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With less than a tenth of the visitors of its more-famous cousins, Lassen Volcanic National Park offers a calm, pocket-sized glimpse of America’s wild geologic side — and a painful lesson in wildfire.
The hike was easy, even at 7,000 feet, and featured beautiful alpine scenery and stunning vistas in the golden light of the late afternoon. But then we entered hell. An almost literal hell, with the smell of sulfur, steaming vents roaring and hissing the miseries of the underworld, and bubbling pots of acidic muck.
We were at the colorfully named Bumpass Hell, which takes its moniker from Kendall Bumpass. One day in 1865, after warning others to be careful where they stepped, the pioneer guide broke through the thin crust in the area and burned his leg so badly it later had to be amputated.
These days, visitors to Bumpass Hell tread on a nice, safe boardwalk amid a pastel palette of pinkish, coppery, and beige earth and sky-blue pools. It’s one of the highlights of Lassen Volcanic National Park.
Tucked away in California’s northeast corner, about three hours from Sacramento, Lassen is far less crowded than its more famous cousins, Yellowstone and Glacier national parks. It features some of the same stunning alpine scenery and geothermal delights. But Lassen offers its own lessons in geology and wildfire.
Geology on Fast Forward
The park itself is named for Lassen Peak, the highest spot in the park at just over 10,450 feet. It’s the southernmost of the Cascade Mountains, the fiery volcanoes both active and dormant that extend into southern British Columbia and include Mount St. Helens, Mount Rainier, and Crater Lake.
The day after our brief sojourn in “hell,” my wife, Nicki, and I endured a stiffer test, hiking about 2.5 miles and 2,000 vertical feet to the top of Lassen Peak.
The trail winds its way up mostly among desolate treeless rocks, but the views in all directions eased the effort. The crater at the top shows the results of the volcano’s last active period, from 1914 to 1921. A large explosion in May 1915 led to the creation of the national park in 1916, making Lassen the 11th-oldest in the system. (Hawaii Volcanoes National Park was established only a week before; Congress was on a volcano kick.) Lassen Peak is still considered an active plug dome volcano, and the U.S. Geological Survey considers it “high threat.”
Lassen Peak wasn’t the highest peak in the park until relatively recently. Mount Tehama once loomed over 11,000 feet, but it began collapsing and eroding about 10,000 years ago. The remnant is dubbed Brokeoff Mountain and is another popular, strenuous hike.
Visitors to Lassen may come to learn about the dramatic changes in the landscape from volcanic activity, but they will also come face-to-face with the results of another natural force: fire. The Dixie Fire burned through the area in the summer of 2021, scorching almost a million acres, an area about the size of Rhode Island.
The park as a whole boasts all four types of volcanoes: plug dome, shield, cinder cone, and combination. In addition, there are “hydrothermal areas” like Bumpass Hell dotting the park. While there isn’t anything as dramatic as Yellowstone’s Grand Prismatic Spring, there is a Boiling Springs Lake (not boiling, but at 125°F, still quite toasty), a sulphur works (visible along the park’s main road), and a “devil’s kitchen.” No geysers, but fumaroles (steam vents) abound.
Wowed by the park’s namesake volcanic features, we hopped in our car for a drive after our trek up Lassen Peak. Lassen is accessed primarily by the 30-mile Lassen Volcanic National Park Highway (Route 89), a winding two-lane road on the park’s east side. From the south, where the main visitor center sits, the road quickly climbs from about 6,600 feet at the entrance station to 8,500 feet near Lassen Peak, and slowly descends back down to about 5,800 feet at the north entrance near Manzanita Lake, which features a small museum.
Along the way, we saw Chaos Crags, a group of lava domes, and some of the youngest mountains you’ll ever see, only about 1,100 years old. Chaos Jumbles, below the Crags, are the remnants of a massive rock slide about 300 years ago that devastated 2.5 square miles and formed scenic Manzanita Lake.
Throughout the drive, the California high country scenery was on amazing display, and the streaming audio tour taught us about Native Americans, early settlers, eruptions, scenery, and wildlife. Lassen Park is a prime example of the adage: The only constant is change.
The Fire Last Time
Visitors to Lassen may come to learn about the dramatic volcanic landscape, but they’ll also come face-to-face with the results of another natural change agent: fire. The Dixie Fire burned through the area in the summer of 2021, scorching almost a million acres, an area about the size of Rhode Island. It was the second-largest fire in California history, after 2020’s August Complex fire.
Lassen Volcanic National Park itself is only a bit more than 106,000 acres, and the fire was 10 times that size. About 70% of the park was burned, but fuel reduction projects that the Park Service had completed in the areas along the park’s main road kept the fire from burning to the west. Many of the park’s most-visited attractions were unscathed.
But not all. The Warner Valley, Juniper Lake, and Butte Lake areas on the park’s east side were burned. A hike to Boiling Springs Lake goes through the fire’s footprint; wildfires don’t burn evenly, and while the map shows a vast burned area, some areas look almost untouched, while others are completely burned, with blackened trees standing like pillars of stone. Even in areas that were burned severely, some areas were showing signs of vibrant regrowth, while others were dominated by a few fire-loving species.
Craig Thomas is the founder of the Fire Restoration Group, a nonprofit that works to improve fire policy and promote science-based and socially responsible use of fire in California. Not long after the Dixie Fire, he says, “I spent some time driving through all that landscape. The most tragic day of my work life, practically.”
“I just saw a lot of fairly uniform-size, dead, burnt trees. Driving for hours and hours, up and down ridges, down into canyons, across streams. The magnitude of the scale of it was just … I’d like to find a more tragic word than heartbreaking and dismal and tragic, but I don’t know what the word is. I just was like, ’When are we gonna learn how to live here?’”
Thomas has been studying the fire-prone landscapes of California for about 50 years, and to him, the Dixie Fire was a predictable consequence of poor decisions. Climate change, logging naturally fire-resilient old growth, and regrowing dense forests for single species to increase lumber production were all key factors. But suppressing and excluding fire from a landscape that evolved with fire, that needs fires, was perhaps the worst mistake (see sidebar).
Coming Back
The uneven destruction of the Dixie Fire is evident throughout the greater Lassen area. The fire destroyed a few small communities and more than 1,300 structures, but most of the towns in the area escaped. Chester, on the shores of nearby Lake Almanor, is the local recreational hub, and despite being essentially surrounded by the fire, remains standing. Other communities are rebuilding, and the forest is recovering, too.
Laurie Baker is the tourism marketing director for UpStateCA, which includes the Lassen area. Baker has seen fires rip through the region and says, “Anytime you go through those fires … the community rebuilds. Now you have newer buildings, and even though it’s devastating, in the long run you have newer communities with different safeguards.”
She says that visitors may be shocked at the extent of the destruction but explains, “If you’re more local and you’re around it more instead of just a one-time drive-through, you get to see nature rebuild, and it’s beautiful.”
“And so in a sense it’s sad, but it just takes a little bit of time, and it starts to come back, and it’s still beautiful, and then it’ll grow even more as you give it another 20 years. But driving through, it’s amazing. You think, ’Wow, look at all this new growth.’”
Craig Thomas is more circumspect about nature’s prospects in the wake of the Dixie Fire. He says that Lassen Volcanic National Park was ecologically healthier than the surrounding forest to begin with, and that the National Park Service generally does a much better job managing its lands than the U.S. Forest Service does.
But he hesitates to generalize. “What’s interesting is, after a fire, you start to see all sorts of things that you didn’t know were there showing up. And ideally, that is good. There could be silent existing native vegetation that starts showing up in those post-fire landscapes, too. There could be an invasive species that we don’t particularly want to see showing up.”
Different tree and shrub species may thrive compared to what was there before as the landscape regrows in a changed climate. The factors that will determine how Lassen and the surrounding forests regenerate are complex. Generally, areas burned at higher intensity will take longer to recover.
Under the current administration, Park Service employees are forbidden to speak with the media, but in a 2024 interview, Lassen Superintendent Roseann Worley spoke to the park’s efforts to build on past success preparing for fires and preventing another catastrophic blaze.
“We realized a while back human suppression of fire is not necessarily the right answer,” she said. “We’re trying to reduce the fuel load, and we realize that fire is a natural part of the ecosystem, so we want to utilize fire to make the the forest more resilient, and we want to have the varied stands, varied sizes, and varied types of timber, and then just to make it healthier and more resilient for the future.”
As for what it’s like to visit Lassen, Worley compared Lassen to its more-famous (and more crowded) cousin: “It is like a little mini Yellowstone, but I think it’s even better. It’s smaller and things are more condensed and you can do a lot in a day. It’s just inspiring when you drive through our park … it’s just beautiful. It’s amazing.”
Getting Out There
Hiking is the major activity at the park, with the strenuous 5-mile roundtrip hike up Lassen Peak a must-do for the spry. The Bumpass Hell trail is a lovely 3-mile roundtrip to one of the park’s signature hydrothermal areas. We also enjoyed the 3-mile roundtrip Boiling Springs Lake hike, which travels through a severely burned area to another fascinating hydrothermal feature. Other easily accessed trails along the main road lead to peaks, meadows, alpine lakes, and waterfalls.
Being at high elevation, Lassen gets huge amounts of snow, so the main road usually closes in mid- to late November until the next summer. Skiing, snowshoeing, and sledding are allowed in the park, weather permitting, and in spring, cycling and hiking are allowed on cleared sections of the road before cars are allowed. Cycling is allowed on the entire road when opened, and traffic is generally light and low speed (35 mph limit). The park website posts alerts about snow, fires, and maintenance closures.
Although the summer and early fall are the best times for a visit, Baker recommends the ranger-led snowshoe tour for winter visitors. “It’s a really good workout,” she says. “It’s so pristine and quiet. And it’s just soul-filling. It’s hard to describe, but it’s an amazing experience to be in a place that tranquil.”
Outside the park, Lake Almanor in Chester is a great place for fishing, boating, and dining. There is also a paved 10-mile bike path along the western shore (the Lake Almanor Recreation Trail) that features great views of the lake while winding through beautiful forest that was mostly spared from the Dixie Fire.
For more serious bikers, about 20 miles further east, the Bizz Johnson National Recreation Trail starts near Westwood and travels more than 25 miles to Susanville along an old rail line. It has amazing scenery and a gravel surface. For mountain bikers, the South Side Trail runs parallel to the Bizz Johnson for the last 7 miles into Susanville and offers sweet singletrack from the Devil’s Corral trailhead. High Elevation Kayak Rentals rents bikes and kayaks; it’s a very small business, but the owner, Bobby, is super friendly and helpful.
Where to Stay and Eat
In the park, the only accommodations are the campgrounds, with the Manzanita Lake campground having the most amenities. Backcountry backpack camping is also an option for the adventurous. Chester, on the shores of Lake Almanor about 40 minutes south, has plenty of hotels and restaurants. We spent a night at the Plumas Pines Resort on the lake and enjoyed a meal and beers at nearby Timber House Brewing (which also has lodging). We also stayed a bit outside of town, 20 minutes closer to the park, at the St. Bernard Lodge, which was charming. The Highlands Ranch Resort is very close to the south entrance and has a terrific restaurant.
Fighting Fire With Fire
For fire expert Craig Thomas, megafires like the Dixie Fire are inevitable because of the way we’ve treated forests, and our planet, for the past century and half.
“Climate warming is a factor. We’re responsible for that,” Thomas says. “But climate warming and drought intolerance is only really additive to the way we’ve historically managed these landscapes.”
First, logging from the late 1800s to the 1990s decimated healthy, mature forests that were naturally fire-resistant. “It’s a very fire-associated landscape,” Thomas says, “and we were targeting the most fire-resilient, carbon-storing, habitat-enhancing trees, strictly for greed. They were the pricey ones, you know. … Those trees often were, you know, three-, four-, five- or more-hundred years old, and became the target.”
After the loggers cut the old growth, they replanted what had been a forest with trees of different species, densities, and ages with nothing but pine trees, which were harvested for timber “like it’s a corn crop,” Thomas says. “Huge numbers [of trees] per acre. There’s no analog in the ecological realm that looks anything like that.”
Last, for decades, federal policy was to extinguish all fires, rather than let them do the job they had been doing for millennia. “It was another completely misguided [idea] … that fire was evil, that we had no place for beneficial fire in California.” Fire suppression and exclusion, he says, led to a dangerous buildup of fuels, and eventually, Thomas says, “you package all of that nuance together, you get the Dixie Fire.”
According to Thomas, the Dixie Fire, and other recent California megafires, have no precedent in the historical or biological record. “The fires over the last 10, 15, 20 years have been significantly outside the scale of anything in the fire ecology, fire regime, fire history, evidentiary world.”
One of Thomas’s main points is that fire is a necessary and natural part of the California landscape. “People were living here for thousands of years, and fire was one of their primary tools for renewal, for burning around their community, like we call defensible space,” Thomas says. “They had to so they could see somebody coming to visit, whether it was friendly or not. And they did it for hunting reasons or gathering and food and fiber. And it was just a very fundamental part of life.”
Using fire for forest management is coming back into favor, as researchers like Thomas come to understand that most of the California landscape evolved with low-to-medium intensity fires that could kill up to 50% of trees, and that stopping that process leads to high-intensity fires that kill every tree for miles.
“We go out, and we’re all hiking and mountain biking and fishing,” he says. “And nobody thinks about the fire regime, which is part of nature as the tree is, and the fish, and the rocks. And fire is everywhere in California.”
