Mountain biking · Lassen Volcanic National Park, California, USA · recorded with NomadTracks

Riding to Lake Helen: 17 km up a closed park road through the snow

Every spring there's a golden window in Lassen: the park highway is plowed but still closed to cars. Result — 17 km of empty mountain asphalt between head-high snowbanks, all the way up to the frozen Lake Helen, shared only with other riders.

Distance17.0 km
Elevation gain381 m
ActivityMountain biking
Duration2 h 48 min

About this data: this track and its photos were personally shared with us as samples by a NomadTracks user. NomadTracks never uploads, collects or shares your tracks or photos — your recordings stay on your devices and in your own cloud.

Route map of Riding to Lake Helen: 17 km up a closed park road through the snow drawn from the recorded GPS points on an OpenStreetMap basemap
The actual recorded GPS track — start marked green, finish orange. Numbered pins mark where the photos below were taken.

Download GPX Coordinates, elevation and relative times — recording dates are normalized out, photos not included.

Elevation profile of the track
Elevation profile over the full distance. Switch the map above to interactive mode, then slide across the chart — a marker follows the route.

The closed-road season

No traffic, no noise, just the climb. The recorded track captures the strange beauty of it: a highway profile (steady 5–6%) in a snowscape that normally belongs to skiers.

One long climb, one long reward

The elevation chart is a single clean ramp followed by a single clean descent — 380 m up, then 20 minutes of grinning back down. The speed chart's two halves could not look more different.

About the place: Lassen Volcanic National Park, California, USA

Each spring, Lassen Volcanic National Park plows its 50-kilometer park highway weeks before opening it to cars — and cyclists get a snow-walled mountain road to themselves, usually in May or early June. Lake Helen, near the road's 2,594 m high point, often stays frozen into July; the Sulphur Works thermal area steams right beside the asphalt on the way up.

Empty park road winding between deep snowbanks in Lassen
1 · Empty park road winding between deep snowbanks in Lassen
Fire-scarred forest below the snowy ridgelines of Lassen
2 · Fire-scarred forest below the snowy ridgelines of Lassen
Burnt forest and fresh snow along the closed park highway
3 · Burnt forest and fresh snow along the closed park highway
Yellow sulphur cliffs steaming beside the road
4 · Yellow sulphur cliffs steaming beside the road
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