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.


We followed the red line, clockwise.




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.




My wife and daughter climbing the loose pumice hill side.


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.


Slimscherer has some new tires with deep inviting grooves perfect for pumice to grind it's way into.


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.