Black Butte seen from I-5 near Shasta City

Black Butte (formerly Wintoon Butte, Cone Mountain, Sugar Loaf and Muir's Peak) is a cluster of overlapping

dacite Dacite () is a volcanic rock formed by rapid solidification of lava that is high in silica and low in alkali metal oxides. It has a fine-grained (aphanitic) to porphyritic texture and is intermediate in composition between andesite and rhyolite. ...

lava dome In volcanology, a lava dome is a circular mound-shaped protrusion resulting from the slow extrusion of viscous lava from a volcano. Dome-building eruptions are common, particularly in convergent plate boundary settings. Around 6% of eruptions on ...

s in a

butte __NOTOC__ In geomorphology, a butte () is an isolated hill with steep, often vertical sides and a small, relatively flat top; buttes are smaller landforms than mesas, plateaus, and tablelands. The word ''butte'' comes from a French word mea ...

, a

satellite cone A parasitic cone (also adventive cone or satellite cone) is the cone-shaped accumulation of volcanic material not part of the central vent of a volcano. It forms from eruptions from fractures on the flank of the volcano. These fractures occur ...

Mount Shasta Mount Shasta ( Shasta: ''Waka-nunee-Tuki-wuki''; Karuk: ''Úytaahkoo'') is a potentially active volcano at the southern end of the Cascade Range in Siskiyou County, California. At an elevation of , it is the second-highest peak in the Cascades ...

. It is located directly adjacent to the northbound lanes of

Interstate 5 Interstate 5 (I-5) is the main north–south Interstate Highway on the West Coast of the United States, running largely parallel to the Pacific coast of the contiguous U.S. from Mexico to Canada. It travels through the states of Califor ...

at milepost 742 between the cities of

and

Weed, California Weed is a city in Siskiyou County, California, United States. As of the 2020 Census, the city had a total population of 2,862, down from 2,967 in 2010. There are several unincorporated communities adjacent to, or just outside, Weed proper, inclu ...

. The I-5 freeway crosses a pass, Black Butte Summit, at the western base of the lava domes. The lava domes were extruded at the foot of the cone of

Shastina Shastina is a satellite cone of Mount Shasta. It is the highest of four overlapping volcanic cones which together form the most voluminous stratovolcano in the Cascade Range. At , Shastina is taller than Mount Adams and would rank as the thir ...

following the period of its major eruptions about 9,000–10,000 years ago. A

United States Forest Service The United States Forest Service (USFS) is an agency of the U.S. Department of Agriculture that administers the nation's 154 national forests and 20 national grasslands. The Forest Service manages of land. Major divisions of the agency inc ...

fire lookout tower A fire lookout tower, fire tower or lookout tower, provides housing and protection for a person known as a "fire lookout" whose duty it is to search for wildfires in the wilderness. It is a small building, usually on the summit of a mountain or ...

was built on the summit in the early 1930s, but destroyed during the

Columbus Day Storm of 1962 The Columbus Day Storm of 1962 (also known as the Big Blow, and originally, and in Canada as Typhoon Freda) was a Pacific Northwest windstorm that struck the West Coast of Canada and the Pacific Northwest coast of the United States on October 12, ...

. A new lookout was built in 1963 and operated until 1973. The building was moved by helicopter to a new location in 1975 and only the concrete foundation remains today. A trail leads to the summit from a

trailhead A trailhead is the point at which a trail begins, where the trail is often intended for hiking, biking, horseback riding, or off-road vehicles. Modern trailheads often contain rest rooms, maps, sign posts and distribution centers for information ...

accessible by

gravel road A gravel road is a type of unpaved road surfaced with gravel that has been brought to the site from a quarry or stream bed. They are common in less-developed nations, and also in the rural areas of developed nations such as Canada and the Unite ...

s off the Everitt Memorial Highway. The summit boasts an outstanding view of the southwest side of Shasta and Shastina, and on clear days

Mount McLoughlin Mount McLoughlin is a dormant steep-sided stratovolcano, or composite volcano, in the Cascade Range of southern Oregon and within the United States Sky Lakes Wilderness. It is one of the volcanic peaks in the Cascade Volcanic Arc, within the Hi ...

is easily visible to the north in Oregon.

Lassen Peak Lassen Peak ( ), commonly referred to as Mount Lassen, is a lava dome volcano and the southernmost active volcano in the Cascade Range of the Western United States. Located in the Shasta Cascade region of Northern California, it is part of the ...

is visible around to the south.

References

External links

* {{Commons category, Black Butte (Siskiyou County, California), position=left Volcanoes of Siskiyou County, California Cascade Volcanoes Holocene lava domes Mount Shasta Subduction volcanoes Buttes of California Fire lookout towers in California Shasta-Trinity National Forest Landforms of Siskiyou County, California

See also

References

Further reading

External links