Regaining the low ground at the base of the mountain and holding on in your grand orbit, you pass through a belt of juniper woods, called “The Cedars,” to Sheep Rock at the foot of the Shasta Pass.  Here you strike the old emigrant road, which leads over the low divide to the eastern slopes of the mountain.  In a north-northwesterly direction from the foot of the pass you may chance to find Pluto’s Cave, already mentioned; but it is not easily found, since its several mouths are on a level with the general surface of the ground, and have been made simply by the falling-in of portions of the roof.  Far the most beautiful and richly furnished of the mountain caves of California occur in a thick belt of metamorphic limestone that is pretty generally developed along the western flank of the Sierra from the McCloud River to the Kaweah, a distance of nearly four hundred miles.  These volcanic caves are not wanting in interest, and it is well to light a pitch pine torch and take a walk in these dark ways of the underworld whenever opportunity offers, if for no other reason to see with new appreciation on returning to the sunshine the beauties that lie so thick about us.

Sheep Rock is about twenty miles from Sisson’s, and is one of the principal winter pasture grounds of the wild sheep, from which it takes its name.  It is a mass of lava presenting to the gray sage plain of Shasta Valley a bold craggy front two thousand feet high.  Its summit lies at an elevation of five thousand five hundred feet above the sea, and has several square miles of comparatively level surface, where bunchgrass grows and the snow does not lie deep, thus allowing the hardy sheep to pick up a living through the winter months when deep snows have driven them down from the lofty ridges of Shasta.

From here it might be well to leave the immediate base of the mountain for a few days and visit the Lava Beds made famous by the Modoc War.  They lie about forty miles to the northeastward, on the south shore of Rhett or Tule[7] Lake, at an elevation above sea level of about forty-five hundred feet.  They are a portion of a flow of dense black vesicular lava, dipping northeastward at a low angle, but little changed as yet by the weather, and about as destitute of soil as a glacial pavement.  The surface, though smooth in a general way as seen from a distance, is dotted with hillocks and rough crater-like pits, and traversed by a network of yawning fissures, forming a combination of topographical conditions of very striking character.  The way lies by Mount Bremer, over stretches of gray sage plains, interrupted by rough lava slopes timbered with juniper and yellow pine, and with here and there a green meadow and a stream.

This is a famous game region, and you will be likely to meet small bands of antelope, mule deer, and wild sheep.  Mount Bremer is the most noted stronghold of the sheep in the whole Shasta region.  Large flocks dwell here from year to year, winter and summer, descending occasionally into the adjacent sage plains and lava beds to feed, but ever ready to take refuge in the jagged crags of their mountain at every alarm.  While traveling with a company of hunters I saw about fifty in one flock.