Castle Crags: One Hundred Sixty Million Years in the Making

The spires rising west of the highway are not volcanic rock. They are granite, formed during the Jurassic period, well over a hundred million years ago, when a mass of magma intruded into older rock deep underground. Glaciers during the ice ages stripped away the softer material around them and left the hard granite towering up to sixty-five hundred feet.

The Okwanuchu Shasta people lived in this canyon for thousands of years, and the Siskiyou Trail ran along its base. In eighteen fifty-five, during the Gold Rush, a battle between miners and local native people unfolded among the crags, where a young man who would later become the poet Joaquin Miller was wounded. The California state park here, which began with a state land purchase in nineteen forty-three, protects the crags and the stretch of the upper Sacramento River below them, offering a rare glimpse of what the highway corridor looked like before the railroad arrived.