There’s something about the mountain that’s always given me a low-grade case of the creeps. I first felt it about twenty years ago, the first time I saw the mountain. I was traveling alone, more or less. Unsure where I was going to sleep, I found a spot just north of Mount Shasta City to roll out my sleeping bag and watch the mountain turn vermilion, glaciers backlit by the sun setting beyond the Klamaths. It was an uneasiness, a prickling of the skin, as if someone not far away was playing a loud note at just slightly too low a pitch for me to hear.
I have seen the mountain perhaps a dozen times since then, and always I feel that same uneasiness; it starts well before the mountain comes into view, as the road climbs the canyon of the Upper Sacramento River from the south. It is not exactly a foreboding. It does not feel exactly bad. But I have been able to relax fully only once in view of the mountain, and that in Lava Beds forty miles away by crow, a place with entertaining creepiness enough of its own that the horizon’s snowy triangle becomes mere scenery.
I’ve been all around it, seen it from every angle, but I have never set foot on Mount Shasta. I would like to, and I intend to, and then I get there and other directions beckon. The mountain again sings that song I cannot hear and I lose track of it.
It might be something about volcanoes. Fault-block or syncline fold mountains are fascinating enough, with their implicit histories of continents colliding or stretching apart, and yet their existence owes much to random chance, a small crack in an uplifted massif widening by root and branch, stream and glacier. Eventually the chasm widens and Whitney and Tyndall become distinct peaks, but that distinction is a superficial one: their root is the same rock. A stratovolcano is an individual from the start, and it can grow from nothingness to full-fledged mountain in far less than a human lifetime. The story a mountain like Shasta tells is a bit more dramatic. Perhaps not as dramatic as some mountains I’ve actually set foot on: I’ve hiked high in the San Francisco Peaks, which are the remnants of a stratovolcano that may have been taller than Whitney. I sat on a porch east of Flag one afternoon looking at the Peaks, a beer in my hand and my boots on the rail, and connected the implied slope past where the old mountain had been truncated. It looked like several thousand feet of missing mountain, a sobering fantasy. If it went all at once like Mount Saint Helens there would have been ashfall in Tennessee. For that matter, I’ve climbed about as high as one can anymore toward the summit of Mount Mazama, which for the last 7,500 years or so has been missing its top half-mile.
I don’t know what it is. I feel the hair standing on the nape of my neck even thinking about Shasta.
I’ll be seeing it three times this summer, if all goes as planned. Once sometime next month on our way up to Seattle to visit Becky’s sister. Once on the way back, unless we decide to return the long way, for instance through Utah.
And for a few days starting this Friday, if my plans with Matthew come to fruition. We intend to backpack for a couple days on Mount Eddy across the Shasta Valley from the volcano, to kick up some peridotite gravel, to pay respects to Zeke’s Darlingtonia bog, to marvel at what might be the westernmost wild population of Jeffrey pines, to get away from every single one of the internets for a few days.
I suppose we could hike a little on the volcano, if we feel like it. If we think of it.
