Mount Shasta — California

A vast, solitary snow-capped volcano rising fourteen thousand feet over the forests of Northern California, with no near neighbors to share the horizon. It dominates everything — the towns, the roads, the mood of the whole region. People come here for mountaineering and, in equal number, for reasons harder to name.

You see it long before you reach it. Driving north on Interstate 5, somewhere past Redding, a white shape resolves out of the haze ahead and simply grows, hour after hour, until it fills the windshield and refuses to leave. Shasta has no range around it, no supporting cast — it stands alone on the plain like a mountain that wandered off from the others and decided to stay. Lia, who is not given to grand statements, watched it for a long silent while and finally said, “It looks like it’s thinking about something.” I knew what she meant. There is a presence to the thing that the geology books don’t quite cover.

The Town at Its Foot

Mount Shasta City is a small place that has arranged its entire self around one view. Every side street ends in the mountain. The main drag is a mix of climbing outfitters, cafés, and shops selling crystals and incense — because Shasta is, for reasons going back over a century, a magnet for the spiritually inclined, who consider it a place of unusual energy. We are not believers, exactly, but we drank our coffee outside a shop that sold both carabiners and singing bowls and found the combination oddly harmonious. Everyone here, climber or mystic, is fundamentally in the same relationship with the same mountain: looking up.

The main street of Mount Shasta City with shopfronts and the great white peak filling the view at the end of the road

The Headwaters and the Springs

At the north edge of town there is a small park where the Sacramento River begins — not as a river at all, but as water simply appearing out of the mountainside, ice-cold, filtered down through the volcano’s flanks for who knows how many decades. People come with jugs. We came with nothing but our hands, and drank straight from the spring, and I will admit it was the best water I have ever tasted — clean in a way that made me suspicious of every other glass I’d had. Lia filled our bottles anyway. The little pool trembles where the water wells up, and the whole grove smells of wet stone and pine. It felt like drinking directly from the mountain’s private supply.

Clear spring water welling up among mossy rocks at the Sacramento River headwaters below Mount Shasta

Up the Everitt Memorial Highway

The road climbs the mountain as far as roads are allowed to, up the Everitt Memorial Highway to Bunny Flat at around seven thousand feet, where the climbers set out for the summit and the rest of us set out for a short walk and a very long look. We got out into thin, brilliant air, the volcano now looming so close it had lost its clean postcard shape and become a real thing of rock and ice and avalanche chutes. A pair of hikers came down heavy with rope and crampons, sunburnt and elated. We walked a gentle mile through the last of the whitebark pines and sat on a warm rock while the shadow of a cloud slid up the enormous white flank above us, taking its time.

Hikers on a trail at Bunny Flat with the rocky ice-streaked upper slopes of Mount Shasta rising steeply above

Getting There

Mount Shasta City sits directly off Interstate 5 in far Northern California, about an hour north of Redding and roughly four hours from either San Francisco or Portland. The Everitt Memorial Highway climbs from town to the Bunny Flat trailhead in about twenty minutes. Summer opens the high trails; late spring leaves deep snow on the upper mountain and full flow at the springs. Serious summit attempts need permits, gear, and experience — but the views, the town, and the headwaters ask nothing of you but time.