Lassen Volcanic National Park Highway: Cultural Landscape Inventory, Lassen Volcanic National Park Highway, National Park Service

Provencher, Shaun; Warner, Len

The Lassen Volcanic National Park Highway is a linear landscape that extends 29.86 miles between the southwest and northwest entrance stations of Lassen Volcanic National Park. From the southwest entrance (elevation 6,646 feet) the road climbs to an elevation of 8,511 feet at its summit near Lassen Peak, and descends toward the northwest entrance (elevation 5,808 feet) near Manzanita Lake. The road traverses active geothermal areas, sub-alpine forests, mountain meadows and lava fields. Designed in the early 1920s as a recreational pleasure drive, the Lassen Volcanic National Park Highway remains the primary means by which most visitors experience the park. The road alignment was designed to display the park’s most scenic and geologically interesting areas to automobile tourists. Although the mountainous terrain required extensive use of cut and fill road building techniques to provide scenic vistas, designers ensured that, where possible, existing landscape features were carefully preserved. Preservation of the landscape, an essential component of the project landscape architect’s design philosophy, improved the naturalistic design of the road corridor. Roadside amenities, including scenic pullouts, trailhead parking areas, and roadside markers were designed and located to enhance the motorists’ experience, to allow hikers access to the park’s extensive backcountry trail system, and to add to the visitor’s understanding of the dramatic geological processes that created the diverse volcanic landscape. The road offers distant views of the surrounding countryside within and beyond park boundaries, as well as a variety of distant and intimate views of the park’s major natural landscape feature, Lassen Peak. The Lassen Volcanic National Park Highway is a historic designed landscape, and is significant as an intact example of early road design in the National Park Service. Significant features include the road’s route and alignment, scenic overlooks, headwalls, bridge culverts, entrance pylons, and northwest entrance station. These features utilize native materials and naturalistic design to blend the road with its setting. The periods of significance are 1925 to 1941 and 1948 to 1951, reflecting major construction efforts. The first period reflects the original National Park Service and Bureau of Public Roads construction in the 1920s and continues through the end of the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) work projects in 1941. The second period reflects road paving and widening projects that brought the road to its current width. The Lassen Volcanic National Park Highway retains its original route and function as a touring road through the park. It is in fair condition and retains integrity in relation to both periods of significance.

Lassen Volcanic National Park Highway: Cultural Landscape Inventory, Lassen Volcanic National Park Highway, National Park Service

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