NEWBERRY PENSTEMON (dark red)
You can hike through Bumpass Hell and continue via Cold Boiling Lake to Kings Creek Campground. It is an easy walk of 4 miles, most of which is downhill.
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18 LAKE HELEN is a deep, blue, glacial lake at 8,164 feet elevation. It is frozen over for 7 or 8 months a year, and is very cold even in summer being 39 degrees at depth. Lake Helen is exceptional among Lassen’s lakes in that fish plantings here have been unsuccessful ... perhaps because of a lack of native food.
This body of water was named by Major Pierson B. Reading for Mrs. Helen Tanner Brodt who ascended Lassen Peak with him in 1864, the first woman known to have made the climb.
Lassen Peak is across the lake to the northwest. The cliffs represent portions of the original plug of stiff, pasty dacite lava which was forced up rapidly as a unit through the crust of the earth. Along the right shoulder of Lassen the trail zig-zags up the mountain.
On the side of the road away from the lake is a large andesite lava outcrop of vertical plates, or slabs. Known as jointing, this has been caused by strains set up in the cooling lava mass after it hardened. This helps to wear away mountains because water seeps into these cracks and wedges them apart when it freezes and expands.
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19 LAKE HELEN PICNIC AREA. In 1933 a bronze plaque was placed here by Ethel Brodt Wilson and her children through the sponsorship of the Shasta Historical Society. It reads: “Lake Helen, elevation 8,164 feet. Named for Helen Tanner Brodt by Major Pierson B. Reading in honor of her being the first white woman to see the lake and to make the ascent of Lassen Peak August 28, 1864....”