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Shasta's Hidden Lake

by Emilie A. Frank

AND WHILE YOU'RE UP THERE..... By Emilie A. Frank

Hidden inside Shastina crater you'll find Clarence King Lake, lying high and remote and sometimes enveloped in clouds. Shastina, is the lesser peak which rises from the western flank of Mt. Shasta at an elevation of 12,433 feet. American geologist Clarence King climbed Mt. Shasta a few years before John Muir came to this area.

King is credited with discovering the glaciers when he climbed solo in 1855. He was, like Muir, an adventurer and explorer.

At the age of 20, King graduated from the Sheffield Scientific school of Yale and following that, he studied glaciology under Agassiz. Then he undertook a trip across the continent on horseback, unmindful and unafraid of what he called his "Indian brothers" and oddly enough, they let him pass through their territories.

In time he accepted a position as volunteer geologist on the California geological survey and it was at this point in his life that he discovered, to his great delight, the mountains of northern California. One bright September morning in 1870 Clarence King and his group were accompanied up Mt. Shasta by J.H. Sisson, pioneer guide who operated an inn in Strawberry Valley (now part of the city of Mount Shasta).

There were five in the party and they ascended the Shastina peak, camping overnight on the rim the the crater. The next morning, after a light breakfast, they hiked the connecting saddle to Mt. Shasta's peak. King wrote in his journal: "A singularly transparent air revealed every plain and peak until the earth's curve rolled them under remote horizons.

The whole great disk of world beneath wore an aspect of glorious cheerfulness. It seemed incredible that we could see so far toward the Columbia River, almost across the state of Oregon - but there stood the Pit, Jefferson and the Three Sisters in unmistakable plainness."

He wrote that he saw Goose Lake and Klamath Lakes "lying in mid plain, glassing the deep upper violet. Farther and farther from our mountain base in that direction, the greenness of forest and meadow fades into rich mellow brown, with warm cloudings of sienna over bare lava hills, and shades as you reach the eastern limit, in pale ash and lavendar and buff."

So entranced was Clarence King with Mt. Shasta that he stayed on the summit all day, drinking in the wonders of the vast scene which spread before him in all its early autumn glory. At last, when the late afternoon sun began to sink in the west, King and a member of the group climbed together out upon the highest pinnacle which he described as a "trachyte needle rising a few feet above the rest, and so small we could barely balance there together. " They stood a moment and waved the American flag, then the group went down to the hot spring area just below the peak and prepared camp for the night. Making a square fortress out of lava boulders, they then filled the chinks with pebbles and banked it with damp lava sand. The wind howled fiercely all night long and it was cold. After a splendid sunrise, they shouldered their loads, took to the ice-fields and hastened down the mountain to Sisson's inn for a hot meal and comfortable beds.

Clarence King Lake. It's up there, lying like a turquoise jewel in Shastina crater and it's honorably named after this great mountain man, who like John Muir and poet Joaquin Miller and the late Ed Stuhl, loved the mountain and reveled in its beauty.

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