Trinity Alps & Vicinity: Including Whiskeytown, Russian Wilderness, and Castle Crags Areas
What the Alps don’t have, unlike other popular mountain ranges in the state, is hordes of people. Positioned in remote northwestern California, hundreds of miles away from any large population centers, the Alps tend to attract crowds only in a few areas. Part of the purpose of this guide is to inform the reader about some of the lesser-used places that, in many cases, can handle more visitors than some of the more popular areas.
View over Trinity River Canyon
Photo: Luther Linkhart
The Whiskeytown Unit is one of three parcels of land surrounding artificial reservoirs built as part of the Central Valley Project in the 1960s comprising Whiskeytown-Shasta-Trinity National Recreation Area. Whiskeytown Lake is a 3,250-acre reservoir that doesn’t suffer the effects of drawdown like Shasta and Trinity Lakes, which makes Whiskeytown a popular summertime destination for boaters and water-skiers. Encompassing nearly 42,500 acres, the land around the reservoir boasts 24 trails that are well suited for day hiking and mountain biking. With elevations ranging from 1,200 feet at the lake’s surface to 6,029 feet at the summit of Shasta Bally, Whiskeytown can be quite hot during the typically sunny afternoons in summertime. Therefore, spring and fall tend to be the most pleasant seasons for trail users. Four of Whiskeytown’s trails are included in this guide—three to picturesque waterfalls and one to the view-packed summit of Kanaka Peak.
The Russian Wilderness, also set aside by Congress in 1984, is much smaller than the Trinity Alps, at a mere 12,000 acres. However, within that more diminutive acreage is a biological diversity that makes the area unique. The concentration of 17 distinct conifer species in the Duck Lake Botanical Area distinguishes the Russian Wilderness as one of most biologically diverse areas in the world. In fact, some smaller plants here grow nowhere else in the world. The area straddles a divide between the Scott and Salmon Rivers, and elevations range from a little more than 5,000 feet to 8,196 feet at the summit of Russian Peak. This compact wilderness also boasts 22 lakes and numerous trails, including a section of the famed Pacific Crest Trail.
The 4,000-acre Castle Crags State Park and adjoining 10,500-acre Castle Crags Wilderness combine to form the final backcountry area covered in this guide. Situated along a stretch of the upper Sacramento River and just off I-5, the park is open year-round to campers, picnickers, sightseers, and outdoors enthusiasts. Ranging in elevation from around 2,000–3,000 feet, the lands within the park are towered over by the Castle Crags, a series of dramatic, granite spires, some of which exceed 6,000 feet in elevation. With 22 miles of trail, Castle Crags State Park offers plenty of opportunities for hikers. Castle Crags Wilderness, also set aside in 1984, contains the namesake crags and surrounding higher-elevation backcountry. Nearly 28 miles of trails, including a 19-mile section of the Pacific Crest Trail, offer opportunities to visit a wide variety of terrain, including high-elevation lakes, flower-covered meadows, and the crags themselves. While defined tread leads to the base of the crags, a more intimate visit requires basic off-trail skills.
The Klamath Mountains yield their inner secrets and pleasures only to hikers, backpackers, and equestrians willing to head out on 500-plus miles of trail. Automobile-bound visitors to resorts near the lakes and rivers see only a fraction more of the mountains than they would see from their car windows on I-5. The general purpose of this book is to inform and inspire those willing to forgo the comforts of their vehicles to get out onto the trails.
Natural History and Environment
GEOLOGY
If you crumple a piece of paper into a ball, and then spread the paper out partway so it’s still crumpled and creased in all directions, you would have an approximate model of the topography of the Klamath Mountains. Although the Trinity Alps do form a generally east–west divide, and the Russians form a north–south divide that separates the Scott and Salmon Rivers, the area’s contorted ridges, canyon, and peaks seem to run helter-skelter in all directions.
The metamorphic rocks in the Trinity Alps area are some of the oldest in California.
These mountains are only vaguely related, geologically, to the Coast Range to the west, and not related at all to the volcanic Cascades beginning with Lassen Peak and Mount Shasta to the east. They are, in fact, the southern part of the Klamath Mountains, which include the Marbles and Siskiyous farther north. The Klamath Mountains harbor some of the oldest rocks in California. These rocks originated as offshore sediments, largely volcanic in origin, which were repeatedly uplifted, folded, and combined with the granite bedrock below the seafloor, creating an amalgam of varied rock types formed at different times, by different means, and in different locations. In the process, tremendous pressures metamorphosed the deposits into uptilted and distorted strata of slate, quartzite, schist, gneiss, chert, and soapstone. Isolated pockets of unmetamorphosed sandstones, limestones, mudstones, and conglomerates can be attributed to later sedimentation and fallout from eruptions in a nearby volcanic chain. Geologists refer to this widely varied, complex, and mixed-up geology as the Klamath Knot.
There is no evidence of volcanic lava flows or eruptions with the Klamath Mountains. Granitic magmas did well up at various times, which accounts for the composition of most of the higher peaks in the area. Other igneous rocks, known as mafic and ultramafic, also squeezed up into faults and cracks in the earth’s crust; the high iron content of much of this rock accounts for the weathered red- and rust-colored rock of many of the other high peaks in the region.
Further upheavals, lateral movements, and constant erosion over geologic time gave many of the lower ridges and canyons much of the same shape as they display today, but the higher peaks and ridges received their final contours during periods of glaciation. Although these glaciers ran down the canyons just a few miles, the massive sheets of ice removed cubic miles of rock from the higher areas, depositing the ground-up rock in the lower areas. Once the glaciers receded, they left behind many small cirque-bound lakes at the heads of U-shaped valleys, with fantastically carved divides between them. Moraines dammed some of the larger valleys, which formed large lakes and marshes that eventually became some of the present-day meadows; Morris Meadows in the Trinity Alps is an outstanding example. Erosion distributed glacial till farther down the canyons, putting the finishing touches on the landscape that is visible today. Elevations in this part of the Klamath Mountains range from 900 feet along the lower Trinity River to 9,002 feet on top of Thompson Peak.
Many define three regions of the Trinity Alps by color as seen from the high summits of the central Alps. To the west is the extensive tract of land known as the Green Trinities, named not for a rock type but for the extensive swath of forest, perhaps the largest intact section of diversified forest in the greater Klamath Mountains. The Red Trinities includes lands of high ridgelines to the southeast that are defined by the characteristic igneous bedrock composed primarily of peridotite and interspersed with granite, which creates red-, brown-, and gray-colored summits. To the northeast, beyond the gash of Coffee Creek, are the granitic mountains of the White Trinities. The high, central Trinity Alps are also part of this group.
CLIMATE
Although the Klamath Mountains are much wetter than the Sacramento Valley and many other regions of Northern California, they are not nearly as wet as locations along the Northern California coast. Precipitation varies greatly in this relatively small area, from as much as 80 inches a year on some of the higher, west-facing slopes to less than 20 inches in some of the lower east-side canyons. Much of the precipitation occurs as either rain or snow during the winter months. However, thunderstorms are not uncommon during the summer.
Temperatures vary more greatly than along the coast or in the Sacramento Valley. Winter temperatures can be quite cold. Even Weaverville, at 2,000 feet, receives some snow almost every winter. The snowpack at the higher elevations can build up to 10–20 feet, making it an important storage facility of water for the Central Valley Project. High-country trails are usually free of snow by late June, but snow may linger all summer on north-facing slopes following winters of heavy snowfall.
Summer daytime temperatures can be quite hot, exceeding 90°F even