Cool!!
Hit up th eTAC-Shasta yahoo group..
I'm pretty sure they are familiar with that spot.
TonyF
Marek Cichanski <marekc@earthlink.net> wrote:
My dad and I were out hiking yesterday, and after our hike we drove up to the top end of the Everett Memorial Highway on Mount Shasta.
When we got there, I thought to myself 'Whoa! This would be a heck of a place to bring a scope!'
It's a lot like the Bumpass parking lot. It's a little over 7800 feet, it faces south. It's even farther from Redding, Red Bluff, Cottonwood, etc... I suspect that this spot is very very dark. Like Bumpass, it's only open during the summer when the road is melted out. This year, the road was still closed below this point in early July.
Here is an annotated panorama of the site:
http://nebula2.deanza.edu/~marek/images/astro/Everitt%20top%20pan%201.jpg
(If this link doesn't work, you could try it with spaces instead of the '%20' marks.)
I suspect that there would be two main cons:
1) From the parking lot shown here, the southeast is a bit blocked by a ridge. If you wanted a low southeast, you could go down the road a short distance (e.g quarter-mile) to another, similar parking area that's not shown on this photo. It has more of a view to the SE around Grey Butte.
2) You can see that this parking area is on somewhat of a pumice plain. If it's windy, say hello to dust and grit. Like Coe, but volcanic. However, the parking areas mentioned in #1, above, have less fine-grained material around them.
These cons are somewhat applicable to Bumpass, too. Like Bumpass, this area could be subjected to orographic clouds, such as the lenticular clouds that Mount Shasta is famous for.
Mount Shasta blocks out a lot of the north, more so than Lassen Peak at Bumpass. I suspect that the NCP is above the summit, though.
Even with a few cons, the place looked really spectacular to me, and I kept thinking how much I want to set up my 18" there. If Bumpass is all about 'wonder and grandeur', this place is about 'shock and awe'.
A sign at the parking area said 'Day Use Only, no Camping'. I have done absolutely zero legwork on access issues. I have absolutely no idea how the Forest Service rangers would feel about people doing astronomy there. Your guess is as good as mine.
There are two campgrounds down the road. Panther Meadows is a walk-in campground, about as far away as Summit Lake is from the Devastated Area. McBride Springs is a bit farther down the road, but not as far as Summit Lake is from Bumpass. I don't think they take reservations, but I could be wrong about that.
>From Redding to the town of Mt. Shasta is an hour on I-5. Then it's a fairly short drive up the Everett Memorial Highway to here. Maybe 15 or 20 minutes, IIRC.
Something to think about for the future. Spectacular spot.
Marek
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