Joe Allen
The volcanoes are alive … PART ONE: Visiting Mount Shasta and the 5th Dimension – A redneck’s travelogue from the heights of Cascadia to the sordid depths of pop sorcery
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here is silence on the mountaintop. Silence and laughter. We take shelter from the biting wind behind the summit’s jagged volcanic rocks. These formations are fresh – around 8,000 years old. Many Native Americans were still newly arrived immigrants when this eruption cooled. The stench of sulphur rises from a bed of steaming yellow stones just below. This activity hints at the chthonic forces that created Mt Shasta’s massive body in the first place – a succession of violent eruptions that laid waste to her surroundings – and it warns of the destruction she may unleash again. For now, vibrant life climbs up her fertile slopes, step by faltering step. At 14,179ft above sea level, the icy air is thin. It takes two breaths to do the job of one. Snow clings to the steel crampons strapped to our boots. Looking out, we see the north Californian landscape forested with rows of triangular conifers. They’re so green, you can taste the chlorophyll. A few barren squares have been clear cut. Other patches
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were burned off by wildfires. The heat from these reckless outbursts will actually wake up the dormant seeds in pine cones. In the aftermath, acres of cutthroat saplings grow past each other in the shade of their charred ancestors. Rolling south to the Sierras, the gently uplifted land suggests the distant memories of bygone geological disasters. More climbers arrive at the summit. ——————— At the base of the mountain, thousands of feet below the treeline, the tiny town of Mt. Shasta is waking up to another beautiful morning. “Where Heaven and Earth Meet”, as their motto goes. You certainly meet a few weird ones down there. Some astonishingly influential people in town claim there’s a hi-tech subterranean city inside this bulging volcano. It’s called Telos, they say, and it’s reportedly inhabited by survivors from the lost continent of Mu, which sank into the Pacific some 12,000 years ago. The city’s underground urbanites are known as Lemurians. According to the various mediums who uncovered this esoteric histo-
ry through telepathic power, these beings still care about us deeply. They want humanity to evolve and to succeed – on their terms. You can’t see Lemurians with the naked eye, though, because they’ve ascended to the 5th dimension to escape the current degenerate crop of humanoid surface-dwellers. Therefore, to normal people, Mt. Shasta just looks like a big mountain. It’s hard to believe, but multiple knife-eyed locals explained this to me with a straight face – as if I’m the moron for not already knowing about it. The very existence of such philosophies may alarm rational people, especially when openly voiced by enfranchised adults with reproductive potential and full voting rights. But we’ve heard so many astonishingly influential people make so many unbelievable claims in recent years, one suspects that pervasive horseshit is just part of the human condition, even at the loftiest heights. ——————— I’d started my climb at midnight, beginning at a talus flat about 3,500ft below the summit. There was only one other climber mov-
