Rising 10,000 feet above the landscape, Mt. Shasta lies in solitary, captivating grandeur, visible from over 100 miles away. Seen while one drives north on I-5, the robust massif—the Cascade Range’s most voluminous stratovolcano—stretches toward the sky, its 14,179-foot summit rising to the east of its satellite cone, Shastina. Orb-like clouds—their whisked, cylindrical appearance beautiful and unnatural—brush its summit so often they’ve been reported as UFOs. Just 40 miles south of the Oregon border, Shasta is one of the southernmost Cascades. Known for more than just its physical beauty, it stands out as an impalpable entity—an energy, a sacredness—that has inspired myths of hidden civilizations, religious movements, a designation as Earth’s Root Chakra and even a nonprofit recognized by a President’s Council.
“When I first caught sight of [Mount Shasta] over the braided folds of the Sacramento Valley I was fifty miles away and afoot, alone and weary. Yet all my blood turned to wine, and I have not been weary since,” John Muir wrote of the mountain on the horizon.
Muir, of course, was not the first to feel the mountain’s power. Thousands of years before he set foot in California, the Shasta, Atsugewi, Achuwami, Wintu and Modoc tribes residing near Shasta incorporated the distinct peak into their cosmologies, though documentation is inconsistent. One Wintu legend traces their people’s origins to a sacred spring on the mountain. A Modoc story says, “at last, the water went down…then the animal people came down from the top of Mt. Shasta and made new homes for themselves. They scattered everywhere and became the ancestors of all the animal people.”
But these are not Shasta’s only legends.
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