Medicine Lake Tour - Shasta Trinity National Forest

[4x4mike]

The family and friends (UY user: Slimscherer) decided to visit some other friends up near Mount Shasta and celebrate the 4th of July. We've been up there a tons and every time is something different activity wise. Skiing at Mount Shasta ski park, camping, cycling, fishing, hiking, boating and water skiing, shooting, quad/dirt bike/buggy riding, sit'n and drink'n.

This time around all we really had planned was visiting and catching the fire work show at Lake Siskiyou. As such I hit up Google Earth for some roads and trails to explore. Our campsite was outside of McCloud, CA and is near 100's if not 1000's of miles of dirt roads and trails in every direction. Medicine Lake showed up on the aerial and was surrounded by trees, dirt, lava and craters...sweet. We hadn't been there and figured it would be a good place to spend the day so we took the long way there.

I made a KML file at home with stuff I wanted to see and explore and we went to it. Since everyone likes pictures I figured I'd post some up.

Red star is the general area of the State.
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We followed the red line, clockwise.
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We took 89 East from McCloud and turned North onto 15/49. The road was chip seal, carless and flanked with trees. There were large hills and buttes to the West and lowland/craters to the East. First stop was Paint Pot Crater. It was a Pumice Mine tucked into some hills. The small mountain tops were pumice and lava and the crater flat bottomed and pumice (golf ball sized) and trees. Something different from desert mines is we never saw any old mining equipment. There was also an S-ton of pumice around so I'm assuming these mines were operated differently than a metal mine. One thing is for sure, pumice is loose and light which seems much easier to mine than something that is heavy and has to be blasted or broken out of rock. Something tells me pumice isn't worth all that much.
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My wife and daughter climbing the loose pumice hill side.
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The map showed a trail but pumice doesn't wear like dirt so we had to do a little pine tree bush whacking as the trail was hard to find/see. I'm pretty sure the only traffic out there is a dirt bike or SXS once or twice a year. Similar to sand the pumice takes a little finesse to navigate in (it's also very abrasive to tires). I started to sink in and list once I began climbing so we decided to park in the crater.
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Slimscherer has some new tires with deep inviting grooves perfect for pumice to grind it's way into.
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Next stop was adjacent to Paint Pot as well as Pumice Stone Mountain (which had a blocked trail). Pumice Stone Well appeared to be a seasonal marsh/pond with surrounding vernal pools. My wife is a wildlife biologist so she went to town here.
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[4x4mike]

Just after Pumice Stone Mountain we crossed the road to a Forest Service road which went Eastward. On the map to the South of the road was Little Glass Mountain. On a quad map it's a purplish color and was labeled lava. We've spent a lot of time in Central Oregon so we've seen a lot of this. This one was on our route so I figured, cool. As we got closer I had to stop as all the rocks were shiny.

Hard to tell here. https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-AMFtEdWbnPw/U7rUfZPWapI/AAAAAAAA_Y0/xqpui2BJ1zY/s800/DSC_4718.JPG

A closer look revealed why it was called Little Glass Mountain. Those were massive chunks of obsidian.
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We had found little key chain sized pieces in the Paint Pot but this was something else. After climbing around on this mountain I figured it was safer to get back in the truck to get to our lunch spot as falling or having something fall on you here would prove bloody. These chunks were medium density. I'm no geologist but they were a bit lighter than I thought they'd be. Some were super shiny and beautiful, others chalky and rough. I'm sure this place was like going to the Syderco shop for the Native Americans back in the day.
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The road to and away from LGM was super dusty, thick dirt with a mix of straight aways and twisty turns in the trees. It was also quite rough which called for high speeds...to make things smoother of course. I only felt a little bad dusting out Slim because I was having so much fun. I'd slow every now and again to make sure we were still in radio range as well as straighten myself out on the road. Some of the turns I'd take a bit fast which would leave me staring at barkless trees which I didn't want to use as guardrails as it appeared others had.

Next stop was Little Hoffman Lookout. It's a FS Lookout that was built in the 1920's and was above the tree line on a lava caldera at 7300' elevation. It's available as a rental from the FS and would be a cool place to spend a night or two. We chose this spot to have lunch, enjoy the views and use the wrist rocket to send pieces of lava into the wind.

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The big blob in the foreground is LMG, behind that is Pumice Stone Mountain and behind the ridge is Mount Shasta (14,179' elevation). This photo is looking West from the lookout.
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[4x4mike]

Medicine Lake was 2 miles from the lookout via dirt FS roads. This portion had a lot more dips and turns. It was also my turn to get dusted. We showed up to the lake in grand style with a train of dust.

I didn't get any pictures of the lake but it was a good sized one with quite a bit of development. This was somewhat surprising since this lake is in the middle of nowhere. There were several large campgrounds that were full, full day use areas, a FS fire station and a neighborhood of cabins. We spent most of the remainder of the day here drinking beer, swimming with the kids and fishing. Total was 4 trout for me and 3 for Slim in a really short time.

By the time we left it was getting along in the day and there were still a few things I wanted to see as well as some miles to cover. We traveled South on the 49 road to an area that was labeled on the quads as having caves. The roads we traveled on the West side had mines, this East side had caves. In planning I had seen the caves on the maps and did a little internet reading and figured they were worth checking out.

What really caught my interest is that most were labeled ice caves. The online write ups I read were all over 10 years old and were reports from summer travels. Sure as s**t we found some ice caves in the middle of nowhere in 95* heat. The area around the caves were coarse lava that appeared to flow in old creek beds(?) The channelized lava would then reveal an opening and it would go under ground. The openings were pretty big, like semi truck sized and not 20 feet in the temperature dropped. A little further in there was ice on the walls, ground and frost on the ceiling.

This signs reads like people live down there.

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This picture is lightened up and is kind of misleading. This is the large opening and half way in, in the foreground, you climb down some rocks.
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The cave closes in and we did walk back as far as we could go. The small opening on the bottom is where there appears to be a large ice waterfall into the cave. If you pulled a Ken and slipped in there is no getting out without a lot of assistance and some equipment.
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Lens shadow.
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Ice floor. It was chilly here, even after being in the 90*+ heat all day.
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This is one piece of the 2 person destruction team. They actually did really well this trip. The trip home usually takes about 4 hours. The Holiday weekend and 30+ mile back up due to construction and one lane on I-5 made it an 8 hour trip in the 100+ heat.
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In all the loop was great. For future reference this mileage from town and back was about 100 miles. Other than spending some time in the ice caves at the end of the day the terrain is about the same if you travel clockwise or counter clockwise, with the lookout being the highest point. No services throughout. The fire station might also be seasonal but in the winter a snow machine is the only way to get around this area anyway.

[4x4mike]

I'm sending Slimscherer the link in hopes he might chime in on this post. He's still spammer? status so he needs to get some posts under his belt...it's been almost 4 years after all. He's recently added the bumper and tires to his 4th gen.

[slomatt]

Nice writeup Mike, looks like a great trip.

- Matt

[04 Rocko Taco]

Definitely a cool trip, the ice caves would be trippy, but I bet a nice relief after the heat of the day!

[Kryptoroxx]

Beautiful scenery! There's tons of stuff I would like to see in cali before I leave but I doubt I will get to a quarter of it. I have driven past shasta several times on the way to Seattle and wanted to explore.

Sent from my SAMSUNG-SM-G870A using Tapatalk

[DHC6twinotter]

Nice pictures! Looks like an awesome area!

[4x4mike]

Fixed the pictures Google+ messed up.