Mt Shasta (14179') via Clear Creek Trail

Pictures: here

As people say - third time’s the charm. This time finally after two previous attempts, I made it to the top and back in one day via the clear-creek trail. For route information please see the previous attempt <here>. We were 8 people - Jugal, Praveen, Surendran, Roxana, Abhijeet, Rohit, Josh and I. For a change we started early on Friday from the bay area. By 6pm we were on our way to Mt. Shasta towards clear creek trailhead. On the way we picked up Samosa’s from India Cash & Carry in Fremont along with Chipotle. We reached the trailhead at 1:30am (8th August 2015). This is pretty early compared to the other times we’ve reached Mt. Shasta before. It also meant we were going to get some hours of sleep before starting the hike in the morning. I hadn’t brought a tent along and so I just bunked up in the car.

The first glimpse of Mt. Shasta came into sight when I came of the dense forest into the mud creek opening area. It was a very hazy day. The forest fires around Yosemite and Shasta forests caused the smoke to act as a veil to the mountain and the scenery around. Walking just a little ahead I came across the bed of flowers. It looked extremely beautiful with Mt. Shasta in the backdrop. Heading further up, we got to clear creek. It took us ~1hr to get here. Jugal got here too after going back and locking the car. We took a brief rest stop and started our ascent up the scree field towards red rock/mushroom rock. The mushroom rook was clearly visible through Roxana’s single eye binocular.

The slow ascent up from clear creek was just about putting one foot in front of another and continuing to gain altitude. It was mostly climbing up scree. The landscape changed drastically to just rocks, scree and dirt. There weren’t any trees around which also meant finding a shade was impossible unless of course you consider ducking under rocks. The temperature itself wasn’t very high but the sun shined brightly overhead. Radiance increased as the mid-day sun replaced the pleasant soothing light from the morning sun.

Having stopped for quite some time here, I started the climb up the boulder fields - directly up towards the top. Above mushroom rock there’s no trail. Its just boulders of varying sizes stacked up loosely on top of each other. Each step had to be carefully placed making sure the rock wasn’t loose causing an ankle injury or cause a rock fall potentially injuring other climbers climbing under you. I was able to maintain a steady pace throughout the climb. Without realizing I climbed past Surendran. Now we were pretty much people climbing up however each one of us felt comfortable. I met two other people who had come from Tacoma to climb Shasta. I and one of them took turns leading up the what seemed to be a never ending field of boulders. The other person stopped to take a breather and I continued ahead climbing steadily.

The three of us now descended quickly. In no time we were at the ice patch again. The sulphur and steam is very evidently seen and felt at the base of the summit plateau. However an opening isn’t visible into the volcanic cone. We hurried to reach the boulder field. And this is when things get interesting. We had winds 35+mph hitting us from below. The clouds filled in reducing visibility to almost zero. I made sure I was close to Jugal and Surendran followed me behind and was in sight. We got to Mushroom rock after some careful down climbing over the boulders. The weather was beginning to get worse and we did not want to stick on up there longer. We quickly started descent. From mushroom rock the scree is pretty nice for quickly moving down. It was pretty much running down the scree. (Aah I remember the poem - “She’ll be running down the mountain when she come, singing ya ya yippy yippy yai).