There are two ways to get to Mossbrae Falls, one of the most beautiful (and most often Instagrammed) natural attractions in California, about 30 minutes from the base of Mount Shasta. Unfortunately, neither of the routes is legal — and the more popular one involves a potentially deadly trek along active railroad tracks. 

And yet the ethereal beauty of the falls is still a powerful temptation for visitors, who come here by the thousands, often drawn by shots splashed across Instagram and other social media sites. Tall as a five-story building and longer than an Olympic swimming pool, Mossbrae is actually hundreds of waterfalls in one, all cascading over a carpet of lush moss into the Sacramento River just outside the small city of Dunsmuir. 

For nearly a century, the only way to see the beauty in person has been to trespass on one of two privately owned properties. The falls are located on the east side of the river, which is owned by the Saint Germain Foundation, a secretive religious group. The opposite bank is owned by Union Pacific Railroad, which regularly runs trains along tracks that overlook the river. This is the more popular route for visitors, but it comes with serious risks: Two people have been hit by trains while hiking the route since 2011.

Signage makes it clear that no one is allowed to hike along these train tracks near Mossbrae Falls. But many people ignore the sign. 

Over the years, concerned citizens, nonprofit groups and city officials have pushed for a safe and accessible path to the falls. So far, every plan has fallen apart in the negotiation phase, due in large part to both passive and active resistance from the property owners on either side of the river. But that hasn’t stopped John Harch, retired surgeon and president of the Mount Shasta Trail Association, from fighting for a public right to view this natural splendor.  

In early May, I joined Harch on a walk along the tracks to see the falls for myself. The mile-plus journey isn’t a challenge for an experienced hiker, but it’s obviously not a maintained trail; the gravel is sharp, and the tracks are slick with oil. While there’s room to walk, there are several narrow stretches where we had to thread our way between the tracks and a steep drop-off.

One of Saint Germain’s biggest objections to the creation of any public access route to Mossbrae has been that people will trash the place and compromise its natural beauty and serenity. Indeed, I spotted used toilet paper, beer cans and other garbage along the way. But I forgot all that when we got to the falls, where hundreds of streams gushed from the mountainside, spreading out like a curtain over the mossy cliff, as slanting light painted rainbows in the mist. I'd been prepared for swimmers splashing around the pool at the base of the falls; on this rare afternoon, though, Harch and I had Mossbrae to ourselves.

A view of Mossbrae Falls in Dunsmuir, California.

A view of Mossbrae Falls in Dunsmuir, California.

A view of Mossbrae Falls in Dunsmuir, California.

A view of Mossbrae Falls in Dunsmuir, California.

After a few minutes, we heard the sound of an oncoming train. Harch and I scrambled up the path to watch as a half-million tons of cold steel barreled through the landscape. The train was going fairly slowly, maybe 15 miles an hour, easy enough for us to avoid. But plenty of the thousands of annual visitors aren’t experienced hikers, and aren't anticipating train traffic; many bring dogs and young children along.

“We've seen people trying to push wheelchairs down this, and people with canes and walkers,” Harch told me. “I understand the real consequences of getting hit by a train. And I don't want to see it happen.” 

There used to be a perfectly legal way for the public to view the falls, assuming they could afford it. 

Back in the late 1800s, wealthy passengers took Southern Pacific trains to witness Mossbrae in all its glory, and sip water from a natural spring at the top of the falls. One of the tourists was Alexander Graham Bell’s wife, Mabel Gardiner Hubbard Bell, who wrote to her husband about the experience.

“The train stopped for five minutes at a little pavilion to allow all who were of thirst to take a drink of the mineral or side water that here gushes from the earth by the riverside at the foot of some pretty idyllic falls,” she wrote.

Entrepreneurs soon capitalized on the natural spring, buying 40 acres on the Mossbrae side of the river and building the opulent Shasta Springs Resort, which included a walking trail down to the falls. 

A passenger train makes a stop at Shasta Springs, Calif., circa 1905. 

As train travel waned, the resort fell on hard times. In 1951, a woman named Edna Ballard scooped it up for $230,000 and turned it into a spiritual home for the Saint Germain Foundation, a religious group she founded with her husband, mining engineer Guy Ballard.

Ballard claimed the group’s principles were based on what he learned during an encounter with a spiritual entity named Saint Germain, whom he’d met in 1930, on the steep slope of Mount Shasta. Using the entity’s teachings, Ballard and his wife started the “I AM” movement, which collected “love offerings” from the faithful and claimed that group leaders could shift world events and heal the sick. It spread from Northern California to more than a million adherents worldwide by 1938. 

In the years since, the I AM movement has dwindled. But a dedicated group of members still live near Mount Shasta today. They run a bookstore, the I AM Reading Room, in town, and the retreat above Mossbrae Falls remains a spiritual home. Every summer, believers convene there for classes, services and other activities. 

Nonmembers are not welcome on the property. Purple signs throughout the grounds warn trespassers. Sarah Kerns, a manager at a Dunsmuir hamburger joint called Yaks on the 5, told me that tourists regularly come in talking about how they tried to visit Mossbrae but got chased away by people in “flowing cloaks.”

Guy Ballard and his wife Edna, founders of the religious group the Saint Germain Foundation.

“They have cameras on their property, so they’ll see people and come after them,” Kerns told me. The members wear “dress capes” that extend from “here to here,” Kerns added, gesturing to her neck and her knees. “It’s trippy.” 

I asked Saint Germain’s chief financial officer and treasurer, Sidney Lanier, about these rumors by email.

“[N]ever have Foundation Members donned purple robes to run away trespassers,” he told me. But he made it clear that nonmembers were unwelcome at the falls, which the foundation considers a sacred site on its own private property.

“The Foundation believes it can best protect this site by limiting access, rather than allowing trailblazers to desecrate its natural beauty,” he wrote.

For hikers who don’t want to risk a run-in with Saint Germain members, the only other way to the falls lies across the river, along tracks now owned by Union Pacific.

The earliest effort to build a safe and legal trail came from Southern Pacific Railroad, which owned the tracks until the mid-1990s. The trail plan was one of several public service projects the company undertook after one of their trains derailed upriver from the falls in 1991, dumping thousands of gallons of pesticides into the river and causing one of the worst ecological disasters in state history.

Some worry that a safe, legal path to Mossbrae Falls will lead to people trashing the area. In fact, it's already happening.

The railroad company partnered with California Trout, a fish conservation group then run by hiking trail architect Tom Hesseldenz, and committed a million dollars to building a 6-mile trail between Dunsmuir and Lake Siskiyou, passing by Mossbrae Falls. 

The initial design called for the trail to cross over a small portion of Saint Germain’s property, which Southern Pacific offered to buy for a considerable sum, according to Hesseldenz. When the foundation wouldn’t sell, the project fell apart.

In 2010, the project found another champion in Harch, who had recently retired from his surgery practice and joined the board of the Mount Shasta Trail Association. According to Hesseldenz, Harch “ran full bore” at numerous projects, including organizing a network of volunteers called “Crazy Old Guys!” who build trails, take on major cleanups and root out invasive species. Harch quickly evolved from “an excellent surgeon with delicate, exacting hands” to “a chain saw-wielding wild man with heavily calloused hands,” Hesseldenz told me.

John Harch makes a point about Mossbrae Falls, using a trash grabber for emphasis.

As a surgeon, Harch has seen firsthand the damage a train can do to a human body. So when he heard about the Mossbrae project, he jumped at the chance to help Hesseldenz with fundraising for a new trail design and negotiating with Saint Germain and the railroad tracks’ current owner, Union Pacific. 

A decade on, he still believes in the project — although he, too, has grown weary of the back-and-forth.

The first trail that Hesseldenz and Harch envisioned, in 2011, involved buying much of Saint Germain’s riverfront property, and building a trail along the Mossbrae side. Union Pacific supported the plan, donating $10,000 to map the trail. Hesseldenz forwarded me email exchanges he’d had with Lanier, Saint Germain’s CFO, about the proposed land deal. An appraiser hired by the Mount Shasta Trail Association had valued the land at $70,000 in total; in an email, Lanier said he would sell the land for $75,000 per acre, which totaled more than $400,000. The trail association scraped together $225,000, which Lanier rejected. The group even tried to fly then-president Joe Wirth to Texas to talk things out. Lanier refused to meet with him. 

“Every time we make a proposal, they sit on it for six months, and then come back and say, ‘nah,’” Harch says. “That's been going on for 20 years.”

Hesseldenz forwarded me a letter from Lanier offering to sell approximately 6 acres for $75,000 each, with a number of stipulations including a fence along the property line and indemnification from accident, injury or death on the premises. When I asked Lanier about offers to purchase Saint Germain land for a public access route, he flatly denied that the foundation had ever considered selling.

Mossbrae Falls is one of the most beautiful water features in California, but there's no legal, safe way to get there.

“The fact is Mossbrae is not now nor has it ever been for sale, at any price!” he wrote in a recent email. Instead, he told me, the foundation had commissioned its own trail to a lookout point high above the falls, at considerable price to the group, “to be a good neighbor and find an alternative to the status quo.” 

When I asked Hesseldenz about the Saint Germain proposal, he told me he doesn’t believe it would solve the problem of sightseers trespassing on dangerous terrain. 

“The viewing platform would be far from the falls, at the top of a cliff above the tracks in a hot dry location, with trees partially blocking the view of the falls. The public wants the far more intimate experience of standing on the river’s edge directly across from the falls, looking up at it, hearing the sounds, and feeling the cool mist from the falls,” he wrote by email. “The difference in experience between the two options is so great that most people will still use the tracks to get to the viewpoint at the base of the falls.”

In 2017, eager for a compromise, Hesseldenz came up with a new plan: building a trail along the other bank, below both the railroad tracks and the high water mark. It would end at a gravel bar across from the falls, perhaps the best spot for sightseers to revel in the beauty of the falls. But Lanier says that area is Saint Germain’s private property and the public doesn’t have a right to be there. Harch and Hesseldenz disagree, citing California law that provides for “a right to use a navigable river and the riverbed up to the high water mark for navigational, fishing, recreational and other permitted purposes.” 

In addition, California law suggests that, when pedestrians openly use a trail through private land for long enough, the state can protect the public’s right to keep using that path, something called a "prescriptive easement." So far, nobody has gone to court to formally petition for a right of public access to this gravel path across from the falls.   

Unfortunately, the new plan relied much more heavily on Union Pacific, which — a decade after negotiations first began — has yet to approve any of Hesseldenz’s proposals. Robynn Tysver, Union Pacific’s communications manager, conceded that the process has taken a long time, but pointed out that the complex matter involves a lot of stakeholders and concerns over safety, engineering and real estate.

Lanier has rejected any public access trail, even one that doesn’t directly touch Saint Germain property. In late 2021, he wrote letters to local Indigenous groups, inviting them to join forces with the foundation to protect Mossbrae from hikers and sightseers.  

“For the past 10 years, Union Pacific (UP) railroad, City of Dunsmuir and Mt Shasta Trail Association (MSTA) have all aggressively worked to gain access to Mossbrae by traversing thru Saint Germain Foundation property to the Falls for the purpose of creating a recreational venue with concessions, toilets, etc,” Lanier wrote in a letter to local Indigenous tribal leaders. If a trail does get built along the Union Pacific side, Lanier warns, “frolic, desecration and clutter would become the prevailing activity” at the falls. 

“If you agree that Mossbrae Falls should be protected from unfettered public access and the likely desecration of this Sacred area, you are encouraged to write Union Pacific Railroad and request DENIAL of the City of Dunsmuir Application for a walking trail,” the letter concluded, along with a mailing address for the railroad’s CEO. (Leaders of the Wintu, Shasta Nation and Karuk tribes were either unreachable or declined to be interviewed for this story.)

John Harch, president of the Mount Shasta Trail Association, picks up a discarded beer can along the railroad tracks near Mossbrae Falls.

When I asked Harch about Lanier’s argument, he pointed out that thousands of people are already visiting the falls this way, and there’s no good way to stop them. He acknowledges that some make a mess; that’s why he always brings a trash grabber and a giant garbage bag when he makes the trek. 

Refuse — even human waste — can be cleaned up, he told me. What you can’t reverse are the effects of a train collision on a human body. 

On a brisk but sunny afternoon in November of 2011, a woman was hiking the tracks to Mossbrae Falls with her husband and their two children, when a Union Pacific freight train approached.

The woman didn’t have time to get out of the way, so she “scrunched down and became very small,” according to an interview by Dunsmuir City Manager Brenda Bain on a public radio station. “She was hit by the step of the train,” resulting in a serious brain injury, Bain said.

After the incident, the city of Dunsmuir announced that Mossbrae Falls was closed to the public. For a little while, the county issued tickets to people who parked near the trailhead and walked on the tracks. But the enforcement didn’t last.

Two people have been hit by trains while they hiked along these tracks to Mossbrae Falls in Dunsmuir, Calif. 

Disaster struck again on a February morning in 2019, when Kyle Hutchinson was walking down the tracks to Mossbrae Falls. New to the area, the 33-year-old later told authorities he’d had no idea he was walking on an active railroad line. He was listening to music on his headphones as he snapped some photos and never heard the train coming. 

When Harch and I were walking along the tracks, the train passed us right near where Hutchinson had been hit. Harch pointed beneath the moving train with his trash grabber, indicating the other side.

“So the problem is, the guy who got hit landed over there,” he told me, speaking about Hutchinson. On this steep downhill slope, it took the engineer about a quarter of a mile to stop the incredibly long train. Search and rescue personnel initially responded on the river side of the track, and were forced to hike to the front of the train and back down to the site of the accident on the other side.

“They’re not allowed to crawl under the train,” Harch told me. “It took 45 minutes to extricate the guy. He could have died in that 45 minutes.”

When deputies reached Hutchinson, he was suffering from an open wound on the left side of his head, along with a leg injury and back pain, according to an incident report. Rather than hike him out, rescuers brought in a helicopter to airlift Hutchinson to safety.  

A post shared by Sri Sudarshan Jyotirmayananda (@sri.sudarshan.vision)

Now, when Siskiyou County sheriff’s deputies see people on the tracks, they give them safety warnings, Siskiyou County Sheriff Jeremiah LaRue told me. “We’ll stop people, but the idea is not to write tickets or make arrests or anything,” he says. “It’s mainly just a safety issue.” 

Union Pacific is well-aware of the issue; director of public affairs Francisco Castillo brought it up in a letter to Wirth, then the president of the Mount Shasta Trail Association, in November of 2019, not long after Hutchinson was hit.

Signage in the Shasta Retreat neighborhood meant to deter Mossbrae Falls visitors. 

In the letter, Castillo acknowledged that “the number of individuals illegally trespassing, while heading to and from Mossbrae Falls along the railroad tracks, has increased dramatically resulting in safety concerns.” 

Then, a few paragraphs down, he wrote: “Union Pacific recently went through a reorganization to support a safe, reliable and efficient railroad while streamlining decision-making. The reorganization affected many of the departments responsible for reviewing these types of projects, and as a result the review process will take longer than expected.”

Even with firsthand experience of train injuries, the danger hasn’t stopped Harch from being a regular visitor to the falls, which have enchanted him since the first time he saw them. He’s even got a four-paneled painting of the falls hanging above his bed. As he and I stood on the gravel bar across from Mossbrae, watching the water cascade down, I could understand his passion.

John Harch loves Mossbrae Falls so much that he commissioned this four-paneled painting by Tom Lifka and hung it above his bed.

“It's one thing to see the pictures, and quite another thing to stand here,” Harch told me. “You’ve got to admit, it’s a pretty special place.”

In the past year, some progress has been made, Harch told me. He took me to where Hesseldenz’s latest trail begins, back toward Dunsmuir on the other side of the river. This short, recently revamped stretch is also referred to as Hedge Creek Falls Trail. It dips behind a small but appealing waterfall pouring from an overhanging slab of basalt, then ends at the Sacramento River.

The current plan to extend this trail to Mossbrae involves constructing a bridge over the river, which will deliver pedestrians to a new trail downslope from the railroad tracks. There are issues, though, Harch told me. 

The Hedge Creek Falls Trail was recently revamped by trail architect Tom Hesseldenz. It may one day serve as the initial part of a trail to Mossbrae Falls.

When the river rises during high flows, the trail may wash out. There also needs to be a way to keep people off the tracks, so Union Pacific would require fencing. To avoid destabilizing the slope, the trail builders must not cut into the hillside, and instead will need to bring in boulders. Getting those and fencing to the site may require flying them in by helicopter. 

This will all be expensive, and Union Pacific has not authorized funds to help pay for it, according to Hesseldenz. The company has also expressed concern that a trail below the tracks will interfere with maintenance and repairs.

Even if Union Pacific greenlights the project, and the trail association raises the money, the plan still involves the disputed gravel bar that Lanier claims is the foundation’s private property.

Harch and Hesseldenz are not giving up, though. Hesseldenz has seen projects stretch on this long before with good results, and remains hopeful that the trail could be done by next fall. Harch knows it’s a tall order, but remains determined to make it happen. 

“I just think it's the right thing to do,” Harch says. “If somebody gets killed on that railroad track, I will feel horrible that we haven't solved this problem.”

People have been visiting Mossbrae Falls just outside of Dunsmuir, Calif., since the 1800s.

Ashley Harrell is an Associate Editor covering California's parks for SFGATE.