The first snowfall always comes too soon. In spite of cooling temperatures and reduced photoperiods summer doesn’t really end until that first winter storm forces you to realize it. It was a quick storm, maybe a day and a half. The Sacramento Valley got the first rain it had seen in months. Indeed the forest seemed to give a sigh of relief as it embraced the moisture it had longed for through the heat of summer. As the still-strong sun broke through the storm the scent of pine was powerful and ubiquitous, the pine cones swollen shut by the damp.
Even though the lower forests quickly shed their snow they retained a freshness that comes of having been rinsed of the dusty summer days. A sharp cold added a bite to the wet air and ground. With the higher elevations still shrouded by clouds and snow we went to Drakesbad, a relatively low area in Lassen Volcanic National Park. After planting some seeds in the refreshed earth we had two hours to explore. I headed down the Pacific Crest Trail to see two thermal features I had not yet seen. With a time limit and five miles to cover I pushed hard, using my speed to regulate my heat.
As the snow melted off the forest floor I found the trail surprisingly dusty, as a chain of horses had succeeded in mixing the thin wet layer on top with the deep dryness of the trail beneath. On the needle-covered hillsides the ground was steaming as sunlight turned snow to liquid and then to gas. It was as if the forest wished to remind me that even though it could claim no geothermal assistance it was warm too. It could create clouds along with the hot springs.
In the dark deep freshness of the forest I smelled the geothermal sulfur before I saw it. The human nose can detect Hydrogen Sulfide at very tiny quantities, somewhere around 1:1,000,000,000, a way to keep us from breathing in too much of the potentially toxic gas. A few steps further and I could see a bright light through the trees. It was as if the clearing on the other side were nothing but cloud. Boiling Springs Lake was true to its name. A pea green lake boiling on all sides as heat and gases rise from the magma plume 5 miles below the park. The lake was a massive column of steam in the cold air, glowing white with sunlight.
I snapped only a few pictures as I plowed on to the next destination. The Terminal Geyser is really just a large fumarole, no water shooting out of this one. It is also near the south end of the park where the PCT continues on the 1300 mile journey to Mexico. Both thermal features are within my Wilderness area, subject to special rules and determinations to leave them as wild as possible in spite of other considerations. With this in mind there are no interpretive signs on the features. There are no fences, and only a few signs warning of the danger of the superheated steam.
A few decades ago some private landowner owned a parcel a short distance from the Geyser. They collected a bunch of investors and caused a lot of worry when they bulldozed in a road and started drilling, hoping that they could generate electricity from the geothermal heat in the area. The park was very not excited about the possibility and tried again and again to buy the property (which was completely surrounded by national park land) but the owners had no intention of selling. Developing the energy source would increase the land value and make it even harder to buy the land. Geologists were somewhat split over what would happen to the nearby hot springs and the Terminal Geyser but couldn’t prove an immediate effect. The land was eventually seized when the government condemned the property. They very carefully removed any trace of the digging and the road leaving the forest to maintain control over the geyser.
Again I smelled it before I saw it, a billowing white column of steam rising beyond the forest. I cut the trail to see it from high on the hill, then climbed down to see it from below. It was a rocky ravine, much like many other mountainous gullies. Except the head of this gully was not a spring or a creek but a hissing steam vent of the slumbering volcano. Small splatters of water breaking between the rocks indicated that some water was released by the steam, enough to create a small trickle which washed down the gully. I recognized the stringy white cyanobacteria from other hot springs and noticed a red variety that grew only in the middle of the channel where the temperature was slightly higher and had a faster current. The volume of steam was sufficient that I could not see through it and floated upwards not with the lazy wanderings of steam rising from a cup of cocoa but with the energy of a pressure cooker searing the sky.
On the way back I returned to the Boiling Springs Lake in time for a break in the clouds around the summit just large enough to reveal that Lassen Peak was draped in snow as suspected. The warmer air had reduced the fog rolling off the water enough that the trees reflected in the light green water amid the deep-throated thumping of the boiling mud pots on the edge of the lake.
With a mind racing to take in all these sights and sounds in a two hour, five mile hustle I fell back to an article I had read the day before about the loss of starlight in most of our lives. The greatest loss, exclaimed the astronomer author, was the spine-tingling awe that the curious get when they gaze upon the infinities of space. Awe is what makes astronomers. Without places, without sights, to generate awe in the spectators what would ignite the curiosity of future discoverers in a world where wonder is muted by explanation and questions muffled by predictability?
As I thought about the morning, full of rain-swollen pine cones, mud-thumping hot springs, long-distance backpackers, volcano-fueled fumaroles, temperature-dependent bacteria, snow-covered peaks, bright white steam columns, frantic wilderness preservation, drought thirsty earth, and smoky forest floors my mind summoned up a number of words, but one in particular that captured the slack-jawed tingling down my back.
Awesome.
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