Trip Report: Spring Hill Trail June 2025
An Outing of Connection and Curiosity
The June 29th hike up Spring Hill Trail in Mt. Shasta was a delightful escape from hot Redding temperatures. Our group of nine hikers was met with clear blue skies, warm sunshine and a parking lot rimmed with sweet peas, California poppies and abundant alfalfa covered with purple flowers–a plant easily identified by Bonnie who grew up raising cattle. This enchanting display was buzzing with pollinators of various types.
Before heading up the hill into the cool shade of the mixed conifer forest featuring California incense-cedar, Douglas-fir, sugar pine, black oak, white fir, ponderosa pine, and canyon live oak, we took the time to introduce ourselves and share something that made us smile that morning. The responses were mixed with gratitude and humor and set a welcoming tone to a first time SEA hiker, Kyle, and an international guest visiting from Jordan named Maria. She was in Redding for a few weeks visiting her sister and found herself in need of some local nature and social activity. While enjoying the forest and mountain scenery, she taught us about the natural environment of her home country, and by the end of the hike she had made fast friends and exchanged contact information with several of the other hikers.
There was no particular educational theme to this hike, other than choosing an ambling pace because our focus was less about the destination and more about getting curious about our surroundings. The trail has a great deal of plant biodiversity, and we stopped to look at the abundant antelope bitterbrush and some rather enormous berries on a green manzanita shrub. We wondered why they seemed exceptionally large. We admired the towering sugar pines with their large cones drooping from the ends of the branches like ornaments. Sugar pines are the tallest and largest pine in the pine genus and their cones can be up to two feet long. Unfortunately, there weren’t many wildflowers to be seen along the main trail which may have been due to the bulldozer activity in May to fight a small fire on the northwest side of the hill.
A particularly nice feature of this trail are its several vista point benches, some offering spectacular views of Mt. Shasta, and others, sweeping views of Strawberry Valley and the Trinity Mountains. The views are a bit obscured at the top of the hill, but we did enjoy crowding around a picnic table fully shaded by a large canyon live oak to enjoy a snack and some lively conversation. The hilltop is abundant with established bitter cherry shrubs as well as many new seedlings that were emerging in the bulldozer tracks from the fire-fighting efforts –a reminder of this plant’s resiliency and its value in habitat restoration.
For the return trip, we took the Rocky Point loop trail that offered a host of different plants since it skirts around the conifers and is more open and shrubby. We noticed abundant Hartweg’s wild ginger, Solomon’s plume, spreading dogbane, snowbrush ceanothus, and MaryAnn and Holly pointed out ripe thimbleberry, which some of the group enjoyed eating. This trail reconnects to the main trail via a section through some wonderful rock formations and outcroppings. We stopped to admire the view from these geological formations (some of us brave enough to peer over the edge) and acknowledged that we were traversing upon a dynamic volcanic landscape that has seen many changes since the emergence of Mt. Shasta some 300,000 years ago. Spring Hill itself is the result of flank eruptions from the volcano and is referred to as either a satellite or parasitic cone.
Throughout the hike, Brigitte was our humorous and intrepid scout, as she is not much for standing still too long. We usually caught up to her at the various vista points, but on the return trip she waited for us in the middle of the trail to tell us about the large snake that crossed her path and pointed to the track it left behind. While not able to fully identify the snake based on Brigitte’s description, we were certain that it wasn’t a rattlesnake having lacked the very crucial feature of a rattle. Some of us were jealous to have missed the sighting, but the early bird gets the worm as they say.
Everyone made it back to the parking lot with ease, a good sign of a successful outing. We said our goodbyes and departed for separate post-hike excursions –some to lunch and others to see Big Springs, otherwise known as the headwaters of the upper Sacramento River, and the source of the name of Spring Hill trail.
