Lassen Peak Trailhead

Snow Review:

• With all the snow on the trail and us lacking any snow footwear, the girls and I just horsed around the trailhead without making much headway on the trail.

• The bathrooms were open, though we did not use it.

• There were lots of people with microtraction devices, crampons, and snow shoes for the trail.

• The snow was old, dirty, and sun-cupped, but were still fun to play with for the girls.

What I Learned:

• I was surprised that even though it was 70+ degrees, we weren’t post-holing. I think it’s because the snow has been melting slowly, so it’s been condensing into a solid consistency—even in hot weather.

• I really wished we had a sled, as we’d probably spent the whole day here if we had brought one with us.

What Happened?

 

The Lassen Peak trail is one that “only” requires about 2000 ft of elevation gain and although the girls have never done that kind of gain before, they did hike up 600 ft of elevation the day before without much complaining. So I secretly hoped that we could hike to the top.

But we knew that it was a long shot, given how much snow we had seen at the Ridge Lakes Trail and the fact that Lassen Peak has the highest amount of snowfall in California.

As we were driving up, we found that both Emerald Lake and Lake Helen were frozen over with a whole lot of deep snow surrounding it. We may have played around for a bit before getting to Lassen Peak Trailhead, where there was at least 12 ft of snow surrounding the parking lot.

We lathered on the sunblock and had a great time playing on the snow—playing baseball, building faces, destroying little snow bridges, finding artifacts, etc. After an hour or so, we decided that we were done w/the snow, and headed off to go find a short hike.