ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Sunday, August 25, 1996 TAG: 9608230112
SECTION: TRAVEL PAGE: 6 EDITION: METRO
DATELINE: LASSEN VOLCANIC NATIONAL PARK, CALIF.
SOURCE: CHRISTOPHER REYNOLDS LOS ANGELES TIMES
You have risen early, but not all that early, and hiked a couple of not-too-demanding miles. Now you stand in Devil's Kitchen, an early morning landscape of dewy meadows, jumbled rocks and towering, moss-draped pines. All around you, great clouds of steam hiss from the Earth, and each time the wind shifts or the sun slips behind a cloud, the scene is recomposed and relighted, and the stink of sulfur deepens or fades.
But the eeriest aspect of the scene is this: In a national park, on a relatively popular path, after the closure of most schools for summer vacation, you are utterly alone.
The 10,457-foot Lassen Peak, among the southernmost mountains of the Cascade Range, rises four miles to the northwest. A marmot skitters through the brush, and deer cannot be far away. The nearest hiker is a mile behind you - and she's your wife, temporarily horse-crazy and hurrying off down the trail in hopes of catching the 10 a.m. ride at the nearby Drakesbad Guest Ranch.
This is business as usual in Lassen. Here in the national park that rangers call ``the one and lonely,'' there are forests, snowcapped mountains, some of the most dramatic geothermal activity west of Yellowstone National Park, a much-admired fly-fishing lake, an old-fashioned guest ranch and, on an average summer day, fewer than 4,000 visitors scattered over about 150 square miles. For every visitor who finds his or her way into this park, more than 10 enter Yosemite National Park, a few hours to the south. Aside from August, which Lassen Park spokesman Scott Isaacson calls ``extremely busy,'' Lassen is slow and lonely.
This has a lot to do with weather and location. Buried under deep snows through the winter, the park's main artery and only paved road, the winding 30-mile-long Lassen Peak Highway, is targeted for opening on Memorial Day each year, but unpredictable weather frequently upsets those plans. The road usually closes by mid-October.
To reach the park, most visitors from outside Northern California either drive five hours north from San Francisco or fly in a commuter-size plane to Redding, then drive 50 miles east, as Mary Frances and I did recently.
Our first base of operations was Mineral, a wide spot in the road with a population of 90, a handful of lodges, and a location eight miles outside the park's southwest entrance. We stayed at the passable $55-a-night Lassen Mineral Lodge for two nights (though next time we might try the nearby but off-the-highway Mill Creek Resort), then moved on to idyllic but pricey Drakesbad Guest Ranch for two more nights.
The southwest corner of the park, where we began, includes two of Lassen's most popular hikes. One is the trek into the steaming puddles and strewn rocks of Bumpass Hell. Even if you don't make the hike - and we didn't, because we heard that deep snowdrifts on the path had not yet melted away by late June, when we were there - the trail-head parking lot offers one of the park's most scenic panoramas: a boulder in the foreground, an infinity of pointed pines covering the valley, plumes of steam above the roadside Sulphur Works area and other geothermally active pockets, the stark slopes of Lassen above.
The other popular hike, the Mill Creek Falls trail, begins just inside the park's southeastern boundary, and we set out upon it on our first morning in the park. Starting at the parking lot of the Lassen Chalet (where a concessionaire offers meals, souvenirs and bathrooms), we meandered 2.3 miles across ridges and canyons until we reached an overlook above the falls. After pushing on 50 more yards, we finished our sack lunches and lazed awhile in the sun by the rocks above the falls. And we counted hikers. In our first 90 minutes on the trail, we tallied 13 other human beings.
The landscape is the reason to venture into a national park. In a series of eruptions in 1914 and 1915, Lassen Peak sent up preatomic mushroom clouds that rose seven miles into the stratosphere. While thick vegetation survived all around, flows of lava and mud scoured many areas beneath Lassen Peak to an otherworldly bareness - hence such site names as Chaos Crags and Devastated Area. Until the trouble at Mount St. Helens in Washington state came along in 1980, Lassen's was the most recent volcanic eruption in the continental United States.
In 1916, federal officials designated the area a national park. And volcanic aftermath continues. As recently as 1974, geological surveys warned of the potential for further volcanic side effects: Researchers predicted that enormous rock avalanches were possible above the park's Manzanita Lake area, causing Park Service officials to close a lodge, restaurant and several other facilities there.
From Lassen's southwest corner, the park's main road winds and climbs northward, rising to 8,000 feet, passing Emerald and Helen lakes, circling the base of Lassen Peak, and continuing past the Devastated Area, a stark, growth-free slope created by the lava and mudflows of Lassen's 1915 eruption. At the park's northwestern corner, the road reaches Manzanita Lake, a small and unusually placid bit of water that has become a favorite of fly-fishermen.
The lake holds a natural fishery of brown and rainbow trout; all fishing is catch-and-release and a permit is required. On the afternoon we followed the flat 1.6-mile trail around the lake, perhaps three dozen fishermen stood or crouched silently along the shore and in the shallows.
On our third day, we repositioned, and the park seemed to change shape.
Reloading the car, we drove from Mineral to the town of Chester, then headed by dirt road into the park's central southern area and the only lodging within the park.
Drakesbad Guest Ranch has been in operation for more than 90 years, and stepping onto the property is something like tearing a century from your calendar. There are 19 rooms to rent, some of them upstairs in the main lodge, others free-standing cabins or duplexes on a long meadow. The pool is heated to Jacuzzi temperatures each night by hot spring water, and bathers step from the 45-degree night air into the water's warmth while stars hang above, deer graze a few yards away in the meadow, and steam clouds drift above the water. There are worse ways to pass an evening.
But I think Drakesbad has a transformative power for guests without occasions to celebrate too: It makes a national park feel like a private playground.
Drakesbad is not cheap: about $100 per person per night, meals included, horseback riding excluded. But during the short summer season that it's open, the place is usually full. Many families have been reserving the same week for more than a decade, and newcomers usually have to slip in on nights of lower demand.
Service is genial and alert, and clearly the result of careful training by on-site managers Ed and Billie Fiebiger (he's originally from Germany; she's from Switzerland), who spent 14 years running another Northern California lodge before they arrived at Drakesbad in 1990.
Meals aren't fussy and there's usually just one meat entree offered per night, but the food is a definite cut above campfire grub. One typical night, there was black bean soup and almond-crusted pork loin with roasted potatoes and tiramisu for dessert. At every meal, there's a vegetarian alternative. Every night after dinner (if there's no rain), there's marshmallow-roasting over a campfire outside the lodge.
It was on our last night around the fire, after a day of hiking and riding and floating around in the geothermally heated pool, that a veteran Drakesbad guest, a man who'd been coming from the Sacramento area with his family for half a dozen years, offered me a sort of initiation.
``Now,'' he said, ``you only need to remember the golden rule: You can't tell anybody else about this place. Just say you went to a great place and forgot where it was. Or just say it's about 80 miles north of Mono Lake and leave it at that.''
I nodded and laughed. But behind my back, I had my fingers crossed.
LENGTH: Long : 143 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: CHRISTOPHER REYNOLDS/Los Angeles Times. 1. In June, snowby CNBstill covers the mountains at Lassen. 2. Lassen Peak looms over an
angler on Manzanita Lake in California's Lassen Volcanic Park. The
lake, a natural fishery for brown and rainbow trout, is a favorite
of fly anglers. 3. Terminal Geyser (above) is among the geothermal
activity in Lassen Park. If you want to lodge in the park, rooms at
the 90-year-old Drakesbad Guest Ranch (right) don't come cheap, but
they're popular with guests, many of whom return every year. color.
Graphic: Map by staff. color.