Alpenglow lights up Mount Shasta a few days after a massive avalanche.
It’s been a busy time on and around Mount Shasta since the beginning of May. Not only did we get a good dose of late snow but that snow yielded a dramatic avalanche on the side of the mountain. This was pretty late in the year for an avalanche that large. All of this played out beneath one of the most glorious cosmic spectacles we are likely to see in our lifetimes.
The dark spot left of center is the avalanche debris field.
The avalanche occurred a few days after the snow came to an end. It is located on Mount Shasta’s west face, just to the north of the jagged towers of Casaval Ridge. This is the same area that saw mudflows coming off of Casaval Ridge in during the bizarre remnant-hurricane we had in August 2023.
The blue area in the above image marks the area where the snow broke away and slid nearly 700 feet. My father and my son worked together, estimating some basic dimensions of the area and depth and made a SWAG (scientific wild-ass guess) on the volume of snow displaced in this avalanche. Their calculations came to about 7 million tons of snow were moved in the avalanche. That’s a lot of ice moving on the mountain. I can only imagine what the wind caused by the air displacement was like.
Alpenglow on the avalanche.
I love these kinds of events on Mount Shasta. The mountain is so massive in scale, the reality of its presence sometimes recedes into the background of my mind but then an event like this avalanches occurs and, while enormous in its own right, it tends to humanize the scale of Mount Shasta and make the mountain more immanent.
On the other end of the event spectrum is the solar storms that occurred a few days after the snow. The unusually large coronal mass ejections from the sun caused auroras that were visible much, much further south than the normal aurora borealis that appears in the arctic. The event was predicted to be visible a couple days in advance so a number of people were out to take in this glorious event. I headed out to our new property and set up my tripod and camera. The green light on the horizon was visible and the dark sky had a reddish tint to it. Rays and streamers danced across the sky as well.
As awesome as the show was, through the longer exposures on my camera, the sky lit up with red and green and the active nature of the lights was really highlighted. I was able to get some good shots of the aurora with the silhouette of Mount Shasta on the horizon. It was a fantastic, probably once-in-a-lifetime scene.
In the end, where the avalanche brought the mountain’s scale to a human level, the aurora reversed this and overshadowed the mountain on a cosmic level. What a strange but tremendous series of events.
Hike Mt. Shasta 
How neat, Bubba. I wish I would have been there to witness it. I was in Point Reyes and the sky was overcast.
That is a bummer but if you had to miss it, Point Reyes is a great place to miss it from. Did you go there much when you lived down in the area? Those are my old stomping grounds, growing up in Sonoma County. I can’t tell you how many times I went there. During my dad’s marine biologist days, he used to operate out of the UoP marine lab at Dillon Beach. That was just across the sound from Tomales Point. It’s a great place…
Several times, Bubba. Even more so when I lived in Sacramento. It was my favorite wintertime retreat. (Summers were for the Sierras.) Bodega Bay was another favorite. Sonoma County would be a wonderful place to grow up in. And how interesting about your dad. I grew up in the Sierra foothills in the small town of Diamond Springs near Placerville. I could walk out my back door and be in the woods.