Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
Lassen National Forest
The vast Lassen National Forest (
www.fs.fed.us/r5/lassen
)
surrounding Lassen Peak and
Lassen Volcanic National Park, is so big that it's hard to comprehend: it covers 1.2 million
acres (1875 sq miles) of wilderness in an area called the Crossroads, where the granite Si-
erra, volcanic Cascades, Modoc Plateau and Central Valley meet. It's largely unspoiled
land, though if you wander too far off the byways surrounding the park, you'll certainly
see evidence of logging and mining operations that still happen within its borders.
The forest has some serious hikes, with 460 miles of
trails
, ranging from the brutally
challenging (120 miles of the Pacific Crest Trail) to ambitious day hikes (the 12-mile
Spencer Meadows National Recreation Trail), to just-want-to-stretch-the-legs-a-little trails
(the 3.5-mile Heart Lake National Recreation Trail). Near the intersection of Hwys 44 and
89, visitors to the area will find one of the most spectacular features of the forest, the
pitch-black 600yd
Subway Cave
lava tube. Other points of interest include the 1.5-mile
volcanic
Spattercone Crest Trail
,
Willow Lake
and
Crater Lake
, 7684ft
Antelope
Peak
, and the 900ft-high, 14-mile-long
Hat Creek Rim
escarpment.
For those seeking to get far off the beaten trail, the forest has three wilderness areas.
Two high-elevation wilderness areas are the
Caribou Wilderness
and the
Thousand
Lakes Wilderness
, best visited from mid-June to mid-October. The
Ishi Wilderness
, at a
much lower elevation in the Central Valley foothills east of Red Bluff, is more comfortable
in spring and fall, as summer temperatures often climb to over 100°F (37°C). It harbors
California's largest migratory deer herd, which can be upwards of 20,000 head.
The Lassen National Forest supervisor's office is in Susanville. Other ranger offices in-
clude
Eagle Lake Ranger District
(
530-257-4188; 477-050 Eagle Lake Rd, Susanville)
,
Hat
Creek Ranger District
(
530-336-5521; 43225 E Hwy 299, Fall River Mills)
and
Almanor
Ranger District
(
530-258-2141; 900 E Hwy 36, Chester)
, about a mile west of Chester.
Lake Almanor Area
Calm, turquoise Lake Almanor lies south of Lassen Volcanic National Park via Hwys 89
and 36. This man-made lake is a crystalline example of California's sometimes awkward
conservation and land-management policy: the lake was created by the now-defunct Great
