Page 111 - 2024/2025 Travel Guide to CALIFORNIA

SHASTA CASCADE
Explore the great outdoors with a mystical mountain, mud pots and more
TOP CITIES
Redding, Mount Shasta City, Weaverville, Weed, Chico, Oroville
DOMESTIC GATEWAY
Redding Regional Airport (RDD) has flights from
Los Angeles and San Francisco, and is 9 miles (14 km) from the Redding city center
TOURISM WEBSITES
discoversiskiyou.com upstateca.com discoverklamath.com visitredding.com chooseredding.com
BY JOHN FLINN
Poets, artists, adventurers and New Age mystics are drawn inexorably to snow-capped Mount Shasta, which juts 14,179 feet into the Northern California sky. It is such an imposing presence that it creates its own weather—most notably the strange-looking lenticular clouds that form on its summit. Some people see in them a jaunty beret, others a UFO mother ship. Some believe the mountain to be a vortex for spiritual activity, and at least two religions have been founded on its flanks.
Mount Shasta is the focal point of one of California’s least- populated 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 headlong into each other.
Just to the south of Shasta, Mount Lassen, the southern- most of the Cascade peaks, erupted in 1914-1917, 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
POPULATION
274,000
SHASTA CASCADE
2024-25 TRAVEL GUIDE TO CALIFORNIA 109