Lassen Volcanic National Park | How many rules can one park break?

Summary

A short written summary of the episode — not the full transcript. Press play above for the whole thing.

“Close your eyes. Imagine a volcano.” The answer came back fast: pointy, like a triangle, with lava coming out the top. Every kid draws that volcano. So does every adult. Lassen has four kinds inside one park, and most of them look like something else entirely: cinder cones of steep gravel, shield volcanoes so flat they read as a ridge, plug domes where the lava is too stiff to flow anywhere and stacks up over the vent like toothpaste.

We got there in early June with snow still on the ground and the Bumpass Hell trailhead closed. That is the trail most people drive in for. “Oh no, that’s why we came here,” Little said. Erika went to Reddit that night and found a longer way in from the Kings Creek trailhead. When the main trail is closed, you go around the back way.

Cold Boiling Lake is on the way. The surface bubbles like a pot left on a burner, and the water is snowmelt, cold enough to ache. Cy points out that water boils at 212 at sea level and closer to 198 this high up, and that neither number matters here, because the bubbles are carbon dioxide rising through volcanic rock. The same gas as sparkling water. A rule that looks broken and isn’t.

The smell arrives well before the view. Rotten eggs, which is hydrogen sulfide. Bumpass Hell is named for Kendall Bumpass, who came through in 1864 and later brought a newspaper editor back to see it. He walked out front, warning the group that the crust was thin. He broke through it mid-sentence into boiling mud and lost the leg. “Did he die?” Big asked. He didn’t. Everyone since has been told to stay on the boardwalk.

The last rule is the camp rule: boiling water kills things. In the orange pools under that boardwalk, archaea live in acid at temperatures that would sterilize anything else on Earth, and it is the only place they want to be. NASA studies them here, because if anything ever lived on Mars it may have looked like this.

On the way in there is a boulder called Hot Rock, lava that the 1915 avalanche carried five miles, hot enough on landing to set nearby logs on fire. California tortoiseshell butterflies cover it now. They stop partway through their migration, and the black rock still holds the sun, and they sit on it to get warm.