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DUNSMUIR, Calif. — Less than half a mile from the city limits of this Northern California railroad town is a natural wonder so enchanting that locals compare it to geologic features in Yosemite or Yellowstone.
“The most beautiful waterfall I’ve ever seen,” said Stephen Decatur, who works in disaster preparedness for the city of Dunsmuir. City Manager Dustin Rief agreed, adding: “And I’ve traveled all over the world.”
Fed from glaciers on Mount Shasta’s majestic slopes, Mossbrae Falls cascades out of lava tubes and down mossy cliffs into the Sacramento River in ethereal curtains of mist, sending rainbows dancing in all directions.
Native tribes have long considered the waterfall sacred. A century ago, it was such a popular destination that Southern Pacific Railroad ran special trains to a locale where well-heeled customers could disembark, soak in the beauty and sip from a natural spring at the top of the falls. And at Dunsmuir City Hall, where a photograph of Mossbrae Falls adorns the wall, officials consider it a tourist attraction that could be crucial to the city’s economic future. Later this spring, the City Council is poised to vote on declaring Dunsmuir the “Waterfall Capital” of California.
There’s just one hitch: Though Mossbrae Falls sits less than 2,000 feet from Dunsmuir city limits, there is no easy — or legal — way for the public to access its watery splendors. And for decades, every attempt to create legal access has foundered on the rocky shoals of property rights and lumbering bureaucracy.
About 30,000 people each year visit anyway, according to a city study, most of them trespassing for more than a mile along oily train tracks that wend along the Sacramento River. At least two people have been struck by trains near the falls since 2012. Others have reported terrifying near misses.
Social media is rife with photos of people slogging along the tracks in the company of toddlers and dogs, hauling picnic gear. And as selfie photo spreads on Instagram have lured ever more people to make the trek, officials say they are terrified there will be more frantic scrambles to dodge oncoming locomotives that end in injury or death.
That’s why city officials say it is urgent that, at long last, they find a way to negotiate with private landowners to build a short hiking trail from an existing city park to give the public a safe, designated pathway to the falls.
But while constructing a trail less than a third of a mile in length might seem a simple undertaking, people who have been engaged in this effort say it has been anything but.
“We have not spent hundreds of thousands of dollars and 30 years on this just because we want to have a trail to this pretty place. It’s also a safety issue,” said John Harch, a retired surgeon who is president of the Mount Shasta Trail Assn. and has been working with others for years — fruitlessly he fears — on trail access.
The issue, as just about anyone in Dunsmuir can explain, is that the land on the east side of the river, where the waterfall spills down from the cliffs, is owned by the Saint Germain Foundation, a religious group that considers the waterfall and Mount Shasta sacred and doesn’t take kindly to the public wandering through.
Also known as the “I AM” movement, the group was formed in the 1930s, after a mining engineer, Guy Ballard, reported that while hiking on Mount Shasta he encountered Saint Germain, a spiritual guide who Ballard said had ascended to a higher state of being. Ballard said Saint Germain trained him as a messenger who could lead others toward enlightenment.
After Ballard descended Mount Shasta, he and his wife, Edna, started a foundation in their Chicago-area home, dedicated to the principles of self-empowerment and self-improvement they said Saint Germain had passed along. After Guy Ballard’s death in 1939, Edna purchased property near Mount Shasta on the east side of the Sacramento River. These days, the group’s numbers have dwindled, but some followers still live near the retreat, and adherents of the faith and their families visit in the summer for spiritual conclaves.
The Mount Shasta Trail Assn. spent years trying to purchase a small piece of land from the foundation to create a trail from nearby Hedge Creek Falls, which is owned by the city, up to Mossbrae. But association leaders say the foundation never agreed to sell.
Foundation officials did not respond to requests for comment from The Times. In 2022, Sidney Lanier, identified at the time as the group’s chief financial officer, told SF Gate that “the Foundation believes it can best protect this site by limiting access, rather than allowing trailblazers to desecrate its natural beauty.”
The land on the other side of the river is owned by Union Pacific Railroad. The tracks that run adjacent to the river are a major north-south artery for freight and a twice-daily Amtrak service. Long, ponderous trains snake through at regular intervals.
After it became clear that constructing a trail through the foundation’s land was probably not going to work, advocates explored building a footbridge across the Sacramento River at Hedge Creek Falls and then carving a trail along the river, below the train tracks.
The railroad has not said “no” to the concept. But after years of conversations, it also has not given an unequivocal “yes.”
The Mount Shasta Trail Assn., which was bequeathed hundreds of thousands of dollars from an anonymous donor who wanted to see access to the falls, tried for years to negotiate with the railroad, Harch said. But he said railroad officials would ask for proposals, spend months reviewing them and then ask for yet more studies. “Or they say, ‘Oh, there’s a new person [responsible for that], and you have to start all over again,’” Harch said.
At one point, he said, a Union Pacific employee confided that the railroad, whose landholdings across the country are vast, owns property in hundreds of areas that the public would like to access and is wary of setting a precedent.
In an emailed statement, the railroad said: “Union Pacific has worked closely with key stakeholders for years, exploring ways to resolve trespassing and safety issues connected to Mossbrae Falls and have dedicated employees working with the City of Dunsmuir and the Mount Shasta Trail Association to find solutions that address everyone’s concerns.”
More recently, Dunsmuir city officials have taken the lead in the trail effort.
City Councilman Matthew Bryan, who has made access to the falls a key part of his agenda, said that he believes the city and Union Pacific may finally be able to make it happen. The city, as a government entity, has been better able to negotiate with the railroad than a nonprofit, he said.
“I have high hopes,” he said.
For now, officials have gotten “conceptual approval” from the railroad. In a statement, Union Pacific officials said they were “standing by to review the city’s design plans to ensure they meet our safety and engineering standards.”
Still, even such a small trail will cost more money than the small city of Dunsmuir has sitting around. Rief, the city manager, said the costs of engineering alone may be as much as $2 million, even before construction starts. The proposed trail would have to cross the Sacramento River and continue north below the train tracks, on a grade, and be engineered in such a way that it would be accessible for people of many different fitness levels. And discussions are still underway for how a trail could be safely separated from the tracks.
To raise money for the effort, the city last summer posted a sign at Hedge Creek Falls seeking public donations. The sign features a tantalizing photograph of the officially inaccessible Mossbrae Falls along with a QR code that allows people to donate using their phones. So far, $4,700 has come in, mostly in small increments, Rief said.
If the railroad ultimately allows the city to build a trail — and that trail indeed brings in more tourist dollars — many locals say it would be poetic justice. After all, it is because of the railroad that this city, tucked among craggy peaks and towering trees, exists at all. And it is also because of railroads that this city, decades after it was founded in the 1880s, almost died.
“Southern Pacific built the town of Dunsmuir,” Bryan said.
For years, many people who lived there were employed by the railroad, Bryan said, and for much of the town’s history it was a harmonious relationship.
That began to change in the 1960s, Bryan said, when automation and other changes in the railroad industry meant fewer jobs for Dunsmuir. Then, in the summer of 1991, a catastrophic train derailment just north of town spilled nearly 20,000 gallons of a highly toxic herbicide into the Sacramento River. The spill poisoned the river’s ecosystem for a 40-mile stretch, killing tens of thousands of fish, as well as all the bugs and vegetation. The contaminated water released toxic gas that briefly engulfed Dunsmuir and made hundreds of people ill.
The spill wiped out the area’s prized trout fishery for years. And it exacerbated the economic pains in a region already reeling from cutbacks in the timber industry.
Southern Pacific and three other companies ultimately paid $40 million in compensation for the spill, most of which went to the state to cover the costs of cleanup and restoration. Southern Pacific separately agreed to pay $14 million to settle the claims of residents and businesses who suffered losses.
Environmentalists are celebrating a legal settlement that will close historic family dairies they say are degrading Point Reyes National Seashore. Locals say the settlement shows no understanding of this place and its people.
These days, the river is mostly recovered, officials said. And while the railroad still employs people in the area, the town is seeking to diversify its economy by leaning more heavily into tourism.
“Dunsmuir is the perfect base camp to explore Northern California’s natural beauty,” says the city’s visitors website. It boasts of the town’s “up-and-coming culinary scene” and good hotels.
In recent months, the City Council — Dunsmuir officials note it is the only city council in all of California made up entirely of millennials — is looking to add waterfalls to the marketing package.
There are more than a dozen notable waterfalls within an hour’s drive from town, said Mayor Michael Clarno, including Hedge Creek Falls, Burney Falls, Faery Falls and three sets of falls on the McCloud River.
But the crown jewel, locals will tell you, is Mossbrae.
“This trail to Mossbrae is part of us reclaiming our community and our economy and our connection to the best water on Earth,” Bryan said.
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