Lassen Volcanic National Park - Explorers and Thermal Features

Roundabout Route
Visible from 50 miles away, snow-cloaked Mount Lassen was a prominent landmark for explorers and early settlers in northern California. Known by a variety of names over the years, the mountain eventually came to be called Lassen's Peak -- in wry honor of one of the region's favorite pioneers, the resourceful ranger and trail guide Peter Lassen.

A Danish-born blacksmith, Lassen came to California just before the gold rush. After persuading the Mexican government to give him a large tract of land east of the Sacramento River in 1844, he established a ranch. His plan was to build a town; and so, in need of settlers to populate the town, he set himself up as a guide, leading immigrants through the mountains by a winding route that he called Lassen's Trail. A better promoter than pathfinder, Lassen sometimes confused Mount Shasta to the north with Lassen Peak -- a mistake that complicated the already roundabout trek and occasionally led him and his followers thoroughly astray. Many groups became outraged when they realized they were lost. Some almost starved. One group even forced their leader at gunpoint to climb to the top of Lassen Peak so that he could figure out where they were. But Lassen was quite a charming man, and when his charges eventually reached the comfort and safety of his ranch, they forgave him -- usually.

Thump, Bubble, and Boil
If you knew nothing of Lassen Park's stormy past, you could still deduce it from such place names as Bumpass Hell, Devil's Kitchen, Vulcan's Castle, and Boiling Springs Lake. These are part of the park's network of thermal areas -- hissing steam jets, boiling springs, and thumping mud pots. Even in winter, when the park is wearing its 20-foot-deep mantle of snow, these thermal features go full blast, heated by underground pools and rivulets of magma. Hot streams melt the snowpack, and 630-foot-long Boiling Springs Lake remains scalding hot through Lassen's bitterest winters.

Surrounding this lake is a fringe of mud pots -- holes full of churning, bubbling hot mud. Other holes, called fumaroles, emit a wide variety of sounds, from hisses to roars, as jets of steam escape and spread into giant, smelly ground clouds.

The biggest of the thermal areas is the mile-wide valley called Bumpass Hell -- a well-named place with all manner of steamy, sulfurous features. An ominous note is struck by a red-topped sign warning visitors to stay on the trails. And well they might: in 1864 settler Kendall Bumpass took a wrong step on the crust of a boiling mud pot, broke through into scalding mud, and had to have a leg amputated.

Inhospitable though Bumpass Hell may be, a few shallow-rooted grasses and shrubs manage to survive near its streams and pools, and despite temperatures that range from 125ºF to 196ºF, tiny algae flourish in the waters. Most algae are green, but these come in a variety of colors -- red, yellow, brown, and even black -- that form brilliant films, or blooms, on lakes and streams.