Page 151 - 2015 Travel Guide to California

TOP CITIES
Redding, Mount Shasta City, Weaverville, Weed,
Chico, Oroville
GATEWAY
Redding Municipal Airport (RDD) has flights from
Los Angeles and San Francisco, and is 9 miles (14 km)
from the Redding city center
TOURISM WEBSITES
visitsiskiyou.org
shastacascade.com
visitredding.com
POPULATION
274,000
MARK BALDWIN/SHUTTERSTOCK
SHASTA CASCADE
Explore the great outdoors with a mystical
mountain, mud pots and more
B Y J O H N F L I N N
SHASTA
CASCADE
Thrusting 14,179 feet into the Northern California sky, Mount
Shasta is such an imposing presence that it creates its own
weather—most notably the eerie-looking lenticular clouds
that form on its summit. Some people see in them a jaunty beret,
others a UFO mother ship. It’s no wonder the snow-capped volcano
has long held a mysterious attraction for poets, artists, adventurers
and New Age mystics.
At least two religions have been founded on the flanks of the
mountain, which some believe to be a vortex for spiritual activity,
and a race of psychically advanced people named the Lemurians is
rumored to live inside.
Mount Shasta is the focal point of one of California’s least-pop-
ulated regions, a land of high-desert tumbleweeds, majestic rivers
and craggy volcanoes. This is where the West Coast’s two major
mountain ranges—the Sierra Nevada and the Cascades—run head-
long into each other.
Just to the south of Shasta, Mount Lassen, the southernmost of
the Cascade peaks, erupted less than a century ago, spewing ash as
far as 200 miles away. Today, pots of boiling mud and steam vents
smelling of rotten eggs attest that this volcano is far from dormant.
To the west rise the Trinity Alps and Marble Mountains, relatively
unvisited gems that are popular venues for fly fishing and horseback
2015 T R AV E L G U I D E TO C A L I F O R N I A 149