We began our ascent into the mountains as the clouds lifted and parted, sunshine brilliant in the altitude, reflecting against the rain-slick rocky crags and shining down through the saddle of the mountain ridge to the west. The pregnant clouds scudded low, shrouded the hilltops in lavender and indigo and steel grey, shafts of sunlight gracing the world. The colors changed as we traveled south from the land of shadow; the dark tall draping evergreen firs and cedars dwindled, and sharp hard blue pines and rusty red oaks grew in stumbling stands down between the ridges of the mountains. Orange and yellow reeds and silver sage lined the edges of the high cold lakes. The taller ridges had been capped with snow, a bare dusting and indication of the coming winter storms.

Far, far in the deceptive distance rose Shasta’s white craggy wild top, massive and splendid and forbidding, towering above the windy valley. She traps the clouds, and had one veiled around her northern flank, but the rest of her glowed with light from the setting sun, orange and red and yellow, light reflected from the constant drape of snow and ice she wears all year. The high basin and range falls away from her, and big cinder cones score the rolling golden hills, surfaced igneous rock and chunks of granite from a long-ago volcanic eruption. Shasta slumbers, but she could shift the earth if she wished.