Lassen National Forest: The PCT Corridor and the Volcano That Still Moves

The Pacific Crest Trail enters Lassen National Forest from the north and crosses nearly a hundred miles of it before reaching the border of Lassen Volcanic National Park. That hundred miles passes through terrain that ranges from dense lodgepole pine forest to volcanic ridges to the Hat Creek Valley, a broad agricultural corridor between mountains that the PCT crosses on its way south. Thru-hikers describe the Hat Creek Rim section as the longest stretch without reliable water on the entire trail in California. In a drought year, that section becomes a significant logistical problem. The forest is also recovering from the Dixie Fire of twenty twenty-one, the largest single-ignition wildfire in California history, which burned over nearly one million acres.

The Lassen National Forest was established in nineteen oh five, the same year the Forest Service was created, and it has always existed in a complicated relationship with the volcanic national park it surrounds. The national park holds the dramatic geology; the forest holds the working landscape around it. Lassen Peak, the southernmost active volcano in the Cascade Range, sits inside the park but its volcanic system extends into the forest lands around it. The geothermal activity that produces hot springs, mud pots, and steam vents does not stop at a park boundary.

The Yana people, whose traditional territory this was, were nearly wiped out by a series of massacres in the eighteen sixties. The last known Yana survivor, a man the press called Ishi, walked out of the Lassen foothills in nineteen eleven and lived the remaining five years of his life at the University of California Museum of Anthropology. His story is among the most documented and one of the most misrepresented in California Indigenous history.