Visiting Lassen Peak and the Lake Shasta Caverns in Northern California with Juilliard Graduate Florence Paget and Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

Visiting Lassen Peak and the Lake Shasta Caverns in California with Juilliard Graduate Florence Paget and Savvy Mom Ruth Paget



As part of a unit on volcanoes and tectonic plates, my daughter Florence's Waldorf School-inspired charter school planned a several night camping trip to Lassen Peak (Mount Lassen) and the Lake Shasta Caverns in Northern California near the Oregon and Nevada borders.

I was scheduled to ride up in SUV with one of the mothers who is a veteran of Boy Scout Outing Trips; her son was an Eagle Scout, the highest rank and badge you can attain.

My husband and I had obtained multi-sleeper tents, but I was going alone on the trip.  The tents went in the SUV along with the camping stoves, soup-making supplies for arrival, sleeping bags and mattresses, flashlights, and clandestine blueberry muffins.  (The muffins we were supposed to bring were bran, but kids and I do not really like those.)

The driver's daughter, Florence, and one of their school friends piled into the back seat.   They took out Brain Quest games and began quizzing each other.  I put a case of water between the driver and me.

Our SUV was the first to leave, and I was working as navigator in the pre-GPS days with the maps.  I also knew my way around San Francisco's highways from trips there.  I had a flashlight by me for when it got dark, so I could read the map.  We had walkie-talkies to communicate and the kids were in charge of those.  Driver-mom and I were laughing about the important information being communicated like who still had not packed their SUV, who had left, and who had taken the camp stoves.

Our first destination was the Geology Department at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California.  We tramped up stairs and walked through corridor after corridor to arrive at the office of Dr. Elizabeth Miller.  We waited for everyone to arrive.  When they did, their teacher handed out the geology workbooks and drawings they had made at school.  Dr. Miller inspected all of them and made comments about them.  (Drawing is part of every theme at Waldorf Schools.)

Dr. Miller logistically placed all the children around the lab and had them look microscopes at slides of crystal formations.  I helped focus the microscopes and asked the kids to describe what they saw.  We all watched a film on plate tectonics, looked at a fault line map, and played with the department’s dogs.

Next we tramped through corridors, down stairs, and out to Stanford’s main quadrangle.  We visited Stanford’s Memorial Church.  I wondered if they held graduation ceremonies there.

Florence’s teacher took us to the geology library, so we could examine the crystal specimens there.  For me, the most interesting stone was varisite.  It looked like a geode with green sport drink crystals in the center.  Rhodocrosite with red-orange crystals shooting out from its sides was neat, too.

From Stanford, we drove into San Francisco and north to the Lassen National Park area.  Florence’s teacher and his son had arrived before us.  He knew the way, but our SUV had the tents and the arrival food.  Driver-mom got the arrival soup started.  Florence’s teacher and I got the tents pitched with help from the kids.

The soup was ready as people began arriving.  No one argued about lights out.  I did not sleep in a tent.  I put my sleeping bag and pillow out in the middle of the campsite.  I had no plans for sleeping too much, because I was stargazing. 

The clear mountain air lets you see things that you cannot see in a city like shooting stars.  I saw seven of them that night.  I also saw a flashing galaxy.  I had never seen stars truly twinkle before.  I felt like I could see different layers in the universe or was it just lack of sleep?

I helped the mom who was organizing breakfast with potato peeling and potato chopping for American fries.  The American fries tasted great with fried bacon, scrambled eggs, and coffee in the thin, mountain air.  Lassen Peak is 2,000 feet above sea level.

The first place we visited that day was the Lassen Volcanic National Park Center.  Four Native American groups had summer camps at Lassen Peak for hunting – the Atsugewi, the Yana, the Yahi, and the Maidu. 

The last of the Yahi Indian Tribe named Ishi (1860 - 1916) lived at Lassen and finished his days living at the anthropological museum at what is now the University of California – San Francisco.  The anthropologist Alfred Kroeber (1876 - 1960) studied Ishi.  All of the Native American groups represented at Lassen were basket weaving cultures rather than pottery-making ones.

From the Visitor Center, we set out for Mount Lassen.  I discovered that I could not hike to the top of Mount Lassen, because I had not brought the correct shoes.  Poor planning – oh my!  I fell down just getting on the trail.  I was glad I fell at the bottom of Mount Lassen and not going up.  It is a bald peak with no trees.  You could roll down the entire mountain without stopping.

I volunteered to make lunch and dinner for everyone, since I could not hike.  Driver-mom did the same and laughed about disrupting her schedule.  Our kids plus their friend said they were going with us. 

We went back to the SUV and did our own tour around the park.  We went back to the Visitor Center to more fully examine the exhibits and went to the sulfur springs.  Bubbling boo that smells is how I qualified them.  Driver-mom took the kids on a nature walk like a Boy Scout mom could while I worked on salads, sandwiches, and cleaned fruit for dessert back at camp.

Lunch hour passed with no SUVs arriving.  I had the salads and sandwiches in coolers with ice, so they would be ready whenever everyone else came back.  I had brought some geology books and a book called The Endurance: Shackleton’s Legendary Antarctic Expedition by Caroline Alexander along with me that the girls read.

Driver-mom and I got worried when dinner hour rolled around with no kids in sight.  We made soup again and were happy we had two meals ready when the other SUVs showed up in camp.  The kids had hiked to top of Lassen Peak.  They ate everything and we broke out the wild boar sausage and made that for the kids, too.  (We lived in wine country Monterey County, so wild boar sausage is an item you can get donated for field trips, if you know whom to ask.)

I told driver-mom to go have fun while I cleaned up.  The kids were eating roasted marshmallows and doing skits.  One of the mothers had a Japanese exchange student staying with her who did Japanese clown acts and was teaching the kids how to count and sing in Japanese.  The kids already knew some Japanese, because they had Japanese class at school. 

I slept under the stars again.  I was almost asleep when I heard snorting and grunting and bushes rustling beside me.  A wild boar had come into camp.

I jumped out of my sleeping bag and slapped it on the ground next to me and hit the picnic table, saying, “Scat!”

I succeeded in scaring away the boar and ran to our SUV to go to sleep.  Once I was inside the vehicle, I said to myself, “Where’s the pasodobles music?”  (Pasodobles is the music they play before bullfights in Spain.)

Saturday we set out for the Lake Shasta Caverns in Shasta, California.  The caverns were my favorite part of the trip.  Their website has a virtual tour to get an idea of what the place is like.  The Shasta Caverns are limestone caverns with the mineral calcite making formations, which are 250 million years old.

It was interesting to see where stalactites and stalagmite had grown together.  Some of the caves had what is known as cave coral in them.  Water used to be in these caves.  The water level has changed over the course of millions of years.

For me, the most interesting features of the caves were the helictite formations.  These look like crystal spaghetti formations.  Karst formations were there, too.  These are cracks in the rocks that let water through and form rock formations.

After this visit, we took the kids swimming in nearby pool.  They had mud baths at the pool, too.  I thought the kids would be in Never, Never Land mud bath forever. 

The next day, we broke down camp.  The boys all asked me about the wild boar. 

“It’s maybe better to sleep in a tent or cabin,” I said.

Driver-mom and I stopped and bought the kids in our SUV bear claw sticky buns and orange soda on the way home.  I enjoyed reliving the trip through the girls’ wrap-up conversation and commentary.

By Ruth Paget - Author of Eating Soup with Chopsticks and Marrying France

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