Volcanic Legacy Scenic Byway: Lava Beds to Lassen Volcanic National Park

Waypoint introductions and full write-ups

1. 1. 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

   Lava Beds is where the day begins. Next is Mount Shasta.

2. 2. 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 comes up about 165 km into the recorded legs. Next is Lassen Volcanic National Park.

3. 3. Lassen Volcanic National Park

   Lassen Peak last erupted between 1914 and 1917, and the signs are still plain to see. The mountain, a huge plug-dome volcano at the southern end of the Cascade Range, rises to 10,457 feet above a landscape of scorched slopes, steaming vents, boiling mud pots and lakes that sit in craters. In May 1915 an explosion sent a column of ash high into the sky and a mudflow swept down the valley, leaving the sparse, ghostly stretch known as the Devastated Area. Today the area is a national park, with forest and meadow creeping back across the lava.

   Read the complete Lassen Volcanic National Park write-up.

   Recorded stop-planning note

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

   Planning note

   The route ends here after 337 km.