Generations of artistic tribute to California s mythic giant Lonely as God, and white as a winter moon, Mount Shasta starts up sudden and solitary from the heart of the great black forests of Northern California. Joaquin Miller Beauty and majesty have drawn people to the slopes of Mount Shasta for centuries. Long revered as sacred by the Native American tribes in its region, it remains important to various spiritual communities. Modern-day Native American rituals take place there, and elements of other religious practices such as a Buddhist monastery have also clustered around the mountain. Artists too have flocked to Mount Shasta. Writers and painters alike have sought to capture the wonderment we feel at the sight of the lone mountain towering at the head of a long valley. Sudden and Solitary presents over 150 years of artwork, ranging from the artists who accompanied Wilkes, Fremont, and other early explorers to Albert Bierstadt and William Keith to the many visionary artists, past and present, big and small, who have been inspired by Mount Shasta. This book is, as the authors state in the introduction, an attempt to characterize what Mount Shasta meant to the nineteenth-century American and Californian, and how those ideas have evolved in the visual arts up to the present. There are many mountains in the West, but few offer the experience that Shasta does of being in a place apart and unique; it is no surprise that it has generated an artistic legacy of such grandeur.