Behold Mount Shasta, proving ground for a new breed of weekend warrior

Jerry Dodrill; Sanford Schulwolf (3)

The Shasta Circus: At 14,162 feet, the mountain looms over Northern California. Right, from top, software entrepreneur and climber Todd Davidson checks in with the firm; a page from the Forest Service logbook; Davidson's trailhead shuttle.

But there was no privacy to be found on the slope leading to the summit this past Memorial Day weekend—nor will there be any when Labor Day rolls around in early September. Astonishingly, more than 200 climbers were threading their way up the steep snowfield on that last weekend in May. According to the U.S. Forest Service, as many as 500 people had left 240 cars parked at the trailhead—mostly late-model Expeditions, Saabs, Beemers, and Subarus, some with de rigueur dotcom-themed vanity plates. The night before, about 160 of these summit hopefuls—including me and three other climbers— slept alongside each other at Helen Lake base camp in a nylon city of at least 85 top-of-the-line four-season mountaineering tents.

It was as if someone had decided to launch an Internet startup right above the tree line. But no, it was a little more complicated than that. Over the last two years, Shasta has become the proving ground of the techreationalist—a new breed of weekend warrior native to the New Economy hubs of Northern California and Seattle who is streaming into the backcountry. "A lot of people spend so much time inside, working at a computer, and so when it's time to recreate, they go big," says Shasta-Trinity National Forest climbing ranger Dan Towner, who has watched the numbers of climbers, most from the nearby San Francisco Bay Area, swell 20 percent over the last two to three seasons to 10,000 in 1999. "You don't see a whole lot of just ordinary backpacking stuff so much anymore."

In this crowd, mulch trails just don't cut it. Cash-flush (for now), stressed-out at the office, and above all pressed for time, the techreationalist prefers to recharge his or her batteries with the kind of grueling, goal-oriented adventure that scaling a fourteener provides. For regional outdoor retailers, it's a boon. Frank Hugelmeyer, executive director of the Outdoor Recreation Coalition of America, an industry trade group, sees the trend reflected in increased sales of lighter, multisport products, such as smaller packs designed for overnight trips (as opposed to weeklong backpacking trips) and multiuse hiking shoes that can also handle crampons—just in the past 18 months. "We have a whole generation moving into the outdoor recreation community that are professionals who have grown up on MTV," says Hugelmeyer. "They have always had TV and computers, and they like to get their thrills a lot quicker than maybe we used to when we were younger."

Shasta forestry technician Don Lee chalks it up to a desire for weekend therapy: "We all lead more intense lives—the workload is more intense and the commute is more intense—and the recreation required to reset that balance to zero needs to be more intense."

Nowhere is that intensity more apparent than inside Internet startups, where knowledge workers crank out code, hype product, tweak databases, and generally bask in the glow of cathode rays for 60 to 80 hours a week. Two of Shasta's three guide operators attribute more than half of their business to the Bay Area, a five-hour drive away. And that's why in the past year or so, Shasta has emerged as the Everest of Silicon Valley—a high-altitude project that plugged-in twentysomethings can tackle when they're looking for a truly epic adventure and an ultra-cool summit photo to tack up on the cubicle wall back in San Jose, Santa Clara, or Mountain View.