On Sat-Sun, May 8-9, 2010, I went to Mount Shasta with Marie Cardenas, Kristian Eide, Alyssa Umasawasdi, Bryan O'Connor, Kaya Yuki, and Abraham Wang. As you can tell I was the 7th wheel, the lone single in the group. On the way up we stopped at Castle Crags State Park to hike up Castle Dome. Alyssa and Bryan drove separately, but remarkably we arrived at the park at the same time! Here's the "before" picture of the happy couples at the trailhead.
Castle Crags in the distance.
Closer up.
A nice view of the Trinity Alps. These are apparently the Grey Rocks, not so grey this time of year.
Castle Dome itself comes into view. To the right is Shasta, although you can only see the bottom. We couldn't see Shasta on the drive up and joked it had been dismantled and sold to help pay for California's budget crisis.
Castle Dome. Our goal was to get to the summit, although we weren't sure how the 3rd/4th class climbing at the end would go.
The lower part of Shasta. Weather this weekend was rather iffy but we ended up getting pretty lucky and having two days of interesting and enjoyable weather.
Kristian and Marie went ahead, and the the rest of us ran into two guys who had attempted to summit Shasta the day before and had turned back due to weather. We met them about here, and they'd run into apparently the 3rd class section which seemed too uncertain to them, so they turned around and went down.
What they didn't realize was that there was a sharp and rather indistinct switchback here, and they had gone the wrong way. However due to running into them we ended up exploring the same wrong path they had looked at, only to realize later we had gone the wrong way too. I took these two pictures on the way down.
We climbed up a short gully in the picture two previous, and on the other side reached this rather dicey traverse. Here Bryan has made it across and Kaya is contemplating whether she really wants to try. We were wondering where Kristian and Marie were and thinking of just giving up. Of course they had gone the right way....
Kaya decides to head down and Abe follows. It was a little scary but you couldn't really fall far....
It's great we went this way though as I got some of the best pictures of the day, and it was a fun mini-adventure.
Once we finished this traverse we found our way back to the trail and realized we could have covered the same distance that took us over 15 minutes in under 30 seconds. But this was much more fun!
Castle Dome, and the real 3rd class section, were still a ways away. Kristian and Marie stopped before the difficulties and had lunch while waiting for us.
Shasta again, or what we could see of it. We would be snowshoeing up Avalanche Gulch, in the middle of the picture, the next day.
Castle Dome closer.
Finally the third class section, which started as a series of poorly defined ledges, very reminiscent of Lembert Dome in Yosemite. The rock was similar superb granite, very solid and textured, and we had no trouble in normal hiking shoes.
We thought it might be harder because someone had posted on SummitPost pictures of his group doing it with full rock gear and ropes. As we suspected none of that was necessary.
Views were excellent. We didn't take many pictures while climbing though as we needed to concentrate on climbing. Kristian and I scouted out the route and went some wrong ways but that was itself fun.
We did make it to the summit, and here is Kristian posing for a photo.
Enjoying the view.
Myself on the summit.
Only Marie seemed interested in coming up, so I went down to make sure the others were okay, and left my camera with Kristian so he could take pictures of her traditional yoga poses.
Nice angle on this one.
Kaya and Abe ended up climbing up one of our dead ends instead of to the summit, and I guess Kristian took this picture from the summit.
More context.
We all had a good time, and then headed down.
On the way down Alyssa and Marie posed for their "yoga porn" version of Two Girls and a Cup, which became a theme of the trip although this is the only picture I took myself.
I mean I didn't take any more pictures at other locations.
After the hike we did a short walk to a viewpoint area (there was a wedding there while we did our hike) and got a nice view of the crags.
The hike was about 6 miles gaining 2200 feet, so similar in a way to Mission Peak, but of course incomparably better!
We then drove to Mount Shasta City, rented some snowshoes for those who didn't have them, and explored a little of Mount Shasta, hiking up part of the ridge leading to Green Butte that I had gone to in March on my way up to Portland. Sadly I didn't get any pictures of this hike, as I thought I'd forgotten my camera whereas it was in fact in the backpack I lent to Abe. So this picture is of the next morning.
We stayed overnight in Weed, left at 6am, and after picking up food started out at 7:43am. It had snowed overnight and was lightly snowing in the morning. The trees and ground were covered with fresh powder, and it was a wonderful environment to snowshoe in.
It was mostly cloudy but with blue sky at times, and the sun could be faintly made out occasionally.
We found a place to mostly skirt around the ridge and get into the gully leading to Avalanche Gulch.
The upper mountain started to come into view as the weather briefly improved.
Our line of happy snowshoers.
The upper mountain.
We skirted the edge of the trees, hoping to spot the Sierra Club cabin (Horse Camp) in the trees, but didn't see an obvious route to it. We figured we'd try on the way down instead.
Our plan was to hike for 3 hours or until we reached Helen Lake (at 10,400 feet), the former being far more likely. We started at Bunny Flat at 6950 feet.
In a way we were above worse weather below. The weather the whole day was extremely complex and interesting.
Awesome scenery and an incredible day.
The weather was deteriorating higher up and it was clear we weren't going to get close to Helen Lake in 3 hours. So after 2:10 we stopped at 9000 feet and decided that was our high point for the trip. A group photo of the couples.
Bryan took one with me in it.
Me alone.
Kristian and Marie.
We stopped for about a half hour, ate some food and enjoyed the environment. Here we are heading down.
We managed to find Horse Camp on the way down. No wonder it was hard to spot--it was mostly buried in snow! We met the first caretaker for the season who had just arrived and would spend 5 days there. She had to live in a tent outside, though.
I hadn't gone in the hut when I summitted Shasta back in 2007, although I did chat with the caretaker back then. So it was fun to finally see inside the hut.
Outside the hut looking at the upper mountain.
The outhouse near the cabin wasn't quite open for the season yet.
Heading down.
Descending into bad weather. It would actually clear up at the trailhead, though.
Here's a map showing both of our routes. The short right one is Saturday and the longer left one Sunday. Magnify or download to see detail. Saturday's trip was 1.6 miles reaching 7600 feet. Sunday's was 4.6 miles reaching 9000 feet. A fantastic weekend!
