Mt Shasta

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Mt Shasta is a special mountain and has been since our college years. Mt first attempt at this mountain was unsuccessful and so for more than 5 years I have been determined to conquer this peak!

Mount Shasta is located at the southern end of the cascades in Siskiyou, California and at 14,179 feet is the second highest peak in the Cascades and the 5th highest in California.

Shasta is a stratovolcano made up of deep glacial erosion. The biggest glacial valley is Avalanche Gulch where the main climbing path rests. The last cone to be formed from flowing lava was Misery Hill just below the summit.

During the last 10,000 years Shasta has erupted an average of every 800 years but in the past 4,500 years the volcano has erupted an average of every 600 years. The last significant eruption on Shasta may have occurred 200 years ago.

Beginning in the 1820s, Mount Shasta was a prominent landmark along what became known as the Siskiyou Trail, which runs at Mount Shasta's base. The Siskiyou Trail was located on the track of an ancient trade and travel route of Native American footpaths between California's Central Valley and the Pacific Northwest.

By the 1860s and 1870s, Shasta was the subject of scientific and literary interest. In 1877, Muir wrote a dramatic popular article about an experience in which he survived an overnight blizzard on Shasta by lying in the hot sulfur springs found near the summit.

The lore of some of the Native Americans in the area held that Shasta is inhabited by the spirit of a chief who descended from heaven to the mountain's summit. Many other faiths have been attracted to Shasta over the years more than any other Cascade volcano, including a Buddhist monastery founded in 1971. Some people believe that races of sentient or spiritual beings generally considered to be Lemurians, superior to humans, live in or on Shasta, or visit the mountain. Mount Shasta is known as one of a small number of global "power centers". It remains a focus of 'New Age' attention.

Personally it was the first mountain where I was able to discover complete silence, no wind, no sound, just pure still silence - definitely a powerful moment of Zen, of just being, nothing else matters but this moment in nature...