Volcanic Legacy Scenic Byway: Crater Lake to Mount Shasta

Waypoint introductions and full write-ups

1. 1. Crater Lake

   Crater Lake does not look real the first time you see it. The water is a deep, saturated blue, almost unnaturally pure, and it fills a bowl nearly ten kilometres across, with steep walls rising some six hundred metres above the surface. It formed about 7,700 years ago, when the volcano Mount Mazama erupted so violently that it emptied its magma chamber and collapsed in on itself. Rain and snow slowly filled the caldera, and with no rivers flowing in or out, the water stayed exceptionally clear. At nearly six hundred metres, it is the deepest lake in the United States.

   Read the complete Crater Lake write-up.

   Recorded stop-planning note

   May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.

   Planning note

   Crater Lake is where the day begins. Next is Klamath Falls.

2. 2. Klamath Falls

   Klamath Falls sits on the south end of Upper Klamath Lake, a broad shallow sheet of water that is the largest lake by surface area in Oregon, and the whole town faces it. Tucked in a high basin of the Cascades' eastern flank, at over a thousand metres, the city of twenty-odd thousand has a dry, sunny, big-sky character, more like the high desert than the green coastal Oregon of postcards. The Link River tumbles through town, connecting the lake to the Klamath River, which flows west to the Pacific through a wild, deep canyon.

   Read the complete Klamath Falls write-up.

   Recorded stop-planning note

   May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.

   Planning note

   Klamath Falls comes up about 114 km into the recorded legs. Next is Lava Beds.

3. 3. Lava Beds

   Lava Beds is a harsh, strange landscape of black rock, sagebrush and juniper on the high plateau of north-eastern California, formed by eruptions of the Medicine Lake Volcano, the largest volcano by volume in the Cascade Range. The volcano is a broad shield, so gently sloped that it hardly looks like a mountain, and its lava flows have created a field of cinder cones, lava flows and more than seven hundred caves. Many of the caves are lava tubes, long tunnels left behind when the outer part of a flow cooled and hardened and the molten rock drained away, and visitors can explore them with a torch and a helmet.

   Read the complete Lava Beds write-up.

   Recorded stop-planning note

   May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.

   Planning note

   about 187 km into the recorded legs you reach Lava Beds. Next is Mount Shasta.

4. 4. Mount Shasta

   Mount Shasta appears long before you reach it, and it never seems to get smaller. This is a stratovolcano rising 4,322 metres from a plain of lava flows and pine forest, its twin summits dazzling with snow and glacier even in August, and it is visible from over a hundred miles away. The town that takes its name sits at the western foot, at about 1,100 metres, and everything in it, from the streets to the cafes, is built around the view. When the mountain is clear it dominates; when cloud wraps it, which happens often, the whole town feels deflated.

   Read the complete Mount Shasta write-up.

   Recorded stop-planning note

   May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.

   Planning note

   Mount Shasta closes the day.