Stop and smell the thermals

October 11, 2009|Mark Arsenault, Globe Correspondent

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Lassen Peak is a 27,000-year-old youngster formed by lava pushing up from the ground. The mountain exploded in 1915, sweeping away trees, hurling boulders, and sending a column of ash 6 miles into the sky. The volcano rumbled for several more years, then fell quiet. Lassen Peak was the most recent big volcanic eruption in the continental United States before Washington’s Mount St. Helens blew its top in 1980.

My favorite feature at the park is a secluded volcano named Cinder Cone in the northeast corner. The one-hour drive from Manzanita Lake goes outside the park’s borders to a gravel road cut six miles through a pine forest. It’s tempting to say Cinder Cone is in the middle of nowhere, but that implies a central location. It’s on the outskirts of nowhere.

After an easy 2-mile hike, the forest falls away to reveal a smooth, rounded gray mound, 700 feet high. Cinder Cone is both its name and its definition: It is a cinder cone-type volcano. The mound looked unnatural to me, like a hive built by science fiction space bugs. I laughed at what seemed like a trick of perspective: Could the trail up really be that steep? The climb was not so funny; it really is that steep.

From the rim, the view includes pine forests and green lakes, acres of lumpy black lava, and a red-splotched desert called the Painted Dunes. Cinder Cone was formed around 1650, a few decades after the Pilgrims established their foothold on the other side of the continent.

The Cinder Cone trail then winds several hundred feet down inside the giant volcanic funnel. At the very bottom someone has piled skull-sized rocks into a shallow rectangular shelter, like a pharaoh’s tomb in the throat of a volcano. It is an unreal place; for some, a luxury destination.

Mark Arsenault can be reached at mark0079@comcast.net.