Climbing Mount Shasta

I have become an outdoor-urban-hybrid. I'm sitting sipping a latte in a coffee shop in Shasta City, and the promise of it kept me going most of the day: up the volcano and back down again and enjoy a latte at the end.

There are a string of volcanoes down the Pacific Coast: Rainier (Washington), Mnt Hood, Mnt St Helens, Mnt Jefferson and many more in Oregan and Mnt Shasta in Northern California. Driving down Highway 97 is a parade of one icy cone after the other. This is Mount Hood, rising above Oregan wheat fields.





Since I couldn't climb Rainier, I decided to climb Shasta in the NE corner of California. It is lower, but at over 4300m its not a hill. I camped out last night on the side of the mountain, in a grove of dwarf pine trees next to a spring of glacial water and got up at 3:30 am to do the climb. The Milky Way was so bright it looked like a cloud, and experiencing dawn break across the glaciers was a special experience. Its been a while since I last did this (Mount Kenya) and I had forgotten that going up a volcano is hell: you make a single step up, huffing with the altitude, and the shale mountainside slides down around you. Coming down is like walking on the moon: you make kangaroo leaps and let the shale slide you down.

It was a tougher climb than I anticipated; especially the last summit stretch onto the plug which involved some real climbing, but without ropes and alone on a rock face where you had to check every handhold and foothold wasn't going to crumble away. In retrospect I shouldn't have done it - it was risky - but I'd climbed up too much shale to give up. And sitting up there made it all worthwhile: a panoramic view in all directions and the opportunity to watch lazy clouds coalescing and dispersing in the dizzying volume of air below.