John Markoff, the Times’ legendary tech writer, appears to be a hiker at heart. He pens a travel piece on the Trinity Alps, which are northwest of Redding on the way up to Mount Shasta.
For most Californians, the notion of mountains conjures up the vast Sierra Nevada. In contrast, the Trinities are relatively pocket-sized. Sixty miles southwest of Mount Shasta and a five-hour drive from the San Francisco Bay area, the region exudes an off-the-beaten-path feel of a place that time is in the process of forgetting.
I have been in the Trinities in every season. The mountains empty out after Labor Day, but they retain their beauty and they remain unspoiled. In years when winter arrives late, I have hiked there well into December. Later there is great cross-country skiing, which lasts until summer.
Lore has it that there are really three Trinities: red, green and white.
Driving up Highway 3 from the mountain hamlet of Weaverville, it is easy to find the red Trinities in slashes that the road chisels into the rock, revealing the rich hues of igneous peridotite soils found on the eastern slopes. Large swaths of the range provide the green, places where you can walk on seemingly endless vanilla-scented trails under a dense canopy of emerald firs and pines.
The crown jewels of this wilderness area, however, are the white Trinities, named for the white granite reminiscent of the Sierras. They lie at the very heart of the mountains, reachable by car only over a 20-mile stretch of the mostly gravel Coffee Creek Road.
Long as we’re on the subject, here’s a Flickr photo album of Trinity Alps shots.
Markoff mentions Sawtooth Peak … here’s a Google terrain map.
More on Sawtooth at SummitPost, which has an excellent overview of the Trinities for those with peak-bagging on the brain.
The Trinity Alps boasts an exceptional number of peaks, both named and unnamed. Thompson Peak, at 9,002 feet, is the highest in the range. Several peaks in the Canyon Creek area fall just short of this elevation. Only one high mountain, Granite Peak, has a trail to the summit. All other peaks in the Trinity Alps require off trail scrambling and climbing. Most can be summited without any technical effort. The following are the named peaks that exceed 8,000 feet:
GORP has a bunch of great hiking ideas if you make it up that way.
Got any Trinities stories? Send ’em along.
“appears to be a hiker”…. 8)
yea I’m still staggering around. Spent two weeks in the Sierras in September. A week in the John Muir Wilderness including a cross country route through Dusy Basin and Palisades basin and a week in Yosemite.
The thing that really irritated me was all the people with “trekking poles.” I don’t get it!
Hi Tom,
I wrote about the same NYT article earlier today.
I spent most of my early backpacking years in the Trinity Alps, and they are my favorite mountains in Northern California. They are a fantastic place for solitude and off-trail exploration. As you said, climbing the peaks nearly always requires some major cross-country climbing.
The one major peak I haven’t climbed that I wish I had is Sawtooth. I once passed near it on the way from Ell Lake to Smith Lake on a day hike with my brothers Eric and Marc, but we didn’t have the time to summit. (We barely had time to get back to Ell Lake before dark; of course, we didn’t leave until the crack of noon.)
I did a lot of stupid things in the Trinity Alps–primarily hiking cross-country alone with no one knowing where I was or when I would return.
I’m smarter now!
Hi John,
Well, your September rambles definitely qualify you as a hiker from my perspective.
I don’t get the poles thing either. But I know people that swear by them; most are a bit older. I think in part they give more stability, but I’ve also heard people say that it saves the legs a bit of work.
I really liked your piece on the Trinity Alps. I sometimes wrestle with the issue of publicizing beautiful and remote places. Part of me wants to save some areas for the locals. My current practice is to write about places that have established trails and leave the cross-country and four-wheel-drive-accessible hikes for the knowing few.