Shasta Cascade

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 southernmost 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 and horseback trips. To the north, the Klamath Basin National Wildlife Refuge, which extends into southern Oregon, is part of the Pacific Flyway; in the fall its skies are darkened by more than a million migratory birds.

City & Town

For travelers, Redding was nothing more than a pit stop along Interstate 5 until the opening of the instantly iconic Sundial Bridge across the Sacramento River in 2004. On the lower flanks of its namesake peak, Mount Shasta City sports a main street lined with New Age bookstores and shops selling crystals said to have mystical powers. No less an authority than James Hilton, author of Lost Horizon, once claimed that the pretty alpine hamlet of Weaverville, gateway to the Trinity Alps, was the closest he’s ever come to a real-life Shangri-La.