midwest you develop a particular sense when it comes to the wind. A noncommittal, there-and-gone breath against your exposed skin, a breeze, even a gust: these are all just movements of air. What you learn to listen for, though, what you learn to feel is that moment when the wind stops being just a movement of air and becomes a Thing: the snarling, snapping, hissing Thing that, out on the plains at least, usually signals the transition from thunderstorm to tornado.
Where I'm from, it's flat, and you can usually see this Thing coming, or at least feel it coming. Up in the mountains, though, it can sneak up on you, pouncing down from atop an overhanging ridgeline or roaring up a valley when you least expect it, turning the very air around you into a biting, clawing enemy.
As I sat bracing my tent against the attack of this howling sky-animal, waiting for the respite that I chose to imagine was coming, I thought of John Muir's "A Wind-storm in the Forests," a short piece that describes his transcendent experience of riding out a Sierra windstorm in the boughs of a Douglas spruce. During the storm, Muir meditates on the paradoxical peacefulness he observes mid-storm, writing "We hear much nowadays concerning the universal struggle for existence, but no struggle in the common meaning of the word was manifest here; no recognition of danger by any tree; no deprecation; but rather an invincible gladness as remote from exultation as from fear."
Hunched over in my tent in the middle of the night, I was definitely not experiencing "invincible gladness." Instead, over the course of the next ninety minutes, I cycled through terror, frustration, resignation, and then, ultimately, a defeated exhaustion as a wind-storm in the mountains tried to blow me and my tent off of the summit of Ski Heil Peak.
But I'm getting ahead of myself.
The day started pleasantly enough, with a longish but languorous drive from Klamath Falls south and east to Lassen Volcanic National Park.
It was the middle of a particularly bad fire season, but as "particularly bad" has become the norm in recent years, I'd decided to try to keep that from dampening my spirits. I'd been checking the air quality regularly in the Lassen area in the days leading up to my planned trip, and while it certainly wasn't optimal, it was actually better than I'd been experiencing while working in my backyard in Klamath Falls.
This was Lindsey and I's fifth summer in town, and for the first time, the absurdity of the fact that I'd climbed nearly every non-technical mountain in the area but had yet to visit Lassen National Park really hit me when I idly googled it while eating breakfast one morning and this was one of the first pictures that showed up:
Over the course of the ensuing yardwork-laden week, Lassen went from being a random item on my pages-long mountain-climbing to-do list to the motivation for plunging into full-on trip-planning mode. When I wasn't working, I was poring over trip reports, printing and annotating maps, and compiling a gear list.
Sometimes, the rush of enthusiasm for a new adventure feels like an angel (or devil?) on my shoulder, waiting for an excuse to spring into action. In this case, my realizing concretely that Lassen was a four hour drive away was all the excuse she needed to start flapping her wings in my ear.
Though I'd never been to Lassen before, she and I had a bit of a history. Way back in the summer of 2012, when I'd been a graduate student with much less disposable income and much worse gear but way more time on my hands, I'd planned a similar trip to the park, with a similar amount of enthusiasm. I was one year on from my momentous summit of Mount Adams back then, and, electrified by the prospect of climbing more big mountains, I'd settled on a trip to Lassen after scoring hail-mary Phish tickets for their three-night San Francisco run. It was an ambitious plan for a trip, as I'd be coming down from Pullman, in northeastern Washington. I'd drive the seven hundred miles to Lassen, spend a day there climbing Brokeoff Mountain and a morning climbing Eagle Peak, then it would be another two hundred and fifty miles to Bill Graham Civic Auditorium for three days in the Bay Area before the nine hundred mile drive home.
Unfortunately, this plan turned out to be too daunting for my aging car and my bank account, and despite taking most of a year to save up the money for it, I had to cancel at the last minute, selling my tickets, canceling my hotel reservations, and leaving Brokeoff Mountain for another day. It wasn't the worst thing that's ever happened to anyone, but at the time, it felt like it.
So, as I cruised down I-5 through Mount Shasta city and Redding five years later, watching the snowy dome of Lassen Peak rise in the distant east like an earthbound moon, having only driven for three hours and made no plans beyond where I might climb and where I might sleep for free on the ground inside the park, I felt in equal parts the thrill of a new adventure and the relief of the exorcism of old ghosts.
There had been bands of heavy smoke striping the air throughout the drive, and a particularly dark one settled in over the road as I turned off of I-5 and onto Highway 89. The worsening air quality was a disappointment for sure, as it obscured my view of the mountains that were emerging ahead and meant I'd likely be breathing particulate for two days while I labored up steep talus slopes, but it wasn't really unexpected. After hiking in the southern Oregon/northern California area for five years, I start nearly every August trip hoping that morning will be the morning that the winds blow the smoke away from my own little patch of wilderness. I get my wish maybe one in ten times.
By the time I reached the park's west entrance, though, all my concerns about the smoke drifted away like...well, like smoke. Having not traveled to any other National Parks but Crater Lake for the previous five years, I found the entrance to Lassen National Park simultaneously comfortingly like Crater Lake's south entrance and intriguingly different. I felt the kind of excitement-for-endless-possibilities that's usually reserved for the moments when I'm up high on a mountain and looking out across a few hundred square miles of horizon. This place was immediately beautiful (albeit in that rocky, volcanic way that is admittedly a bit of an acquired taste) and it was going to be my playground for the next two days.
On the heels of that thought, though, my enthusiasm dropped away precipitously, and I was suddenly deeply sad to be at this playground alone. By necessity, I undertake many of my outdoor adventures alone or with a few friends but without my wife, and though I always want the two of us to share these adventures, I've long since accepted — for the most part — that I'll have to spend a fair amount of the summer on the road without her. Sitting in my car just inside the gates of Lassen National Park, though, in a place that I was certain, at first glance, that she would absolutely love, this seemed deeply unfair in a way that made my throat hurt. It suddenly felt selfish and a bit callous of me to take my first trip into the park without her, to discover what was there just for myself, and for a moment I legitimately considered just driving home and coming back some other time. Ultimately, though, my sense of financial pragmatism won out — I'd already paid the entrance fee and had chewed through half a tank of gas, after all — but as I drove forward through the park, I did so with an unusually heavy heart.
The remainder of the drive slowly restored my enthusiasm, though, while ramping my excitement to critical levels. Early on, it reminded me of nothing more than driving Crater Lake's west rim, as the road undulated over some old volcanic flows before dropping slightly down into a pine forest as it slowly looped north, then southeast around the bulk of the Lassen Peak massif.
I may have entered the park without a fully-fledged plan for my next forty-eight hours, but I knew I was headed to Lassen Peak first. At 10,463 feet, it had been a bit above my aspirations back in 2012 when I'd planned my first, failed trip to the park. Now, something like one hundred and twenty-five summits later, I hoped to bag it in around three hours and be off to climb a second mountain after lunch.
That said, I wasn't tossing Lassen Peak off. Not only is it one of the most visible and most aesthetically pleasing mountains in the area, throughout five years of adventures in northern California, it had always loomed on my horizon, beckoning to me even while I stood looking out from the summit of Shasta, almost a mile higher up. I was itching to cross it off my list, but I wasn't going to kid myself into thinking it would be an easy jaunt.
For what felt like a bit too long, I followed Highway 89 as it twisted and turned through the park, tantalizing me with occasional glimpses of snowy summits and plunging canyons before hiding them from view again. By design or no, the road from the park's Manzanita Lake entrance to Lassen Peak leaves you in suspense until the last possible moment. Combine that with the low in-park speed limit and by the time I reached the final rise of the road, at an elevation of 8,500 feet, it felt like my feet were literally itching with the need to start hiking.
Which was fine, because Lassen Peak was right there.
Really, the Lassen Peak trailhead is sort of hilarious in the way that it buts right up against the mountain. The trail starts right from the parking lot and ascends for two thousand feet over the course of two and a half miles.
After parking near the back of the lot, I spent a few minutes shuffling gear between my summit pack and my backpack, a few minutes drinking water, and a few minutes waiting in line for the bathroom (really), and then I was off, up the obvious trail as it headed straight toward the summit to the north before jagging sharply to the east, ascending maybe fifteen minutes after getting out of the car.
The immediately surprising thing about ascending Lassen Peak wasn't necessarily that there were so many people on the trail — it was a beautiful day in the middle of summer, and the trail was right on the side of the main highway through a National Park — but that so few of them seemed like the mountaineering type.
Now, to clarify, I don't believe that you need to be a certain kind of person to enjoy climbing a mountain, or even to be able to climb a mountain. Via the established trail, the climb to Lassen's summit is about as easy a walk-up as you can get from a technical standpoint, and it doesn't take any particular type or level of expertise to follow an obvious trail for two and a half miles. For my money, anybody who wants to be out there should be able to be out there. That's the point of National Parks, after all, right? Plus, in my experience, there's little better for keeping my own ego in check than the experience of being partway up a mountain, swathed in my fancy gear, and then being passed by someone powering up the hill in a ragged pair of jeans, a t-shirt, and work boots. Something like this happened to me when I was climbing Whitney, and I've never forgotten it. This is one of my all-time favorite mountaineering stories for the same reason.
That said, it was a hot morning, and would only get hotter as the day went on. The sky was clear, the sun was beating down, and Lassen Peak is over ten thousand feet high. This is not a summit to take on lightly, well-established trail or no. So I was not particularly surprised and a little relieved when, about a third of the way up the mountain, much of the sweating, wheezing, occasionally staggering crowd begun to turn around in clumps, heading back down to the flatter, more oxygenated ground below. Knowing your limits is an important part of climbing any mountain, and meeting them and being smart enough to turn around is a rarer thing than it should be. I like to imagine that some of those would-be mountaineers will come back to the park someday, and make it to the top.
Myself, I continued pounding the trail, passing the crowds on the left when possible. This side of Lassen is something that I'd love to try to climb in the snow, someday. During the dry season, the landscape is an exceptionally bare volcanic slope. It is not a slope that you would want to climb without a trail to follow through the scree.
In a nice contrast, though, the higher you climb on this tan mound of broken rock, the more the rest of the park unfolds below you. Sure, it was a hazy day, but the view of the gorgeous and seemingly out-of-place Lake Helen and the line of Eagle Peak, Ski Heil Peak, Mount Diller and Brokeoff Mountain marching southwestward made for a striking backdrop to the climb.
Even so late in the summer, the bone-dry terrain was occasionally broken up by an errant snowfield. Even more occasionally, one of these snowfields would cross the trail, but they had been crossed by so many before me that the danger was slipping on slush compacted by hundreds of feet rather than suddenly postholing through a band of snow a few feet deep.
Once the trail wound around through a slow left turn and then pointed itself north again, I started feeling the altitude a bit, as a very slight aching pulse in the back of my head, but, wrapped up in the excitement of finally — finally — getting to climb Lassen Peak, I took a quick standing water break to deal with it and then kept moving.
I suppose it speaks to my enthusiasm that I topped out on Lassen's summit ridge after just over an hour of hiking. Typically, I can climb about one thousand feet of elevation per hour, so covering two and a half miles and nearly two thousand feet was sort of ridiculous by my standards. But, there I was, with the summit proper just a snowfield away.
The snowfield itself was easy enough to cross, but the summit pinnacle was surprisingly chossy, considering Lassen Peak's intended audience. Indeed, as I took another quick standing break at the base of the spire and later on as I watched from the summit itself, I noticed that the majority of climbers who reached the snowfield simply passed on this final scramble, content with their accomplishment of making it to the base of the summit block. There were a few who tried to ascend, but simply found the rock too loose and the trail (such as it was) too treacherous. I, of course, was going all the way to the top, but it was interesting to see the peak throw one momentary instance of wildness at all the climbers who had used the highway of the official trail to get this far. Again, I say this as an observation and not a judgment, as a guy who will never, ever climb the last eighty feet of Mount Thielsen.
All things considered, Lassen's summit block scramble was comparable to most of the countless rock scrambles I've done in the past. Taken slowly and carefully, it was straightforward and relatively safe, though I had more luck climbing up on the big boulders lining the edges of the use trail rather than walking directly on the river of completely loose pebbles that comprised the established track.
Then I was there, looking out over the length and breadth of my new playground as a light wind whistled between the volcanic spires that comprised the top of Lassen Peak's summit spire. To the north I could see the bowl-shaped no-man's-land that was the result of the mountain's 1915 eruption. To the west was a huge volcanic crater, with a smoke-shrouded Mount Shasta floating in the background. To the south and east the mountain dropped away to reveal the lower-elevation parts of the park, with Bumpass Mountain stretched out in its midst like a sleeping giant.
I spent a few minutes on the summit enjoying the view and taking pictures, and by then there was a line of sorts forming below me. As inexperienced (and, I suppose, experienced) climbers will do, they were scaling the rocks in dangerous ways to avoid having to wait for their chance to summit. So, rather than contribute further to the traffic jam, I took one last, deep breath of the air at 10,463 feet and then started back down. Coming back down the spire was, of course, harder than going up had been, and I had to pick my way through a patch of large, sharp, but ultimately stable rocks to avoid using the trail, which seemed like an invitation to smash a hip, elbow, or head in a fall.
Once I'd safely made it back down to the base of the spire, I spent a fair amount of time on the summit plateau: it was a beautiful day, save for the smoke, and my headache had relented as soon as I'd had some more water and stopped stomping my way uphill. There were at least fifty people on the plateau with me, but it was such a large area that I hardly noticed them.
I descended the mountain in one go. It was certainly easier than going up had been, but I took my time a bit more, hiking with my camera around my neck and scanning the terrain below me for features I recognized from the park's map.
As the trail led me back around the base of the north-south ridge it was designed to bypass, Vulcan's Eye came back into view, and from there it was just a short jaunt back to the parking lot and lunch.
I hadn't necessarily been trying for speed, but I'd managed to go car-to-car in two and a half hours. Not a bad start to the day.
As odd as it felt to treat a ten thousand foot peak as my "warm up," once I'd rested my legs for a half hour or so and gotten some significant calories into my belly, I was indeed ready for another adventure. It was hard not to be with the entire park laid out around me like a Disney World for lunatic mountaineers. The question was: where to next?
I hadn't realized it consciously until after lunch, but I think I'd unconsciously decided during my ascent of Lassen that I wanted to explore the Eagle Peak/Ski Heil Peak area next. Hiking into and over that rugged line of mountains would provide me with a dead-on, off-road view of Lassen Peak and maybe even reveal a great camping spot from which I'd be able to watch the sun set.
After another round of gear shuffling between my various packs — this time moving essential gear from the summit pack into the backpack, as I assumed I wouldn't be back to the car until the next morning — I sat down with the park map and a topo map to figure out the best bushwhacking route to Eagle Peak.
There seemed to be two good approach options:
To pass counterclockwise around the small hill to the west of the trailhead parking lot, and then south and west around the bulk of Eagle Peak to approach it from the south.
To pass clockwise around the small hill and proceed directly west to the southern approach.
I'd seen the valley between Eagle and Lassen Peaks during my descent, and it wasn't particularly hairy-looking terrain, but was covered in a mixture of ice, snow, and talus. I hadn't gotten a glimpse at the route for Option Two yet, but guessed it would be a bit longer, but possibly a bit drier, being more of an undulating rockfield than a deep valley. I decided to take my chances with Option Two.
I hadn't yet felt much tiredness from the morning's ascent, but that changed as soon as I put on my heavy backpacking pack and started heading west and up. As I climbed, I consoled myself with the thought that I only had to carry all of that weight for a little over a mile, and then I'd be able to put it down again. Eagle Peak and nearby Ski Heil Peak were both small enough rises that I'd be able to climb them without a pack at all, if I chose.
It turned out to not be much of a consolation.
The "route," such as it was, rose for about two hundred feet to near the top of the hill, then circled clockwise around until I was facing due north before dropping those two hundred feet again, to the west and down a slope made entirely of large boulders held precariously in place by melting snow. This was very slow going, and hard on the knees, but eventually I bottomed out in an undulating, rock-filled meadow of sorts and stayed there briefly before having to climb another three hundred feet back up on mixed, sometimes icy terrain to find the saddle between Sky Heil and Eagle Peaks.
By the time I finally reached the saddle, it had taken me nearly two hours to cover just over a mile of distance, and I was feeling every foot of my morning ascent of Lassen Peak in my quads. It was getting late in the afternoon, and the wind screaming across the saddle from the north had a noticeable chill to it, so I huddled behind some trees, making a wind screen with my pack, and laid in the grass for a bit, catching my breath.
From there, it was a quick scramble up the north-facing ridgeline of the not-that-imposing Ski Heil Peak. I wasn't sure where I was going to sleep yet, so I climbed the four hundred or so feet to its summit without any gear aside from a trekking pole and a wind jacket. I would regret this later. But I would regret a lot of things later, so whatever.
From the top of Ski Heil, I had a great view in one direction of Lake Helen and Highway 89 circling around it. In the other direction, Lassen Peak dominated the sky, with the smaller, tangled summit of Eagle Peak in front of it.
I noted the nice, flat summit of Ski Heil, the comparably rough-looking slopes and summit of Eagle Peak, and the small dot of my bag full of gear back laying back down at the bottom of the hill, and I groaned inwardly. I'd almost certainly be making another, harder trip up Ski Heil before sundown. But first, Eagle Peak awaited.
I descended back to the saddle, and based on what I'd seen from Ski Heil's summit, didn't even attempt to lug my bag up to the top of Eagle Peak. Initially, I'd hoped that my bushwhack west from the Lassen Peak trailhead might offer up a way to camp on the top of this 9,200 foot perch, but my energy was flagging already, and I couldn't imagine trying to lug all of my gear up what were obviously very loose and chossy slopes. So I kept going, straight across the saddle, past my pack, through the blasting column of wind, and back up the other side, toward the top of Eagle Peak, nothing but my trusty water bottle in my hand.
The terrain was even worse than I'd expected. I fought my way to the top, though, because it was only four hundred feet, and I'd be damned if I was going to not summit the freaking thing after going through all of that horrible bushwhacking to get to the saddle.
At a few points along the way, I was able to find small runs of dirt, or a spine of stable rock that was scrambleable, but, for the most part, I was climbing uphill on badly loose boulders. At the top, though, I was rewarded with a surprisingly wide, flat summit and even better views of looming Lassen.
By this time, the sun was accelerating toward the horizon and the wind was turning downright cold. I took a few pictures, ate a CLIF bar, caught my breath, and then began the careful, laborious descent back to the saddle (yet again). My plan was to grab my gear, schlepp it back up to the top of Ski Heil, and camp shielded from the wind against an outcropping I'd seen my first time up there.
At this point, my legs had reached that zombified state of tiredness where they Just Kept Going No Matter What, so it was easier than it should have been to pound back up the second (and fourth) mountain I'd climbed that day. At the top, I quickly deployed my tent behind a natural windbreak and built a tiny fortress for my stove to rest in while it cooked my dinner. Then I set about congratulating myself on how clever I'd been. Well, after the bushwhacking and double-summit mistakes, at least.
Despite what happened next, I will say that I picked a pretty damn good tent spot.
I ate dinner, then got to sit back and watch a particularly beautiful wildfire-assisted sunset.
As full dark began to set in, I crawled into my tent and wiggled down into my sleeping bag. The wind still blew, but its beating helplessly against the other side of the windbreak was actually relaxing rather than concerning. With a full stomach and content with having climbed three mountains since late morning, I fell asleep quickly.
Only to wake up, heart already racing even though I didn't know yet why, two hours later.
The wind howled.
Of course the wind had changed directions after sunset; it usually does. And now my windbreak was useless. The gale was slamming into the side of my tent as I sat glumly, serving as a bony, anthropomorphized tent pole and berating my own stupidity.
Every few minutes the wind would calm briefly, and I'd try getting back into my sleeping bag. I even managed to fall back to sleep once or twice during these brief respites. But then the Thing would come roaring back, hissing and cracking, and I'd be back at my post, arms and legs splayed out, supporting the thin nylon walls that were keeping the outside out.
What a great idea, camping on the summit of a mountain! "Invincible gladness" my ass!
After well over an hour of fighting the wind, it became clear to me that I had a few choices. One was to just stay awake all night holding up the tent. I ruled that one out immediately, because it sucked. Two was to try to hike back down Ski Heil Peak the way I'd come up in the middle of the night, in the wind, and try to find a more windproof camp spot along the route back to the car. The more I thought about this option, though, the more I was unconvinced of the idea that the saddle or anywhere between where I currently was and the icy, boulder-filled meadow I'd bushwhacked across after summiting Lassen would be less wracked by the wind. Earlier in the day at least, the saddle and the valley below it actually seemed to focus the wind rather than deflecting it. And there was no way I was going to try to climb those boulder fields back up to the car in the dark: it was just too dangerous.
Option Three, then, was to strike off in the opposite direction, along Ski Heil's southwest ridge, a direction I hadn't yet traveled in, in the hopes of finding shelter from the wind. I had no idea what lay that way, other than that the ridge eventually turned into a relatively gentle slope that descended all the way to Highway 89. I didn't know what it would be like trying to downclimb in the dark, but the wind was blowing in from the northeast, and I hoped that just descending a few hundred feet would be enough to get me behind some kind of cover. If not, I could be in for a long night's hike down to the highway and then along it, back to my car.
Still, it would be better than this. Option Three it was, then.
I packed my entire camp up quickly and haphazardly, the wan light of my headlamp inspiring me to focus on efficiency rather than neatness. The tent went into my pack just sort-of folded and with my sleeping bag and pad still inside. I put on most of the clothes that were strewn around the tent floor rather than repacking them. I strapped my tent poles to the outside of my bag. Any remaining accessories were crammed into side pockets in a jumble. And, ten or so minutes after deciding on Option Three, I was shuffling down Ski Heil's southwest ridge, the wind punching me in the face over and over, making my eyes water as I tried to focus on finding something, anything, that I could hide behind for the rest of the night.
At this point, I was all too aware that if this had happened earlier or later in the year, I would have been in seriously dire straits. I was in an uncomfortable and frustrating situation, sure, but even with the massive wind chill, I'd estimate that the temperature was close to forty or forty-five degrees. I was able to leave my tent in the windstorm, take the tent down, and search for a new tent site at my (relative) leisure, without fear of frostbite or other serious temperature-based threats to my health. So, I tried to at least take solace in that fact as I plodded downhill through shifting volcanic sand in near-pitch-darkness, looking through a tear-blurred headlamp beam and stopping to poke my head behind every tree and rock in hopes of finding some relief from the sky-animal.
Eventually, about two hundred vertical feet and probably a half-mile away from my original tent site, I found a tangled grove of trees that were tall enough and thick enough to break the wind for the length of my body. I set the tent back up quickly, threw the rest of my equipment under a tree far enough away that I wouldn't have to worry about myself and my gear getting eaten by the same animal, and then dove back into my sleeping bag. By now, it was 2:30am. My six o'clock alarm seemed much, much closer than it had the first time I'd fallen asleep, just before 10pm.
The last thing that I noticed before I collapsed back into sleep was a sudden, remarkably deep silence as the wind seemed to stop completely. Maybe I'd just chosen a particularly good windbreak, but I like to imagine that, having had its fun with me for the first few hours of the night, the wind around Ski Heil Peak had just stopped for the night once I'd made my escape.
When my alarm woke me up a few hours later, the sun was shining, the birds were singing, and the air was completely still. It was, somehow, time for another day of climbing mountains in Lassen Volcanic National Park.
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