He had nearly died on the summit of that mountain the night before. A fierce blizzard had set in after he and mountain guide Jerome Fay reached it. A blinding deluge of snow obscured their route back, making a descent impossible.

They survived by lying on their backs, just below the summit, on a bank of “fumaroles,” fissures of hot gases escaping from the depths of the volcanic mountain.

As Muir later described it, the two men suffered “the pains of a Scandinavian hell, at once frozen and burned.”

But they survived, and by 4:00 the next afternoon had returned to the hotel and tavern operated by Justin Hinckley Sisson at the base of the mountain, near the present-day town of Mount Shasta.

Muir probably didn’t waste much time before collapsing in his bed. It was Sisson’s daughters who welcomed him back the next morning by spreading wildflowers on it.

I call this mountain region my home and enjoy exploring its trails—and its history of fascinating characters like Muir and Sisson, and stories of courage, near-death, and resourcefulness under extreme conditions. It is like reading one long adventure novel with a thin plot.

Justin Sisson himself was a notable figure, a native of Connecticut, a college-educated schoolteacher who reinvented himself when he came out West, becoming a proficient hunter, fisherman, and mountain guide—and successful innkeeper. “He knew more of the secrets of Mount Shasta than any living man,” said the San Francisco Chronicle in his 1893 obituary.

Sisson’s hotel is long gone, but you can follow the route Muir and Fay took up the mountain to the place, still known as Horse Camp, where they dismounted from their horses and continued on foot toward the summit. If you keep going to the top, you can see those fumaroles, but be aware that the weather up there can change drastically from one hour to the next. You don’t want to spend the night on them.

Recently, I did a walk on another historic trail, the one used by the horse-drawn freight wagons that supplied Sisson with the wines, liquors, and other items from San Francisco that kept his tourist mecca stocked and well-lubricated. (As many as 70 guests at a time could be accommodated in his dining hall.)

The route we followed is still known as the Sisson-Callahan Trail. Back in the freight-hauling days, it was a spur of the main wagon route that ran from the Bay Area to Oregon. The 55-mile spur started at a tiny outpost, a hotel and store, run by a rancher named M.B. Callahan.

I hiked the Sisson end of the trail, the last 10 miles, with a friend from Redding, Todd Holbrook, a search-and-rescue guy who has spent the last couple of decades finding lost hunters and hikers in the wilderness. As it turned out, we needed his skills to get us through a few places where the trail disappeared in the tall grasses of lush meadows.

For the most part Sisson’s trail goes through the canyon carved by the North Fork of the Sacramento River. Much of the trail runs high above the streambed, but there are also some stretches where it drops down right alongside the stream. Use your imagination, and you can picture thirsty horses straining at their reins, slurping a welcome drink after the long pull from Callahan.

Trails like this one, and the route up to the summit, offer us a fourth dimension, that of time and past human experience, whether it’s Muir’s near-death on the Mount Shasta summit or the more prosaic tradition of hauling goods along what is now a scenic hiking trail.

Muir’s account of his night on Mount Shasta, published in 1877 by Harper’s New Monthly magazine, is more than a great adventure story. By enriching his tale with the graceful touches of a poet and philosopher, Muir made it an adventure story for all time, embedded forever in the fourth dimension of our mountain region.

Those stories take us to the very beginnings of recreational tourism, still a vital engine for California’s remote regions, including ours. If you were to do more time-traveling and planted yourself in front of Sisson’s Hotel in 1870 to watch the decades pass, you would see the rough narrow road in front of you become a stagecoach route, with passengers dropped off right at the front door. A few decades later they’d be getting off at a nearby railroad station.

Today the original site of the old hotel is sandwiched between a two-lane frontage road known as “South Old Stage” and Interstate 5. Tourists nowadays flock to the half-dozen motels and many Airbnbs on the other side of the freeway, some of them grabbing ice picks and following the path of John Muir and Jerome Fey toward the summit.

On that night atop Mount Shasta, lying on a bed of hissing gases, Muir calmly drew out his magnifying glass and examined the “exquisitely perfect” rays of the snowflakes on his sleeve.

His thoughts soared beyond the pain and suffering of a “Scandinavian hell” and out into celestial regions that distracted and comforted him with their dazzling beauty. Despite the swirling snow above him, he had a good view of the night sky and marveled that “the mysterious star clouds of the Milky Way arched over with marvelous distinctness.”

“Every planet glowed with long lance rays like lilies within reach,” he noted.

The post Where I Go<span class="colon">:</span> Hiking the Mountain That Almost Killed John Muir appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

It’s preposterous to think that William Randolph Hearst needed a second summer retreat to get away from the ultimate California retreat, his castle at San Simeon.

It strains credulity to imagine a party-throwing media tycoon building a super-quiet, Bavarian-style village along a remote river on Mt. Shasta’s southeast slope.

And the longstanding tales—offered by visitors and residents, including Hearst’s longtime companion, Marion Davies—of Wyntoon as even more beautiful, comfortable, and magical than Hearst Castle are simply unbelievable.

If a place like Wyntoon really existed, wouldn’t every Californian know it? Wouldn’t millions of visitors from around the world have toured the Bavarian village? How could such a place remain hidden in the anonymity of the North State wilderness, in an age when even Yosemite requires a reservation? Yet Wyntoon, allegedly, persists as a strictly private retreat, visited only by generations of Hearst family members during the summer months.

To believe Wyntoon is real is to accept that California, full of so many wonders, also has its own Brigadoon—the invisible Scottish village, in the Lerner and Loewe musical, that appeared for only one day every 100 years. And you have to ask yourself: just how many rich and magical places can one state contain?

To be fair, there is enormous documentary evidence of Wyntoon’s existence—books, papers, photographs, public records—in the material about Hearst and his properties. I’ve been obsessively reading everything I can about the man as Zócalo Public Square moves into a historic Hearst property, the Herald Examiner building in downtown L.A.

But the Wyntoon stories in this published record seem more the stuff of myth than anything else.

This mystical village supposedly sits along bends of the McCloud River, on more than 60,000 acres of land where Siskiyou and Shasta Counties meet. The histories claim that the place was used as a fishing and hunting resort in the 19th century, until Hearst’s mother Phoebe, after visiting the land, acquired an interest.

There, the story goes, she built a giant Gothic German castle, where her grandchildren—William Randolph Hearst’s children—loved to visit her.

When she died, she left Wyntoon to her niece, infuriating her relentlessly acquisitive son, who had only received San Simeon, a Mexican ranch, a Butte County orchard, and millions of dollars in other properties and securities. Hearst—who reportedly wanted Wyntoon both as a place to store his European art and, yes, as a summer retreat from his summer retreat—battled his cousin for six years before she surrendered and sold it to him.

Here’s where the tale jumps the shark. After the castle at Wyntoon burned down in the winter of 1929–1930, Hearst planned to build an even larger castle, using materials from a monastery in Spain that he had acquired and dismantled. But money grew tight in the Depression, and his go-to architect, Julia Morgan, sold him on creating a Bavarian village instead, with large guest houses built from local stone and wood along the river and around a grass clearing.

Morgan, who designed more than 700 California buildings and was constantly working on other Hearst properties, including San Simeon, somehow found the time to supervise Wyntoon. She managed every little bit of its design and construction, from the steep roofs to the landscaping. Fittingly, the guest houses—with names like Cinderella House, Fairy House, and Bear House—were decorated with murals of fairy tale scenes.

The apparent myth then takes a Hollywood turn. After Pearl Harbor spurred concerns about coastal bombings, Hearst closed San Simeon and moved to Wyntoon. Historians want us to believe that prominent people, rarely seen that far north in California, visited: among them Clark Gable, Louis B. Mayer, the Lindberghs, and Joe Kennedy and his young son Jack, who recklessly swam in the McCloud’s 44-degree water.

“There was a calmness about it that really appealed to me,” Davies wrote of the retreat in that era, according to David Nasaw’s magnificent biography of Hearst. “Our happiest times, I think, were at Wyntoon.”

We are also supposed to believe that Wyntoon was so calming that it inspired the rough-and-tumble tycoon to write a poem, “The Song of the River.” Even in the 21st century, Hearst newspapers reprint this ode to the North State’s wonders on the anniversary of his death.

The snow melts on the mountain
And the water runs down to the spring,
And the spring in a turbulent fountain,
With a song of youth to sing,
Runs down to the riotous river,
And the river flows to the sea,
And the water again
Goes back in rain
To the hills where it used to be.
And I wonder if life’s deep mystery
Isn’t much like the rain and the snow
Returning through all eternity
To the places it used to know.

Here’s something even more incredible about Wyntoon. Seven decades after Hearst’s death, his family—in an era when old newspaper families have lost their properties and empires—keeps control of the property through the privately held Hearst Corporation. The family has supported local firefighters and free health clinics, and developed a sustainable logging program that protects the land from fire and produces revenue.

Yes, a few important outsiders—legislators, Cal Fire, the forest service, local law enforcement, philanthropists—say they have been allowed in (and insist the place is real), but otherwise, it’s just family sharing in Wyntoon’s wonder. While money can buy anything in America, a family member says the place is not for sale at any price, or ever.

Does any of that seem remotely real to you?

Me neither. When I was visiting the nearby town of McCloud, I tried to get to Wyntoon, and couldn’t. The road is blocked by a gate—four miles away from the supposed location. All the paths through the woods are closed and forbidding. Local kayakers say you can see Wyntoon’s guest houses by going down the rocky river—but by that point, you’re so cold and wet, you might be hallucinating.

I want to believe that the legend is real. Perhaps the fact that Wyntoon seems a fiction is actually a form of protection for a special place that would be overrun if the public ever got access. Perhaps, it should be comfort enough to know that such a heavenly spot might actually exist. But as a journalist, I try to see things for myself before I believe them. And so, I am waiting on the Hearst family for my invitation.

I should be free Labor Day weekend.

The post Searching for William Randolph Hearst’s Mystical Mountain Retreat appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

When you move to a new neighborhood, you scout it out. It’s all a matter of staking out territory, getting comfortable in your new surroundings. If you’re in the city, your early forays on the streets might lead you to that perfect pastry at the corner bakery, the savory brick-oven pizza from a nearby bistro, a well-lit coffee house, or a well-stocked bookstore.

I moved to Dunsmuir, in the mountain country of far Northern California, 26 years ago. After visiting several times and finding it absolutely charming, I came here for a change, to experience small-town living and more outdoors than I had in the city, and to get away from the sprawl and traffic, noise and asphalt.

Over the past couple of decades, the move to mountain country has come to mean much more than all of that. It has been a way to connect with something primal in the landscape dominated by the natural world. I find it all around me—on every forested hillside, on every winding trail.

When I landed here, I got acquainted with my new “neighborhood” by climbing mountains and exploring trails, even making my own walking paths on the mountain sides above my home in the Sacramento River canyon. On my trips of discovery, I found deer carcasses and large round piles of scat on old logging roads, calling cards left by cougars and bears. Not as savory as your city finds, perhaps, but just as characteristic of my own home region.

My walks led me to a special sacred place, the equivalent, perhaps, to a spot in your own neighborhood—maybe a secluded, leafy glade in a nearby park—that you go to when you seek peace. Mine is a place long sacred to native Northern California tribes: The upper slopes of Mount Shasta.

It is difficult to put into words the feelings I have when I climb toward the upper reaches of the mountain. It is the experience of entering a different world. I feel a powerful spiritual presence, something that transcends all the rock and ice and snow, in the same way that a cathedral, in the eyes of a believer, is much more than a pile of bricks and stone and mortar.

Thousands of people come up here every year to climb to the 14,000-foot summit, but that particular goal doesn’t interest me. What I am seeking on its slopes is something less tangible. When I’m up above the 10,000-foot level, heading into the upper regions of snow and ice, I begin to feel the spirit of the mountain, never more powerfully so than when clouds descend from the summit and surround me in mist, in a kind of spiritual embrace made palpable.

In my previous life, I was a flatlander from the temperate climes of Sacramento. Moving to Dunsmuir I quickly gained a close acquaintance with snow and ice. Not only from my forays on the mountain, but on 22-mile bicycle trips to my part-time job as an English instructor at the college in Weed, just north of Dunsmuir.

There is nothing more enchanting than cycling through a landscape of snow-covered fir trees. There is nothing more painful than flying over your handlebars on an icy road. On my first encounter with an ice-covered road, I assumed, incorrectly, that applying the brakes on the downhill slope would help me stay in control. Instead, I got a mouthful of gravel. From then on, I walked the bike down ice-covered roads and have not had a tumble since.

Tim Holt on the Pacific Crest Trail. Courtesy of Tim Holt.

I have learned to love the change in the seasons, the beauty of a snow-blanketed town as well as a forest. And just as I’ve learned to walk my bike down icy slopes, I’ve learned to strap small chains to the bottom of my snow boots so that I can enjoy all this winter beauty from an upright position.

Pedaling along with my wife on our tandem bike, I have had the more pleasant experience of cycling through the nearby Scott Valley, one of the few flat landscapes in our region. It is a sprawling expanse of ranchland, alfalfa fields, postcard-picturesque barns, and charming little towns. One of them even has a gourmet restaurant featuring brick-oven pizzas.

This is the valley where my great-great grandparents homesteaded. They are buried on a hillside above one of those little valley towns. They established a ranch, worked hard on it, died young. My great-great grandfather Alexander Walker was only 33 years old when, one night in the stable, he got kicked in the head by a horse. He died a few days later.

I am only two generations removed from that ranch. My grandmother—my mother’s mother—grew up on it. I now live in the town where the family moved, and where my mother was born. It is nice to have these family connections to the place I live in now, but all that is in the past—all of those relatives moved out long ago, to Sacramento and cities in the Bay Area—and has little to do with why I live here now.

I am on friendly terms with many of the folks in my small hometown, and with many of the natural features of this mountain region. I have a special bond with a pine tree I’ve watched grow over the past 20 years, since it was a small sapling. Around Christmastime I worry that someone might chop it down to adorn their living room. I had an especially anxious few days recently, when timber company employees swept over the hillside where the tree lives. They were cutting down medium-sized trees as part of a wildfire-mitigation project. Fortunately, my friend was spared. I offered up heartfelt prayers of thanks.

It’s easy to see, in retrospect, where all my staking out of territory was headed. Up here I’ve come to truly understand that I’m part of a larger living world. I had to get past the cars and asphalt, all the noise and distractions, to fully realize and appreciate that connection.

Up here in mountain country, I truly feel at home. 

The post Where I Go<span class="colon">:</span> Seeking Peace on the Upper Slopes of Mount Shasta appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.