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The Mountains of California

by John Muir · English · Gutenberg #10012 · 550,964 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: The Mountains of California

Author: John Muir


        
Release date: November 1, 2003 [eBook #10012]
                Most recently updated: October 28, 2024

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/10012

Credits: Beth Trapaga and PG Distributed Proofreaders


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE MOUNTAINS OF CALIFORNIA ***

[Illustration]




The Mountains of California

by John Muir

Contents

 I THE SIERRA NEVADA
 II THE GLACIERS
 III THE SNOW
 IV A NEAR VIEW OF THE HIGH SIERRA
 V THE PASSES
 VI THE GLACIER LAKES
 VII THE GLACIER MEADOWS
 VIII THE FORESTS
 IX THE DOUGLAS SQUIRREL
 X A WIND-STORM IN THE FORESTS
 XI THE RIVER FLOODS
 XII SIERRA THUNDER-STORMS
 XIII THE WATER-OUZEL
 XIV THE WILD SHEEP
 XV IN THE SIERRA FOOT-HILLS
 XVI THE BEE-PASTURES

[Illustration: HOOFED LOCUSTS.]

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

 HOOFED LOCUSTS
 MOUNT TAMALPAIS—NORTH OF THE GOLDEN GATE
 MAP OF THE SIERRA NEVADA
 MOUNT SHASTA
 MOUNT HOOD
 MAP OF THE GLACIER COUNTRY
 MOUNT RAINIER; NORTH PUYALLUP GLACIER FROM EAGLE CLIFF
 KOLANA ROCK, HETCH-HETCHY VALLEY
 GENERAL GRANT TREE, GENERAL GRANT NATIONAL PARK
 MAP OF THE YOSEMITE VALLEY
 MAP OF THE YOSEMITE VALLEY, SHOWING PRESENT RESERVATION BOUNDARY
 RANCHERIA FALLS, HETCH-HETCHY VALLEY
 VIEW OF THE MONO PLAIN FROM THE FOOT OF BLOODY CAÑON
 LAKE TENAYA, ONE OF THE YOSEMITE FOUNTAINS
 THE DEATH OF A LAKE
 SHADOW LAKE (MERCED LAKE), YOSEMITE NATIONAL PARK
 VERNAL FALL, YOSEMITE VALLEY
 LAKE STARR KING
 VIEW IN THE SIERRA FOREST
 EDGE OF THE TIMBER LINE ON MOUNT SHASTA
 VIEW IN THE MAIN PINE BELT OF THE SIERRA FOREST
 NUT PINE
 THE GROVE FORM
 LOWER MARGIN OF THE MAIN PINE BELT, SHOWING OPEN CHARACTER OF WOODS
 SUGAR PINE ON EXPOSED RIDGE
 YOUNG SUGAR PINE BEGINNING TO BEAR CONES
 FOREST OF SEQUOIA, SUGAR PINE, AND DOUGLAS SPRUCE
 PINUS PONDEROSA
 SILVER PINE 210 FEET HIGH
 INCENSE CEDAR IN ITS PRIME
 FOREST OF GRAND SILVER FIRS
 VIEW OF FOREST OF THE MAGNIFICENT SILVER FIR
 SILVER-FIR FOREST GROWING ON MORAINES OF THE HOFFMAN AND TENAYA GLACIERS
 SEQUOIA GIGANTEA. VIEW IN GENERAL GRANT NATIONAL PARK
 MUIR GORGE, TUOLUMNE CAÑON—YOSEMITE NATIONAL PARK
 VIEW IN TUOLUMNE CAÑON, YOSEMITE NATIONAL PARK
 JUNIPER, OR RED CEDAR
 STORM-BEATEN JUNIPERS
 STORM-BEATEN HEMLOCK SPRUCE, FORTY FEET HIGH
 GROUP OF ERECT DWARF PINES
 A DWARF PINE
 OAK GROWING AMONG YELLOW PINES
 PATE VALLEY, SHOWING THE OAKS. TUOLUMNE CAÑON, YOSEMITE NATIONAL PARK
 TRACK OF DOUGLAS SQUIRREL ONCE DOWN AND UP A PINE-TREE WHEN SHOWING OFF TO A SPECTATOR
 SEEDS, WINGS, AND SCALE OF SUGAR PINE
 TRYING THE BOW
 A WIND-STORM IN THE CALIFORNIA FORESTS
 YELLOW PINE AND LIBOCEDRUS
 BRIDAL VEIL FALLS, YOSEMITE VALLEY
 WATER-OUZEL DIVING AND FEEDING
 ONE OF THE LATE-SUMMER FEEDING-GROUNDS OF THE OUZEL
 OUZEL ENTERING A WHITE CURRENT
 THE OUZEL AT HOME
 YOSEMITE BIRDS, SNOW-COUND AT THE FOOT OF INDIAN CAÑON
 SNOW-BOUND ON MOUNT SHASTA
 HEAD OF THE MERINO RAM
 HEAD OF ROCKY MOUNTAIN WILD SHEEP
 CROSSING A CAÑON STREAM
 WILD SHEEP JUMPING OVER A PRECIPICE
 INDIANS HUNTING WILD SHEEP
 A BEE-RANCH IN LOWER CALIFORNIA
 WILD BEE GARDEN
 IN THE SAN GABRIEL VALLEY.—WHITE SAGE
 A BEE-RANCH ON A SPUR OF THE SAN GABRIEL RANGE.—CARDINAL FLOWER
 WILD BUCKWHEAT.—A BEE-RANCH IN THE WILDERNESS
 A BEE-PASTURE ON THE MORAINE DESERT.—SPANISH BAYONET
 A BEE-KEEPER’S CABIN




CHAPTER I
THE SIERRA NEVADA


Go where you may within the bounds of California, mountains are ever in
sight, charming and glorifying every landscape. Yet so simple and
massive is the topography of the State in general views, that the main
central portion displays only one valley, and two chains of mountains
which seem almost perfectly regular in trend and height: the Coast
Range on the west side, the Sierra Nevada on the east. These two ranges
coming together in curves on the north and south inclose a magnificent
basin, with a level floor more than 400 miles long, and from 35 to 60
miles wide. This is the grand Central Valley of California, the waters
of which have only one outlet to the sea through the Golden Gate. But
with this general simplicity of features there is great complexity of
hidden detail. The Coast Range, rising as a grand green barrier against
the ocean, from 2000 to 8000 feet high, is composed of innumerable
forest-crowned spurs, ridges, and rolling hill-waves which inclose a
multitude of smaller valleys; some looking out through long,
forest-lined vistas to the sea; others, with but few trees, to the
Central Valley; while a thousand others yet smaller are embosomed and
concealed in mild, round-browed hills, each, with its own climate,
soil, and productions.

Making your way through the mazes of the Coast Range to the summit of
any of the inner peaks or passes opposite San Francisco, in the clear
springtime, the grandest and most telling of all California landscapes
is outspread before you. At your feet lies the great Central Valley
glowing golden in the sunshine, extending north and south farther than
the eye can reach, one smooth, flowery, lake-like bed of fertile soil.
Along its eastern margin rises the mighty Sierra, miles in height,
reposing like a smooth, cumulous cloud in the sunny sky, and so
gloriously colored, and so luminous, it seems to be not clothed with
light, but wholly composed of it, like the wall of some celestial city.
Along the top, and extending a good way down, you see a pale,
pearl-gray belt of snow; and below it a belt of blue and dark purple,
marking the extension of the forests; and along the base of the range a
broad belt of rose-purple and yellow, where lie the minor’s gold-fields
and the foot-hill gardens. All these colored belts blending smoothly
make a wall of light ineffably fine, and as beautiful as a rainbow, yet
firm as adamant.

When I first enjoyed this superb view, one glowing April day, from the
summit of the Pacheco Pass, the Central Valley, but little trampled or
plowed as yet, was one furred, rich sheet of golden compositae, and the
luminous wall of the mountains shone in all its glory. Then it seemed
to me the Sierra should be called not the Nevada, or Snowy Range, but
the Range of Light. And after ten years spent in the heart of it,
rejoicing and wondering, bathing in its glorious floods of light,
seeing the sunbursts of morning among the icy peaks, the noonday
radiance on the trees and rocks and snow, the flush of the alpenglow,
and a thousand dashing waterfalls with their marvelous abundance of
irised spray, it still seems to me above all others the Range of Light,
the most divinely beautiful of all the mountain-chains I have ever
seen.

The Sierra is about 500 miles long, 70 miles wide, and from 7000 to
nearly 15,000 feet high. In general views no mark of man is visible on
it, nor anything to suggest the richness of the life it cherishes, or
the depth and grandeur of its sculpture. None of its magnificent
forest-crowned ridges rises much above the general level to publish its
wealth. No great valley or lake is seen, or river, or group of
well-marked features of any kind, standing out in distinct pictures.
Even the summit-peaks, so clear and high in the sky, seem comparatively
smooth and featureless. Nevertheless, glaciers are still at work in the
shadows of the peaks, and thousands of lakes and meadows shine and
bloom beneath them, and the whole range is furrowed with cañons to a
depth of from 2000 to 5000 feet, in which once flowed majestic
glaciers, and in which now flow and sing a band of beautiful rivers.

Though of such stupendous depth, these famous cañons are not raw,
gloomy, jagged-walled gorges, savage and inaccessible. With rough
passages here and there they still make delightful pathways for the
mountaineer, conducting from the fertile lowlands to the highest icy
fountains, as a kind of mountain streets full of charming life and
light, graded and sculptured by the ancient glaciers, and presenting,
throughout all their courses, a rich variety of novel and attractive
scenery, the most attractive that has yet been discovered in the
mountain-ranges of the world.

In many places, especially in the middle region of the western flank of
the range, the main cañons widen into spacious valleys or parks,
diversified like artificial landscape-gardens, with charming groves and
meadows, and thickets of blooming bushes, while the lofty, retiring
walls, infinitely varied in form and sculpture, are fringed with ferns,
flowering-plants of many species, oaks, and evergreens, which find
anchorage on a thousand narrow steps and benches; while the whole is
enlivened and made glorious with rejoicing streams that come dancing
and foaming over the sunny brows of the cliffs to join the shining
river that flows in tranquil beauty down the middle of each one of
them.

The walls of these park valleys of the Yosemite kind are made up of
rocks mountains in size, partly separated from each other by narrow
gorges and side-cañons; and they are so sheer in front, and so
compactly built together on a level floor, that, comprehensively seen,
the parks they inclose look like immense halls or temples lighted from
above. Every rock seems to glow with life. Some lean back in majestic
repose; others, absolutely sheer, or nearly so, for thousands of feet,
advance their brows in thoughtful attitudes beyond their companions,
giving welcome to storms and calms alike, seemingly conscious yet
heedless of everything going on about them, awful in stern majesty,
types of permanence, yet associated with beauty of the frailest and
most fleeting forms; their feet set in pine-groves and gay emerald
meadows, their brows in the sky; bathed in light, bathed in floods of
singing water, while snow-clouds, avalanches, and the winds shine and
surge and wreathe about them as the years go by, as if into these
mountain mansions Nature had taken pains to gather her choicest
treasures to draw her lovers into close and confiding communion with
her.

[Illustration: MOUNT TAMALPAIS—NORTH OF THE GOLDEN GATE.]

Here, too, in the middle region of deepest cañons are the grandest
forest-trees, the Sequoia, king of conifers, the noble Sugar and Yellow
Pines, Douglas Spruce, Libocedrus, and the Silver Firs, each a giant of
its kind, assembled together in one and the same forest, surpassing all
other coniferous forests in the world, both in the number of its
species and in the size and beauty of its trees. The winds flow in
melody through their colossal spires, and they are vocal everywhere
with the songs of birds and running water. Miles of fragrant ceanothus
and manzanita bushes bloom beneath them, and lily gardens and meadows,
and damp, ferny glens in endless variety of fragrance and color,
compelling the admiration of every observer. Sweeping on over ridge and
valley, these noble trees extend a continuous belt from end to end of
the range, only slightly interrupted by sheer-walled cañons at
intervals of about fifteen and twenty miles. Here the great burly brown
bears delight to roam, harmonizing with the brown boles of the trees
beneath which they feed. Deer, also, dwell here, and find food and
shelter in the ceanothus tangles, with a multitude of smaller people.
Above this region of giants, the trees grow smaller until the utmost
limit of the timber line is reached on the stormy mountain-slopes at a
height of from ten to twelve thousand feet above the sea, where the
Dwarf Pine is so lowly and hard beset by storms and heavy snow, it is
pressed into flat tangles, over the tops of which we may easily walk.
Below the main forest belt the trees likewise diminish in size, frost
and burning drought repressing and blasting alike.

[Illustration: MAP OF THE SIERRA NEVADA]

The rose-purple zone along the base of the range comprehends nearly all
the famous gold region of California. And here it was that miners from
every country under the sun assembled in a wild, torrent-like rush to
seek their fortunes. On the banks of every river, ravine, and gully
they have left their marks. Every gravel- and boulder-bed has been
desperately riddled over and over again. But in this region the pick
and shovel, once wielded with savage enthusiasm, have been laid away,
and only quartz-mining is now being carried on to any considerable
extent. The zone in general is made up of low, tawny, waving
foot-hills, roughened here and there with brush and trees, and
outcropping masses of slate, colored gray and red with lichens. The
smaller masses of slate, rising abruptly from the dry, grassy sod in
leaning slabs, look like ancient tombstones in a deserted
burying-ground. In early spring, say from February to April, the whole
of this foot-hill belt is a paradise of bees and flowers. Refreshing
rains then fall freely, birds are busy building their nests, and the
sunshine is balmy and delightful. But by the end of May the soil,
plants, and sky seem to have been baked in an oven. Most of the plants
crumble to dust beneath the foot, and the ground is full of cracks;
while the thirsty traveler gazes with eager longing through the burning
glare to the snowy summits looming like hazy clouds in the distance.

The trees, mostly _Quercus Douglasii_ and _Pinus Sabiniana_, thirty to
forty feet high, with thin, pale-green foliage, stand far apart and
cast but little shade. Lizards glide about on the rocks enjoying a
constitution that no drought can dry, and ants in amazing numbers,
whose tiny sparks of life seem to burn the brighter with the increasing
heat, ramble industriously in long trains in search of food. Crows,
ravens, magpies—friends in distress—gather on the ground beneath the
best shade-trees, panting with drooping wings and bills wide open,
scarce a note from any of them during the midday hours. Quails, too,
seek the shade during the heat of the day about tepid pools in the
channels of the larger mid-river streams. Rabbits scurry from thicket
to thicket among the ceanothus bushes, and occasionally a long-eared
hare is seen cantering gracefully across the wider openings. The nights
are calm and dewless during the summer, and a thousand voices proclaim
the abundance of life, notwithstanding the desolating effect of dry
sunshine on the plants and larger animals. The hylas make a
delightfully pure and tranquil music after sunset; and coyotes, the
little, despised dogs of the wilderness, brave, hardy fellows, looking
like withered wisps of hay, bark in chorus for hours. Mining-towns,
most of them dead, and a few living ones with bright bits of
cultivation about them, occur at long intervals along the belt, and
cottages covered with climbing roses, in the midst of orange and peach
orchards, and sweet-scented hay-fields in fertile flats where water for
irrigation may be had. But they are mostly far apart, and make scarce
any mark in general views.

Every winter the High Sierra and the middle forest region get snow in
glorious abundance, and even the foot-hills are at times whitened. Then
all the range looks like a vast beveled wall of purest marble. The
rough places are then made smooth, the death and decay of the year is
covered gently and kindly, and the ground seems as clean as the sky.
And though silent in its flight from the clouds, and when it is taking
its place on rock, or tree, or grassy meadow, how soon the gentle snow
finds a voice! Slipping from the heights, gathering in avalanches, it
booms and roars like thunder, and makes a glorious show as it sweeps
down the mountain-side, arrayed in long, silken streamers and
wreathing, swirling films of crystal dust.

The north half of the range is mostly covered with floods of lava, and
dotted with volcanoes and craters, some of them recent and perfect in
form, others in various stages of decay. The south half is composed of
granite nearly from base to summit, while a considerable number of
peaks, in the middle of the range, are capped with metamorphic slates,
among which are Mounts Dana and Gibbs to the east of Yosemite Valley.
Mount Whitney, the culminating point of the range near its southern
extremity, lifts its helmet-shaped crest to a height of nearly 14,700
feet. Mount Shasta, a colossal volcanic cone, rises to a height of
14,440 feet at the northern extremity, and forms a noble landmark for
all the surrounding region within a radius of a hundred miles. Residual
masses of volcanic rocks occur throughout most of the granitic southern
portion also, and a considerable number of old volcanoes on the flanks,
especially along the eastern base of the range near Mono Lake and
southward. But it is only to the northward that the entire range, from
base to summit, is covered with lava.

From the summit of Mount Whitney only granite is seen. Innumerable
peaks and spires but little lower than its own storm-beaten crags rise
in groups like forest-trees, in full view, segregated by cañons of
tremendous depth and ruggedness. On Shasta nearly every feature in the
vast view speaks of the old volcanic fires. Far to the northward, in
Oregon, the icy volcanoes of Mount Pitt and the Three Sisters rise
above the dark evergreen woods. Southward innumerable smaller craters
and cones are distributed along the axis of the range and on each
flank. Of these, Lassen’s Butte is the highest, being nearly 11,000
feet above sea-level. Miles of its flanks are reeking and bubbling with
hot springs, many of them so boisterous and sulphurous they seem over
ready to become spouting geysers like those of the Yellowstone.

The Cinder Cone near marks the most recent volcanic eruption in the
Sierra. It is a symmetrical truncated cone about 700 feet high, covered
with gray cinders and ashes, and has a regular unchanged crater on its
summit, in which a few small Two-leaved Pines are growing. These show
that the age of the cone is not less than eighty years. It stands
between two lakes, which a short time ago were one. Before the cone was
built, a flood of rough vesicular lava was poured into the lake,
cutting it in two, and, overflowing its banks, the fiery flood advanced
into the pine-woods, overwhelming the trees in its way, the charred
ends of some of which may still be seen projecting from beneath the
snout of the lava-stream where it came to rest. Later still there was
an eruption of ashes and loose obsidian cinders, probably from the same
vent, which, besides forming the Cinder Cone, scattered a heavy shower
over the surrounding woods for miles to a depth of from six inches to
several feet.

The history of this last Sierra eruption is also preserved in the
traditions of the Pitt River Indians. They tell of a fearful time of
darkness, when the sky was black with ashes and smoke that threatened
every living thing with death, and that when at length the sun appeared
once more it was red like blood.

Less recent craters in great numbers roughen the adjacent region; some
of them with lakes in their throats, others overgrown with trees and
flowers, Nature in these old hearths and firesides having literally
given beauty for ashes. On the northwest side of Mount Shasta there is
a subordinate cone about 3000 feet below the summit, which, has been
active subsequent to the breaking up of the main ice-cap that once
covered the mountain, as is shown by its comparatively unwasted crater
and the streams of unglaciated lava radiating from it. The main summit
is about a mile and a half in diameter, bounded by small crumbling
peaks and ridges, among which we seek in vain for the outlines of the
ancient crater.

These ruinous masses, and the deep glacial grooves that flute the sides
of the mountain, show that it has been considerably lowered and wasted
by ice; how much we have no sure means of knowing. Just below the
extreme summit hot sulphurous gases and vapor issue from irregular
fissures, mixed with spray derived from melting snow, the last feeble
expression of the mighty force that built the mountain. Not in one
great convulsion was Shasta given birth. The crags of the summit and
the sections exposed by the glaciers down the sides display enough of
its internal framework to prove that comparatively long periods of
quiescence intervened between many distinct eruptions, during which the
cooling lavas ceased to flow, and became permanent additions to the
bulk of the growing mountain. With alternate haste and deliberation
eruption succeeded eruption till the old volcano surpassed even its
present sublime height.

[Illustration: MOUNT SHASTA]

Standing on the icy top of this, the grandest of all the fire-mountains
of the Sierra, we can hardly fail to look forward to its next eruption.
Gardens, vineyards, homes have been planted confidingly on the flanks
of volcanoes which, after remaining steadfast for ages, have suddenly
blazed into violent action, and poured forth overwhelming floods of
fire. It is known that more than a thousand years of cool calm have
intervened between violent eruptions. Like gigantic geysers spouting
molten rock instead of water, volcanoes work and rest, and we have no
sure means of knowing whether they are dead when still, or only
sleeping.

Along the western base of the range a telling series of sedimentary
rocks containing the early history of the Sierra are now being studied.
But leaving for the present these first chapters, we see that only a
very short geological time ago, just before the coming on of that
winter of winters called the glacial period, a vast deluge of molten
rocks poured from many a chasm and crater on the flanks and summit of
the range, filling lake basins and river channels, and obliterating
nearly every existing feature on the northern portion. At length these
all-destroying floods ceased to flow. But while the great volcanic
cones built up along the axis still burned and smoked, the whole Sierra
passed under the domain of ice and snow. Then over the bald,
featureless, fire-blackened mountains, glaciers began to crawl,
covering them from the summits to the sea with a mantle of ice; and
then with infinite deliberation the work went on of sculpturing the
range anew. These mighty agents of erosion, halting never through
unnumbered centuries, crushed and ground the flinty lavas and granites
beneath their crystal folds, wasting and building until in the fullness
of time the Sierra was born again, brought to light nearly as we behold
it today, with glaciers and snow-crushed pines at the top of the range,
wheat-fields and orange-groves at the foot of it.

This change from icy darkness and death to life and beauty was slow, as
we count time, and is still going on, north and south, over all the
world wherever glaciers exist, whether in the form of distinct rivers,
as in Switzerland, Norway, the mountains of Asia, and the Pacific
Coast; or in continuous mantling folds, as in portions of Alaska,
Greenland, Franz-Joseph-Land, Nova Zembla, Spitzbergen, and the lands
about the South Pole. But in no country, as far as I know, may these
majestic changes be studied to better advantage than in the plains and
mountains of California.

Toward the close of the glacial period, when the snow-clouds became
less fertile and the melting waste of sunshine became greater, the
lower folds of the ice-sheet in California, discharging fleets of
icebergs into the sea, began to shallow and recede from the lowlands,
and then move slowly up the flanks of the Sierra in compliance with the
changes of climate. The great white mantle on the mountains broke up
into a series of glaciers more or less distinct and river-like, with
many tributaries, and these again were melted and divided into still
smaller glaciers, until now only a few of the smallest residual topmost
branches of the grand system exist on the cool slopes of the summit
peaks.

Plants and animals, biding their time, closely followed the retiring
ice, bestowing quick and joyous animation on the new-born landscapes.
Pine-trees marched up the sun-warmed moraines in long, hopeful files,
taking the ground and establishing themselves as soon as it was ready
for them; brown-spiked sedges fringed the shores of the newborn lakes;
young rivers roared in the abandoned channels of the glaciers; flowers
bloomed around the feet of the great burnished domes,—while with quick
fertility mellow beds of soil, settling and warming, offered food to
multitudes of Nature’s waiting children, great and small, animals as
well as plants; mice, squirrels, marmots, deer, bears, elephants, etc.
The ground burst into bloom with magical rapidity, and the young
forests into bird-song: life in every form warming and sweetening and
growing richer as the years passed away over the mighty Sierra so
lately suggestive of death and consummate desolation only.

It is hard without long and loving study to realize the magnitude of
the work done on these mountains during the last glacial period by
glaciers, which are only streams of closely compacted snow-crystals.
Careful study of the phenomena presented goes to show that the
pre-glacial condition of the range was comparatively simple: one vast
wave of stone in which a thousand mountains, domes, cañons, ridges,
etc., lay concealed. And in the development of these Nature chose for a
tool not the earthquake or lightning to rend and split asunder, not the
stormy torrent or eroding rain, but the tender snow-flowers noiselessly
falling through unnumbered centuries, the offspring of the sun and sea.
Laboring harmoniously in united strength they crushed and ground and
wore away the rocks in their march, making vast beds of soil, and at
the same time developed and fashioned the landscapes into the
delightful variety of hill and dale and lordly mountain that mortals
call beauty. Perhaps more than a mile in average depth has the range
been thus degraded during the last glacial period,—a quantity of
mechanical work almost inconceivably great. And our admiration must be
excited again and again as we toil and study and learn that this vast
job of rockwork, so far-reaching in its influences, was done by agents
so fragile and small as are these flowers of the mountain clouds.
Strong only by force of numbers, they carried away entire mountains,
particle by particle, block by block, and cast them into the sea;
sculptured, fashioned, modeled all the range, and developed its
predestined beauty. All these new Sierra landscapes were evidently
predestined, for the physical structure of the rocks on which the
features of the scenery depend was acquired while they lay at least a
mile deep below the pre-glacial surface. And it was while these
features were taking form in the depths of the range, the particles of
the rocks marching to their appointed places in the dark with reference
to the coming beauty, that the particles of icy vapor in the sky
marching to the same music assembled to bring them to the light. Then,
after their grand task was done, these bands of snow-flowers, these
mighty glaciers, were melted and removed as if of no more importance
than dew destined to last but an hour. Few, however, of Nature’s agents
have left monuments so noble and enduring as they. The great granite
domes a mile high, the cañons as deep, the noble peaks, the Yosemite
valleys, these, and indeed nearly all other features of the Sierra
scenery, are glacier monuments.

Contemplating the works of these flowers of the sky, one may easily
fancy them endowed with life: messengers sent down to work in the
mountain mines on errands of divine love. Silently flying through the
darkened air, swirling, glinting, to their appointed places, they seem
to have taken counsel together, saying, “Come, we are feeble; let us
help one another. We are many, and together we will be strong. Marching
in close, deep ranks, let us roll away the stones from these mountain
sepulchers, and set the landscapes free. Let us uncover these
clustering domes. Here let us carve a lake basin; there, a Yosemite
Valley; here, a channel for a river with fluted steps and brows for the
plunge of songful cataracts. Yonder let us spread broad sheets of soil,
that man and beast may be fed; and here pile trains of boulders for
pines and giant Sequoias. Here make ground for a meadow; there, for a
garden and grove, making it smooth and fine for small daisies and
violets and beds of heathy bryanthus, spicing it well with crystals,
garnet feldspar, and zircon.” Thus and so on it has oftentimes seemed
to me sang and planned and labored the hearty snow-flower crusaders;
and nothing that I can write can possibly exaggerate the grandeur and
beauty of their work. Like morning mist they have vanished in sunshine,
all save the few small companies that still linger on the coolest
mountainsides, and, as residual glaciers, are still busily at work
completing the last of the lake basins, the last beds of soil, and the
sculpture of some of the highest peaks.

[Illustration: MOUNT HOOD]




CHAPTER II
THE GLACIERS


Of the small residual glaciers mentioned in the preceding chapter, I
have found sixty-five in that portion of the range lying between
latitude 36° 30′ and 39°. They occur singly or in small groups on the
north sides of the peaks of the High Sierra, sheltered beneath broad
frosty shadows, in amphitheaters of their own making, where the snow,
shooting down from the surrounding heights in avalanches, is most
abundant. Over two thirds of the entire number lie between latitude 37°
and 38°, and form the highest fountains of the San Joaquin, Merced,
Tuolumne, and Owen’s rivers.

The glaciers of Switzerland, like those of the Sierra, are mere wasting
remnants of mighty ice-floods that once filled the great valleys and
poured into the sea. So, also, are those of Norway, Asia, and South
America. Even the grand continuous mantles of ice that still cover
Greenland, Spitsbergen, Nova Zembla, Franz-Joseph-Land, parts of
Alaska, and the south polar region are shallowing and shrinking. Every
glacier in the world is smaller than it once was. All the world is
growing warmer, or the crop of snow-flowers is diminishing. But in
contemplating the condition of the glaciers of the world, we must bear
in mind while trying to account for the changes going on that the same
sunshine that wastes them builds them. Every glacier records the
expenditure of an enormous amount of sun-heat in lifting the vapor for
the snow of which it is made from the ocean to the mountains, as
Tyndall strikingly shows.

The number of glaciers in the Alps, according to the Schlagintweit
brothers, is 1100, of which 100 may be regarded as primary, and the
total area of ice, snow, and _névé_ is estimated at 1177 square miles,
or an average for each glacier of little more than one square mile. On
the same authority, the average height above sea-level at which they
melt is about 7414 feet. The Grindelwald glacier descends below 4000
feet, and one of the Mont Blanc glaciers reaches nearly as low a point.
One of the largest of the Himalaya glaciers on the head waters of the
Ganges does not, according to Captain Hodgson, descend below 12,914
feet. The largest of the Sierra glaciers on Mount Shasta descends to
within 9500 feet of the level of the sea, which, as far as I have
observed, is the lowest point reached by any glacier within the bounds
of California, the average height of all being not far from 11,000
feet.

The changes that have taken place in the glacial conditions of the
Sierra from the time of greatest extension is well illustrated by the
series of glaciers of every size and form extending along the mountains
of the coast to Alaska. A general exploration of this instructive
region shows that to the north of California, through Oregon and
Washington, groups of active glaciers still exist on all the high
volcanic cones of the Cascade Range,—Mount Pitt, the Three Sisters,
Mounts Jefferson, Hood, St. Helens, Adams, Rainier, Baker, and
others,—some of them of considerable size, though none of them approach
the sea. Of these mountains Rainier, in Washington, is the highest and
iciest. Its dome-like summit, between 14,000 and 15,000 feet high, is
capped with ice, and eight glaciers, seven to twelve miles long,
radiate from it as a center, and form the sources of the principal
streams of the State. The lowest-descending of this fine group flows
through beautiful forests to within 3500 feet of the sea-level, and
sends forth a river laden with glacier mud and sand. On through British
Columbia and southeastern Alaska the broad, sustained mountain-chain,
extending along the coast, is generally glacier-bearing. The upper
branches of nearly all the main cañons and fiords are occupied by
glaciers, which gradually increase in size, and descend lower until the
high region between Mount Fairweather and Mount St. Elias is reached,
where a considerable number discharge into the waters of the ocean.
This is preëminently the ice-land of Alaska and of the entire Pacific
Coast.

[Illustration: MAP OF THE GLACIER COUNTRY]

Northward from here the glaciers gradually diminish in size and
thickness, and melt at higher levels. In Prince William Sound and
Cook’s Inlet many fine glaciers are displayed, pouring from the
surrounding mountains; but to the north of latitude 62° few, if any,
glaciers remain, the ground being mostly low and the snowfall light.
Between latitude 56° and 60° there are probably more than 5000
glaciers, not counting the smallest. Hundreds of the largest size
descend through the forests to the level of the sea, or near it, though
as far as my own observations have reached, after a pretty thorough
examination of the region, not more than twenty-five discharge icebergs
into the sea. All the long high-walled fiords into which these great
glaciers of the first class flow are of course crowded with icebergs of
every conceivable form, which are detached with thundering noise at
intervals of a few minutes from an imposing ice-wall that is thrust
forward into deep water. But these Pacific Coast icebergs are small as
compared with those of Greenland and the Antarctic region, and only a
few of them escape from the intricate system of channels, with which
this portion of the coast is fringed, into the open sea. Nearly all of
them are swashed and drifted by wind and tide back and forth in the
fiords until finally melted by the ocean water, the sunshine, the warm
winds, and the copious rains of summer. Only one glacier on the coast,
observed by Prof. Russell, discharges its bergs directly into the open
sea, at Icy Cape, opposite Mount St. Elias. The southernmost of the
glaciers that reach the sea occupies a narrow, picturesque fiord about
twenty miles to the northwest of the mouth of the Stikeen River, in
latitude 56° 50′. The fiord is called by the natives “Hutli,” or
Thunder Bay, from the noise made by the discharge of the icebergs.
About one degree farther north there are four of these complete
glaciers, discharging at the heads of the long arms of Holkam Bay. At
the head of the Tahkoo Inlet, still farther north, there is one; and at
the head and around the sides of Glacier Bay, trending in a general
northerly direction from Cross Sound in latitude 58° to 59°, there are
seven of these complete glaciers pouring bergs into the bay and its
branches, and keeping up an eternal thundering. The largest of this
group, the Muir, has upward of 200 tributaries, and a width below the
confluence of the main tributaries of about twenty-five miles. Between
the west side of this icy bay and the ocean all the ground, high and
low, excepting the peaks of the Fairweather Range, is covered with a
mantle of ice from 1000 to probably 3000 feet thick, which discharges
by many distinct mouths.

[Illustration: MOUNT RAINIER; NORTH PUYALLUP GLACIER FROM EAGLE CLIFF]

This fragmentary ice-sheet, and the immense glaciers about Mount St.
Elias, together with the multitude of separate river-like glaciers that
load the slopes of the coast mountains, evidently once formed part of a
continuous ice-sheet that flowed over all the region hereabouts, and
only a comparatively short time ago extended as far southward as the
mouth of the Strait of Juan de Fuca, probably farther. All the islands
of the Alexander Archipelago, as well as the headlands and promontories
of the mainland, display telling traces of this great mantle that are
still fresh and unmistakable. They all have the forms of the greatest
strength with reference to the action of a vast rigid press of
oversweeping ice from the north and northwest, and their surfaces have
a smooth, rounded, overrubbed appearance, generally free from angles.
The intricate labyrinth of canals, channels, straits, passages, sounds,
narrows, etc. between the islands, and extending into the mainland, of
course manifest in their forms and trends and general characteristics
the same subordination to the grinding action of universal glaciation
as to their origin, and differ from the islands and banks of the fiords
only in being portions of the pre-glacial margin of the continent more
deeply eroded, and therefore covered by the ocean waters which flowed
into them as the ice was melted out of them. The formation and
extension of fiords in this manner is still going on, and may be
witnessed in many places in Glacier Bay, Yakutat Bay, and adjacent
regions. That the domain of the sea is being extended over the land by
the wearing away of its shores, is well known, but in these icy regions
of Alaska, and even as far south as Vancouver Island, the coast rocks
have been so short a time exposed to wave-action they are but little
wasted as yet. In these regions the extension of the sea effected by
its own action in post-glacial time is scarcely appreciable as compared
with that effected by ice-action.

Traces of the vanished glaciers made during the period of greater
extension abound on the Sierra as far south as latitude 36°. Even the
polished rock surfaces, the most evanescent of glacial records, are
still found in a wonderfully perfect state of preservation on the upper
half of the middle portion of the range, and form the most striking of
all the glacial phenomena. They occur in large irregular patches in the
summit and middle regions, and though they have been subjected to the
action of the weather with its corroding storms for thousands of years,
their mechanical excellence is such that they still reflect the
sunbeams like glass, and attract the attention of every observer. The
attention of the mountaineer is seldom arrested by moraines, however
regular and high they may be, or by cañons, however deep, or by rocks,
however noble in form and sculpture; but he stoops and rubs his hands
admiringly on the shining surfaces and trios hard to account for their
mysterious smoothness. He has seen the snow descending in avalanches,
but concludes this cannot be the work of snow, for he finds it where no
avalanches occur. Nor can water have done it, for he sees this
smoothness glowing on the sides and tops of the highest domes. Only the
winds of all the agents he knows seem capable of flowing in the
directions indicated by the scoring. Indians, usually so little curious
about geological phenomena, have come to me occasionally and asked me,
“What makeum the ground so smooth at Lake Tenaya?” Even horses and dogs
gaze wonderingly at the strange brightness of the ground, and smell the
polished spaces and place their feet cautiously on them when they come
to them for the first time, as if afraid of sinking. The most perfect
of the polished pavements and walls lie at an elevation of from 7000 to
9000 feet above the sea, where the rock is compact silicious granite.
Small dim patches may be found as low as 3000 feet on the driest and
most enduring portions of sheer walls with a southern exposure, and on
compact swelling bosses partially protected from rain by a covering of
large boulders. On the north half of the range the striated and
polished surfaces are less common, not only because this part of the
chain is lower, but because the surface rocks are chiefly porous lavas
subject to comparatively rapid waste. The ancient moraines also, though
well preserved on most of the south half of the range, are nearly
obliterated to the northward, but then material is found scattered and
disintegrated.

A similar blurred condition of the superficial records of glacial
action obtains throughout most of Oregon, Washington, British Columbia,
and Alaska, due in great part to the action of excessive moisture. Even
in southeastern Alaska, where the most extensive glaciers on the
continent are, the more evanescent of the traces of their former
greater extension, though comparatively recent, are more obscure than
those of the ancient California glaciers whore the climate is drier and
the rocks more resisting.

These general views of the glaciers of the Pacific Coast will enable my
readers to see something of the changes that have taken place in
California, and will throw light on the residual glaciers of the High
Sierra.

Prior to the autumn of 1871 the glaciers of the Sierra were unknown. In
October of that year I discovered the Black Mountain Glacier in a
shadowy amphitheater between Black and Rod Mountains, two of the peaks
of the Merced group. This group is the highest portion of a spur that
straggles out from the main axis of the range in the direction of
Yosemite Valley. At the time of this interesting discovery I was
exploring the _névé_ amphitheaters of the group, and tracing the
courses of the ancient glaciers that once poured from its ample
fountains through the Illilouette Basin and the Yosemite Valley, not
expecting to find any active glaciers so far south in the land of
sunshine.

Beginning on the northwestern extremity of the group, I explored the
chief tributary basins in succession, their moraines, roches
moutonnées, and splendid glacier pavements, taking them in regular
succession without any reference to the time consumed in their study.
The monuments of the tributary that poured its ice from between Red and
Black Mountains I found to be the most interesting of them all; and
when I saw its magnificent moraines extending in majestic curves from
the spacious amphitheater between the mountains, I was exhilarated with
the work that lay before me. It was one of the golden days of the
Sierra Indian summer, when the rich sunshine glorifies every landscape
however rocky and cold, and suggests anything rather than glaciers. The
path of the vanished glacier was warm now, and shone in many places as
if washed with silver. The tall pines growing on the moraines stood
transfigured in the glowing light, the poplar groves on the levels of
the basin were masses of orange-yellow, and the late-blooming
goldenrods added gold to gold. Pushing on over my rosy glacial highway,
I passed lake after lake set in solid basins of granite, and many a
thicket and meadow watered by a stream that issues from the
amphitheater and links the lakes together; now wading through plushy
bogs knee-deep in yellow and purple sphagnum; now passing over bare
rock. The main lateral moraines that bounded the view on either hand
are from 100 to nearly 200 feet high, and about as regular as
artificial embankments, and covered with a superb growth of Silver Fir
and Pine. But this garden and forest luxuriance was speedily left
behind. The trees were dwarfed as I ascended; patches of the alpine
bryanthus and cassiope began to appear, and arctic willows pressed into
flat carpets by the winter snow. The lakelets, which a few miles down
the valley were so richly embroidered with flowery meadows, had here,
at an elevation of 10,000 feet, only small brown mats of carex, leaving
bare rocks around more than half their shores. Yet amid this alpine
suppression the Mountain Pine bravely tossed his storm-beaten branches
on the ledges and buttresses of Red Mountain, some specimens being over
100 feet high, and 24 feet in circumference, seemingly as fresh and
vigorous as the giants of the lower zones.

Evening came on just as I got fairly within the portal of the main
amphitheater. It is about a mile wide, and a little less than two miles
long. The crumbling spurs and battlements of Red Mountain bound it on
the north, the somber, rudely sculptured precipices of Black Mountain
on the south, and a hacked, splintery _col_, curving around from
mountain to mountain, shuts it in on the east.

I chose a camping-ground on the brink of one of the lakes where a
thicket of Hemlock Spruce sheltered me from the night wind. Then, after
making a tin-cupful of tea, I sat by my camp-fire reflecting on the
grandeur and significance of the glacial records I had seen. As the
night advanced the mighty rock walls of my mountain mansion seemed to
come nearer, while the starry sky in glorious brightness stretched
across like a ceiling from wall to wall, and fitted closely down into
all the spiky irregularities of the summits. Then, after a long
fireside rest and a glance at my note-book, I cut a few leafy branches
for a bed, and fell into the clear, death-like sleep of the tired
mountaineer.

Early next morning I set out to trace the grand old glacier that had
done so much for the beauty of the Yosemite region back to its farthest
fountains, enjoying the charm that every explorer feels in Nature’s
untrodden wildernesses. The voices of the mountains were still asleep.
The wind scarce stirred the pine-needles. The sun was up, but it was
yet too cold for the birds and the few burrowing animals that dwell
here. Only the stream, cascading from pool to pool, seemed to be wholly
awake. Yet the spirit of the opening day called to action. The sunbeams
came streaming gloriously through the jagged openings of the _col_,
glancing on the burnished pavements and lighting the silvery lakes,
while every sun-touched rock burned white on its edges like melting
iron in a furnace. Passing round the north shore of my camp lake I
followed the central stream past many cascades from lakelet to lakelet.
The scenery became more rigidly arctic, the Dwarf Pines and Hemlocks
disappeared, and the stream was bordered with icicles. As the sun rose
higher rocks were loosened on shattered portions of the cliffs, and
came down in rattling avalanches, echoing wildly from crag to crag.

The main lateral moraines that extend from the jaws of the amphitheater
into the Illilouette Basin are continued in straggling masses along the
walls of the amphitheater, while separate boulders, hundreds of tons in
weight, are left stranded here and there out in the middle of the
channel. Here, also, I observed a series of small terminal moraines
ranged along the south wall of the amphitheater, corresponding in size
and form with the shadows cast by the highest portions. The meaning of
this correspondence between moraines and shadows was afterward made
plain. Tracing the stream back to the last of its chain of lakelets, I
noticed a deposit of fine gray mud on the bottom except where the force
of the entering current had prevented its settling. It looked like the
mud worn from a grindstone, and I at once suspected its glacial origin,
for the stream that was carrying it came gurgling out of the base of a
raw moraine that seemed in process of formation. Not a plant or
weather-stain was visible on its rough, unsettled surface. It is from
60 to over 100 feet high, and plunges forward at an angle of 38°.
Cautiously picking my way, I gained the top of the moraine and was
delighted to see a small but well characterized glacier swooping down
from the gloomy precipices of Black Mountain in a finely graduated
curve to the moraine on which I stood. The compact ice appeared on all
the lower portions of the glacier, though gray with dirt and stones
embedded in it. Farther up the ice disappeared beneath coarse
granulated snow. The surface of the glacier was further characterized
by dirt bands and the outcropping edges of the blue veins, showing the
laminated structure of the ice. The uppermost crevasse, or
“bergschrund,” where the _névé_ was attached to the mountain, was from
12 to 14 feet wide, and was bridged in a few places by the remains of
snow avalanches. Creeping along the edge of the schrund, holding on
with benumbed fingers, I discovered clear sections where the bedded
structure was beautifully revealed. The surface snow, though sprinkled
with stones shot down from the cliffs, was in some places almost pure,
gradually becoming crystalline and changing to whitish porous ice of
different shades of color, and this again changing at a depth of 20 or
30 feet to blue ice, some of the ribbon-like bands of which were nearly
pure, and blended with the paler bands in the most gradual and delicate
manner imaginable. A series of rugged zigzags enabled me to make my way
down into the weird under-world of the crevasse. Its chambered hollows
were hung with a multitude of clustered icicles, amid which pale,
subdued light pulsed and shimmered with indescribable loveliness. Water
dripped and tinkled overhead, and from far below came strange, solemn
murmurings from currents that were feeling their way through veins and
fissures in the dark. The chambers of a glacier are perfectly
enchanting, notwithstanding one feels out of place in their frosty
beauty. I was soon cold in my shirt-sleeves, and the leaning wall
threatened to engulf me; yet it was hard to leave the delicious music
of the water and the lovely light. Coming again to the surface, I
noticed boulders of every size on their journeys to the terminal
moraine—journeys of more than a hundred years, without a single stop,
night or day, winter or summer.

The sun gave birth to a network of sweet-voiced rills that ran
gracefully down the glacier, curling and swirling in their shining
channels, and cutting clear sections through the porous surface-ice
into the solid blue, where the structure of the glacier was beautifully
illustrated.

The series of small terminal moraines which I had observed in the
morning, along the south wall of the amphitheater, correspond in every
way with the moraine of this glacier, and their distribution with
reference to shadows was now understood. When the climatic changes came
on that caused the melting and retreat of the main glacier that filled
the amphitheater, a series of residual glaciers were left in the cliff
shadows, under the protection of which they lingered, until they formed
the moraines we are studying. Then, as the snow became still less
abundant, all of them vanished in succession, except the one just
described; and the cause of its longer life is sufficiently apparent in
the greater area of snow-basin it drains, and its more perfect
protection from wasting sunshine. How much longer this little glacier
will last depends, of course, on the amount of snow it receives from
year to year, as compared with melting waste.

After this discovery, I made excursions over all the High Sierra,
pushing my explorations summer after summer, and discovered that what
at first sight in the distance looked like extensive snow-fields, wore
in great part glaciers, busily at work completing the sculpture of the
summit-peaks so grandly blocked out by their giant predecessors.

On August 21, I set a series of stakes in the Maclure Glacier, near
Mount Lyell, and found its rate of motion to be little more than an
inch a day in the middle, showing a great contrast to the Muir Glacier
in Alaska, which, near the front, flows at a rate of from five to ten
feet in twenty-four hours. Mount Shasta has three glaciers, but Mount
Whitney, although it is the highest mountain in the range, does not now
cherish a single glacier. Small patches of lasting snow and ice occur
on its northern slopes, but they are shallow, and present no well
marked evidence of glacial motion. Its sides, however, are scored and
polished in many places by the action of its ancient glaciers that
flowed east and west as tributaries of the great glaciers that once
filled the valleys of the Kern and Owen’s rivers.




CHAPTER III
THE SNOW


The first snow that whitens the Sierra, usually falls about the end of
October or early in November, to a depth of a few inches, after months
of the most charming Indian summer weather imaginable. But in a few
days, this light covering mostly melts from the slopes exposed to the
sun and causes but little apprehension on the part of mountaineers who
may be lingering among the high peaks at this time. The first general
winter storm that yields snow that is to form a lasting portion of the
season’s supply, seldom breaks on the mountains before the end of
November. Then, warned by the sky, cautions mountaineers, together with
the wild sheep, deer, and most of the birds and bears, make haste to
the lowlands or foot-hills; and burrowing marmots, mountain beavers,
wood-rats, and such people go into winter quarters, some of them not
again to see the light of day until the general awakening and
resurrection of the spring in June or July. The first heavy fall is
usually from about two to four feet in depth. Then, with intervals of
splendid sunshine, storm succeeds storm, heaping snow on snow, until
thirty to fifty feet has fallen. But on account of its settling and
compacting, and the almost constant waste from melting and evaporation,
the average depth actually found at any time seldom exceeds ten feet in
the forest region, or fifteen feet along the slopes of the summit
peaks.

Even during the coldest weather evaporation never wholly ceases, and
the sunshine that abounds between the storms is sufficiently powerful
to melt the surface more or less through all the winter months. Waste
from melting also goes on to some extent on the bottom from heat stored
up in the rocks, and given off slowly to the snow in contact with them,
as is shown by the rising of the streams on all the higher regions
after the first snowfall, and their steady sustained flow all winter.

The greater portion of the snow deposited around the lofty summits of
the range falls in small crisp flakes and broken crystals, or, when
accompanied by strong winds and low temperature, the crystals, instead
of being locked together in their fall to form tufted flakes, are
beaten and broken into meal and fine dust. But down in the forest
region the greater portion comes gently to the ground, light and
feathery, some of the flakes in mild weather being nearly an inch in
diameter, and it is evenly distributed and kept from drifting to any
great extent by the shelter afforded by the large trees. Every tree
during the progress of gentle storms is loaded with, fairy bloom at the
coldest and darkest time of year, bending the branches, and hushing
every singing needle. But as soon as the storm is over, and the sun
shines, the snow at once begins to shift and settle and fall from the
branches in miniature avalanches, and the white forest soon becomes
green again. The snow on the ground also settles and thaws every bright
day, and freezes at night, until it becomes coarsely granulated, and
loses every trace of its rayed crystalline structure, and then a man
may walk firmly over its frozen surface as if on ice. The forest region
up to an elevation of 7000 feet is usually in great part free from snow
in June, but at this time the higher regions are still heavy-laden, and
are not touched by spring weather to any considerable extent before the
middle or end of July.

One of the most striking effects of the snow on the mountains is the
burial of the rivers and small lakes.

As the snow fa’s in the river
A moment white, then lost forever,


sang Burns, in illustrating the fleeting character of human pleasure.
The first snowflakes that fall into the Sierra rivers vanish thus
suddenly; but in great storms, when the temperature is low, the
abundance of the snow at length chills the water nearly to the
freezing-point, and then, of course, it ceases to melt and consume the
snow so suddenly. The falling flakes and crystals form, cloud-like
masses of blue sludge, which are swept forward with the current and
carried down to warmer climates many miles distant, while some are
lodged against logs and rocks and projecting points of the banks, and
last for days, piled high above the level of the water, and show white
again, instead of being at once “lost forever,” while the rivers
themselves are at length lost for months during the snowy period. The
snow is first built out from the banks in bossy, over-curling drifts,
compacting and cementing until the streams are spanned. They then flow
in the dark beneath a continuous covering across the snowy zone, which
is about thirty miles wide. All the Sierra rivers and their tributaries
in these high regions are thus lost every winter, as if another glacial
period had come on. Not a drop of running water is to be seen excepting
at a few points where large falls occur, though the rush and rumble of
the heavier currents may still be heard. Toward spring, when the
weather is warm during the day and frosty at night, repeated thawing
and freezing and new layers of snow render the bridging-masses dense
and firm, so that one may safely walk across the streams, or even lead
a horse across them without danger of falling through. In June the
thinnest parts of the winter ceiling, and those most exposed to
sunshine, begin to give way, forming dark, rugged-edged, pit-like
sinks, at the bottom of which the rushing water may be seen. At the end
of June only here and there may the mountaineer find a secure
snow-bridge. The most lasting of the winter bridges, thawing from below
as well as from above, because of warm currents of air passing through
the tunnels, are strikingly arched and sculptured; and by the
occasional freezing of the oozing, dripping water of the ceiling they
become brightly and picturesquely icy. In some of the reaches, where
there is a free margin, we may walk through them. Small skylights
appearing here and there, these tunnels are not very dark. The roaring
river fills all the arching way with impressively loud reverberating
music, which is sweetened at times by the ouzel, a bird that is not
afraid to go wherever a stream may go, and to sing wherever a stream
sings.

All the small alpine pools and lakelets are in like manner obliterated
from the winter landscapes, either by being first frozen and then
covered by snow, or by being filled in by avalanches. The first
avalanche of the season shot into a lake basin may perhaps find the
surface frozen. Then there is a grand crashing of breaking ice and
dashing of waves mingled with the low, deep booming of the avalanche.
Detached masses of the invading snow, mixed with fragments of ice,
drift about in sludgy, island-like heaps, while the main body of it
forms a talus with its base wholly or in part resting on the bottom of
the basin, as controlled by its depth and the size of the avalanche.
The next avalanche, of course, encroaches still farther, and so on with
each in succession until the entire basin may be filled and its water
sponged up or displaced. This huge mass of sludge, more or less mixed
with sand, stones, and perhaps timber, is frozen to a considerable
depth, and much sun-heat is required to thaw it. Some of these
unfortunate lakelets are not clear of ice and snow until near the end
of summer. Others are never quite free, opening only on the side
opposite the entrance of the avalanches. Some show only a narrow
crescent of water lying between the shore and sheer bluffs of icy
compacted snow, masses of which breaking off float in front like
icebergs in a miniature Arctic Ocean, while the avalanche heaps leaning
back against the mountains look like small glaciers. The frontal cliffs
are in some instances quite picturesque, and with the berg-dotted
waters in front of them lighted with sunshine are exceedingly
beautiful. It often happens that while one side of a lake basin is
hopelessly snow-buried and frozen, the other, enjoying sunshine, is
adorned with beautiful flower-gardens. Some of the smaller lakes are
extinguished in an instant by a heavy avalanche either of rocks or
snow. The rolling, sliding, ponderous mass entering on one side sweeps
across the bottom and up the opposite side, displacing the water and
even scraping the basin clean, and shoving the accumulated rocks and
sediments up the farther bank and taking full possession. The dislodged
water is in part absorbed, but most of it is sent around the front of
the avalanche and down the channel of the outlet, roaring and hurrying
as if frightened and glad to escape.

SNOW-BANNERS

The most magnificent storm phenomenon I ever saw, surpassing in showy
grandeur the most imposing effects of clouds, floods, or avalanches,
was the peaks of the High Sierra, back of Yosemite Valley, decorated
with snow-banners. Many of the starry snow-flowers, out of which these
banners are made, fall before they are ripe, while most of those that
do attain perfect development as six-rayed crystals glint and chafe
against one another in their fall through the frosty air, and are
broken into fragments. This dry fragmentary snow is still further
prepared for the formation of banners by the action of the wind. For,
instead of finding rest at once, like the snow which falls into the
tranquil depths of the forests, it is rolled over and over, beaten
against rock-ridges, and swirled in pits and hollows, like boulders,
pebbles, and sand in the pot-holes of a river, until finally the
delicate angles of the crystals are worn off, and the whole mass is
reduced to dust. And whenever storm-winds find this prepared snow-dust
in a loose condition on exposed slopes, where there is a free upward
sweep to leeward, it is tossed back into the sky, and borne onward from
peak to peak in the form of banners or cloudy drifts, according to the
velocity of the wind and the conformation of the slopes up or around
which it is driven. While thus flying through the air, a small portion
makes good its escape, and remains in the sky as vapor. But far the
greater part, after being driven into the sky again and again, is at
length locked fast in bossy drifts, or in the wombs of glaciers, some
of it to remain silent and rigid for centuries before it is finally
melted and sent singing down the mountainsides to the sea.

Yet, notwithstanding the abundance of winter snow-dust in the
mountains, and the frequency of high winds, and the length of time the
dust remains loose and exposed to their action, the occurrence of
well-formed banners is, for causes we shall hereafter note,
comparatively rare. I have seen only one display of this kind that
seemed in every way perfect. This was in the winter of 1873, when the
snow-laden summits were swept by a wild “norther.” I happened at the
time to be wintering in Yosemite Valley, that sublime Sierra temple
where every day one may see the grandest sights. Yet even here the wild
gala-day of the north wind seemed surpassingly glorious. I was awakened
in the morning by the rocking of my cabin and the beating of pine-burs
on the roof. Detached torrents and avalanches from the main wind-flood
overhead were rushing wildly down the narrow side cañons, and over the
precipitous walls, with loud resounding roar, rousing the pines to
enthusiastic action, and making the whole valley vibrate as though it
were an instrument being played.

But afar on the lofty exposed peaks of the range standing so high in
the sky, the storm was expressing itself in still grander characters,
which I was soon to see in all their glory. I had long been anxious to
study some points in the structure of the ice-cone that is formed every
winter at the foot of the upper Yosemite fall, but the blinding spray
by which it is invested had hitherto prevented me from making a
sufficiently near approach. This morning the entire body of the fall
was torn into gauzy shreds, and blown horizontally along the face of
the cliff, leaving the cone dry; and while making my way to the top of
an overlooking ledge to seize so favorable an opportunity to examine
the interior of the cone, the peaks of the Merced group came in sight
over the shoulder of the South Dome, each waving a resplendent banner
against the blue sky, as regular in form, and as firm in texture, as if
woven of fine silk. So rare and splendid a phenomenon, of course,
overbore all other considerations, and I at once let the ice-cone go,
and began to force my way out of the valley to some dome or ridge
sufficiently lofty to command a general view of the main summits,
feeling assured that I should find them bannered still more gloriously;
nor was I in the least disappointed. Indian Cañon, through which I
climbed, was choked with snow that had been shot down in avalanches
from the high cliffs on either side, rendering the ascent difficult;
but inspired by the roaring storm, the tedious wallowing brought no
fatigue, and in four hours I gained the top of a ridge above the
valley, 8000 feet high. And there in bold relief, like a clear
painting, appeared a most imposing scene. Innumerable peaks, black and
sharp, rose grandly into the dark blue sky, their bases set in solid
white, their sides streaked and splashed with snow, like ocean rocks
with foam; and from every summit, all free and unconfused, was
streaming a beautiful silky silvery banner, from half a mile to a mile
in length, slender at the point of attachment, then widening gradually
as it extended from the peak until it was about 1000 or 1500 feet in
breadth, as near as I could estimate. The cluster of peaks called the
“Crown of the Sierra,” at the head of the Merced and Tuolumne
rivers,—Mounts Dana, Gibbs, Conness, Lyell, Maclure, Ritter, with their
nameless compeers,—each had its own refulgent banner, waving with a
clearly visible motion in the sunglow, and there was not a single cloud
in the sky to mar their simple grandeur. Fancy yourself standing on
this Yosemite ridge looking eastward. You notice a strange garish
glitter in the air. The gale drives wildly overhead with a fierce,
tempestuous roar, but its violence is not felt, for you are looking
through a sheltered opening in the woods as through a window. There, in
the immediate foreground of your picture, rises a majestic forest of
Silver Fir blooming in eternal freshness, the foliage yellow-green, and
the snow beneath the trees strewn with their beautiful plumes, plucked
off by the wind. Beyond, and extending over all the middle ground, are
somber swaths of pine, interrupted by huge swelling ridges and domes;
and just beyond the dark forest you see the monarchs of the High Sierra
waving their magnificent banners. They are twenty miles away, but you
would not wish them nearer, for every feature is distinct, and the
whole glorious show is seen in its right proportions. After this
general view, mark how sharply the dark snowless ribs and buttresses
and summits of the peaks are defined, excepting the portions veiled by
the banners, and how delicately their sides are streaked with snow,
where it has come to rest in narrow flutings and gorges. Mark, too, how
grandly the banners wave as the wind is deflected against their sides,
and how trimly each is attached to the very summit of its peak, like a
streamer at a masthead; how smooth and silky they are in texture, and
how finely their fading fringes are penciled on the azure sky. See how
dense and opaque they are at the point of attachment, and how filmy and
translucent toward the end, so that the peaks back of them are seen
dimly, as though you were looking through ground glass. Yet again
observe how some of the longest, belonging to the loftiest summits,
stream perfectly free all the way across intervening notches and passes
from peak to peak, while others overlap and partly hide each other. And
consider how keenly every particle of this wondrous cloth of snow is
flashing out jets of light. These are the main features of the
beautiful and terrible picture as seen from the forest window; and it
would still be surpassingly glorious were the fore- and middle-grounds
obliterated altogether, leaving only the black peaks, the white
banners, and the blue sky.

[Illustration: KOLANA ROCK, HETCH-HETCHY VALLEY]

Glancing now in a general way at the formation of snow-banners, we find
that the main causes of the wondrous beauty and perfection of those we
have been contemplating were the favorable direction and great force of
the wind, the abundance of snow-dust, and the peculiar conformation of
the slopes of the peaks. It is essential not only that the wind should
move with great velocity and steadiness to supply a sufficiently
copious and continuous stream of snow-dust, but that it should come
from the north. No perfect banner is ever hung on the Sierra peaks by a
south wind. Had the gale that day blown from the south, leaving other
conditions unchanged, only a dull, confused, fog-like drift would have
been produced; for the snow, instead of being spouted up over the tops
of the peaks in concentrated currents to be drawn out as streamers,
would have been shed off around the sides, and piled down into the
glacier wombs. The cause of the concentrated action of the north wind
is found in the peculiar form of the north sides of the peaks, where
the amphitheaters of the residual glaciers are. In general the south
sides are convex and irregular, while the north sides are concave both
in their vertical and horizontal sections; the wind in ascending these
curves converges toward the summits, carrying the snow in concentrating
currents with it, shooting it almost straight up into the air above the
peaks, from which it is then carried away in a horizontal direction.

This difference in form between the north and south sides of the peaks
was almost wholly produced by the difference in the kind and quantity
of the glaciation to which they have been subjected, the north sides
having been hollowed by residual shadow-glaciers of a form that never
existed on the sun-beaten sides.

It appears, therefore, that shadows in great part determine not only
the forms of lofty icy mountains, but also those of the snow-banners
that the wild winds hang on them.




CHAPTER IV
A NEAR VIEW OF THE HIGH SIERRA


Early one bright morning in the middle of Indian summer, while the
glacier meadows were still crisp with frost crystals, I set out from
the foot of Mount Lyell, on my way down to Yosemite Valley, to
replenish my exhausted store of bread and tea. I had spent the past
summer, as many preceding ones, exploring the glaciers that lie on the
head waters of the San Joaquin, Tuolumne, Merced, and Owen’s rivers;
measuring and studying their movements, trends, crevasses, moraines,
etc., and the part they had played during the period of their greater
extension in the creation and development of the landscapes of this
alpine wonderland. The time for this kind of work was nearly over for
the year, and I began to look forward with delight to the approaching
winter with its wondrous storms, when I would be warmly snow-bound in
my Yosemite cabin with plenty of bread and books; but a tinge of regret
came on when I considered that possibly I might not see this favorite
region again until the next summer, excepting distant views from the
heights about the Yosemite walls.

To artists, few portions of the High Sierra are, strictly speaking,
picturesque. The whole massive uplift of the range is one great
picture, not clearly divisible into smaller ones; differing much in
this respect from the older, and what may be called, riper mountains of
the Coast Range. All the landscapes of the Sierra, as we have seen,
were born again, remodeled from base to summit by the developing
ice-floods of the last glacial winter. But all those new landscapes
were not brought forth simultaneously; some of the highest, where the
ice lingered longest, are tens of centuries younger than those of the
warmer regions below them. In general, the younger the
mountain-landscapes,—younger, I mean, with reference to the time of
their emergence from the ice of the glacial period,—the less separable
are they into artistic bits capable of being made into warm,
sympathetic, lovable pictures with appreciable humanity in them.

Here, however, on the head waters of the Tuolumne, is a group of wild
peaks on which the geologist may say that the sun has but just begun to
shine, which is yet in a high degree picturesque, and in its main
features so regular and evenly balanced as almost to appear
conventional—one somber cluster of snow-laden peaks with gray
pine-fringed granite bosses braided around its base, the whole surging
free into the sky from the head of a magnificent valley, whose lofty
walls are beveled away on both sides so as to embrace it all without
admitting anything not strictly belonging to it. The foreground was now
aflame with autumn colors, brown and purple and gold, ripe in the
mellow sunshine; contrasting brightly with the deep, cobalt blue of the
sky, and the black and gray, and pure, spiritual white of the rocks and
glaciers. Down through the midst, the young Tuolumne was seen pouring
from its crystal fountains, now resting in glassy pools as if changing
back again into ice, now leaping in white cascades as if turning to
snow; gliding right and left between granite bosses, then sweeping on
through the smooth, meadowy levels of the valley, swaying pensively
from side to side with calm, stately gestures past dipping willows and
sedges, and around groves of arrowy pine; and throughout its whole
eventful course, whether flowing fast or slow, singing loud or low,
ever filling the landscape with spiritual animation, and manifesting
the grandeur of its sources in every movement and tone.

Pursuing my lonely way down the valley, I turned again and again to
gaze on the glorious picture, throwing up my arms to inclose it as in a
frame. After long ages of growth in the darkness beneath the glaciers,
through sunshine and storms, it seemed now to be ready and waiting for
the elected artist, like yellow wheat for the reaper; and I could not
help wishing that I might carry colors and brushes with me on my
travels, and learn to paint. In the mean time I had to be content with
photographs on my mind and sketches in my note-books. At length, after
I had rounded a precipitous headland that puts out from the west wall
of the valley, every peak vanished from sight, and I pushed rapidly
along the frozen meadows, over the divide between the waters of the
Merced and Tuolumne, and down through the forests that clothe the
slopes of Cloud’s Rest, arriving in Yosemite in due time—which, with
me, is _any_ time. And, strange to say, among the first people I met
here were two artists who, with letters of introduction, were awaiting
my return. They inquired whether in the course of my explorations in
the adjacent mountains I had ever come upon a landscape suitable for a
large painting; whereupon I began a description of the one that had so
lately excited my admiration. Then, as I went on further and further
into details, their faces began to glow, and I offered to guide them to
it, while they declared that they would gladly follow, far or near,
whithersoever I could spare the time to lead them.

Since storms might come breaking down through the fine weather at any
time, burying the colors in snow, and cutting off the artists’ retreat,
I advised getting ready at once.

I led them out of the valley by the Vernal and Nevada Falls, thence
over the main dividing ridge to the Big Tuolumne Meadows, by the old
Mono trail, and thence along the upper Tuolumne River to its head. This
was my companions’ first excursion into the High Sierra, and as I was
almost always alone in my mountaineering, the way that the fresh beauty
was reflected in their faces made for me a novel and interesting study.
They naturally were affected most of all by the colors—the intense
azure of the sky, the purplish grays of the granite, the red and browns
of dry meadows, and the translucent purple and crimson of huckleberry
bogs; the flaming yellow of aspen groves, the silvery flashing of the
streams, and the bright green and blue of the glacier lakes. But the
general expression of the scenery—rocky and savage—seemed sadly
disappointing; and as they threaded the forest from ridge to ridge,
eagerly scanning the landscapes as they were unfolded, they said: “All
this is huge and sublime, but we see nothing as yet at all available
for effective pictures. Art is long, and art is limited, you know; and
here are foregrounds, middle-grounds, backgrounds, all alike; bare
rock-waves, woods, groves, diminutive flecks of meadow, and strips of
glittering water.” “Never mind,” I replied, “only bide a wee, and I
will show you something you will like.”

At length, toward the end of the second day, the Sierra Crown began to
come into view, and when we had fairly rounded the projecting headland
before mentioned, the whole picture stood revealed in the flush of the
alpenglow. Their enthusiasm was excited beyond bounds, and the more
impulsive of the two, a young Scotchman, dashed ahead, shouting and
gesticulating and tossing his arms in the air like a madman. Here, at
last, was a typical alpine landscape.

After feasting awhile on the view, I proceeded to make camp in a
sheltered grove a little way back from the meadow, where pine-boughs
could be obtained for beds, and where there was plenty of dry wood for
fires, while the artists ran here and there, along the river-bends and
up the sides of the cañon, choosing foregrounds for sketches. After
dark, when our tea was made and a rousing fire had been built, we began
to make our plans. They decided to remain several days, at the least,
while I concluded to make an excursion in the mean time to the
untouched summit of Ritter.

It was now about the middle of October, the springtime of snow-flowers.
The first winter-clouds had already bloomed, and the peaks were strewn
with fresh crystals, without, however, affecting the climbing to any
dangerous extent. And as the weather was still profoundly calm, and the
distance to the foot of the mountain only a little more than a day, I
felt that I was running no great risk of being storm-bound.

Mount Ritter is king of the mountains of the middle portion of the High
Sierra, as Shasta of the north and Whitney of the south sections.
Moreover, as far as I know, it had never been climbed. I had explored
the adjacent wilderness summer after summer, but my studies thus far
had never drawn me to the top of it. Its height above sea-level is
about 13,300 feet, and it is fenced round by steeply inclined glaciers,
and cañons of tremendous depth and ruggedness, which render it almost
inaccessible. But difficulties of this kind only exhilarate the
mountaineer.

Next morning, the artists went heartily to their work and I to mine.
Former experiences had given good reason to know that passionate
storms, invisible as yet, might be brooding in the calm sun-gold;
therefore, before bidding farewell, I warned the artists not to be
alarmed should I fail to appear before a week or ten days, and advised
them, in case a snow-storm should set in, to keep up big fires and
shelter themselves as best they could, and on no account to become
frightened and attempt to seek their way back to Yosemite alone through
the drifts.

My general plan was simply this: to scale the cañon, wall, cross over
to the eastern flank of the range, and then make my way southward to
the northern spurs of Mount Ritter in compliance with the intervening
topography; for to push on directly southward from camp through the
innumerable peaks and pinnacles that adorn this portion of the axis of
the range, however interesting, would take too much time, besides being
extremely difficult and dangerous at this time of year.

All my first day was pure pleasure; simply mountaineering indulgence,
crossing the dry pathways of the ancient glaciers, tracing happy
streams, and learning the habits of the birds and marmots in the groves
and rocks. Before I had gone a mile from camp, I came to the foot of a
white cascade that beats its way down a rugged gorge in the cañon wall,
from a height of about nine hundred feet, and pours its throbbing
waters into the Tuolumne. I was acquainted with its fountains, which,
fortunately, lay in my course. What a fine traveling companion it
proved to be, what songs it sang, and how passionately it told the
mountain’s own joy! Gladly I climbed along its dashing border,
absorbing its divine music, and bathing from time to time in waftings
of irised spray. Climbing higher, higher, now beauty came streaming on
the sight: painted meadows, late-blooming gardens, peaks of rare
architecture, lakes here and there, shining like silver, and glimpses
of the forested middle region and the yellow lowlands far in the west.
Beyond the range I saw the so-called Mono Desert, lying dreamily silent
in thick purple light—a desert of heavy sun-glare beheld from a desert
of ice-burnished granite. Here the waters divide, shouting in glorious
enthusiasm, and falling eastward to vanish in the volcanic sands and
dry sky of the Great Basin, or westward to the Great Valley of
California, and thence through the Bay of San Francisco and the Golden
Gate to the sea.

Passing a little way down over the summit until I had reached an
elevation of about 10,000 feet, I pushed on southward toward a group of
savage peaks that stand guard about Ritter on the north and west,
groping my way, and dealing instinctively with every obstacle as it
presented itself. Here a huge gorge would be found cutting across my
path, along the dizzy edge of which I scrambled until some less
precipitous point was discovered where I might safely venture to the
bottom and then, selecting some feasible portion of the opposite wall,
reascend with the same slow caution. Massive, flat-topped spurs
alternate with the gorges, plunging abruptly from the shoulders of the
snowy peaks, and planting their feet in the warm desert. These were
everywhere marked and adorned with characteristic sculptures of the
ancient glaciers that swept over this entire region like one vast
ice-wind, and the polished surfaces produced by the ponderous flood are
still so perfectly preserved that in many places the sunlight reflected
from them is about as trying to the eyes as sheets of snow.

God’s glacial-mills grind slowly, but they have been kept in motion
long enough in California to grind sufficient soil for a glorious
abundance of life, though most of the grist has been carried to the
lowlands, leaving these high regions comparatively lean and bare; while
the post-glacial agents of erosion have not yet furnished sufficient
available food over the general surface for more than a few tufts of
the hardiest plants, chiefly carices and eriogonae. And it is
interesting to learn in this connection that the sparseness and
repressed character of the vegetation at this height is caused more by
want of soil than by harshness of climate; for, here and there, in
sheltered hollows (countersunk beneath the general surface) into which
a few rods of well-ground moraine chips have been dumped, we find
groves of spruce and pine thirty to forty feet high, trimmed around the
edges with willow and huckleberry bushes, and oftentimes still further
by an outer ring of tall grasses, bright with lupines, larkspurs, and
showy columbines, suggesting a climate by no means repressingly severe.
All the streams, too, and the pools at this elevation are furnished
with little gardens wherever soil can be made to lie, which, though
making scarce any show at a distance, constitute charming surprises to
the appreciative observer. In these bits of leanness a few birds find
grateful homes. Having no acquaintance with man, they fear no ill, and
flock curiously about the stranger, almost allowing themselves to be
taken in the hand. In so wild and so beautiful a region was spent my
first day, every sight and sound inspiring, leading one far out of
himself, yet feeding and building up his individuality.

Now came the solemn, silent evening. Long, blue, spiky shadows crept
out across the snow-fields, while a rosy glow, at first scarce
discernible, gradually deepened and suffused every mountain-top,
flushing the glaciers and the harsh crags above them. This was the
alpenglow, to me one of the most impressive of all the terrestrial
manifestations of God. At the touch of this divine light, the mountains
seemed to kindle to a rapt, religious consciousness, and stood hushed
and waiting like devout worshipers. Just before the alpenglow began to
fade, two crimson clouds came streaming across the summit like wings of
flame, rendering the sublime scene yet more impressive; then came
darkness and the stars.

Icy Ritter was still miles away, but I could proceed no farther that
night. I found a good campground on the rim of a glacier basin about
11,000 feet above the sea. A small lake nestles in the bottom of it,
from which I got water for my tea, and a storm-beaten thicket near by
furnished abundance of resiny fire-wood. Somber peaks, hacked and
shattered, circled half-way around the horizon, wearing a savage aspect
in the gloaming, and a waterfall chanted solemnly across the lake on
its way down from the foot of a glacier. The fall and the lake and the
glacier were almost equally bare; while the scraggy pines anchored in
the rock-fissures were so dwarfed and shorn by storm-winds that you
might walk over their tops. In tone and aspect the scene was one of the
most desolate I ever beheld. But the darkest scriptures of the
mountains are illumined with bright passages of love that never fail to
make themselves felt when one is alone.

I made my bed in a nook of the pine-thicket, where the branches were
pressed and crinkled overhead like a roof, and bent down around the
sides. These are the best bedchambers the high mountains afford—snug as
squirrel-nests, well ventilated, full of spicy odors, and with plenty
of wind-played needles to sing one asleep. I little expected company,
but, creeping in through a low side-door, I found five or six birds
nestling among the tassels. The night-wind began to blow soon after
dark; at first only a gentle breathing, but increasing toward midnight
to a rough gale that fell upon my leafy roof in ragged surges like a
cascade, bearing wild sounds from the crags overhead. The waterfall
sang in chorus, filling the old ice-fountain with its solemn roar, and
seeming to increase in power as the night advanced—fit voice for such a
landscape. I had to creep out many times to the fire during the night,
for it was biting cold and I had no blankets. Gladly I welcomed the
morning star.

The dawn in the dry, wavering air of the desert was glorious.
Everything encouraged my undertaking and betokened success. There was
no cloud in the sky, no storm-tone in the wind. Breakfast of bread and
tea was soon made. I fastened a hard, durable crust to my belt by way
of provision, in case I should be compelled to pass a night on the
mountain-top; then, securing the remainder of my little stock against
wolves and wood-rats, I set forth free and hopeful.

How glorious a greeting the sun gives the mountains! To behold this
alone is worth the pains of any excursion a thousand times over. The
highest peaks burned like islands in a sea of liquid shade. Then the
lower peaks and spires caught the glow, and long lances of light,
streaming through many a notch and pass, fell thick on the frozen
meadows. The majestic form of Ritter was full in sight, and I pushed
rapidly on over rounded rock-bosses and pavements, my iron-shod shoes
making a clanking sound, suddenly hushed now and then in rugs of
bryanthus, and sedgy lake-margins soft as moss. Here, too, in this
so-called “land of desolation,” I met cassiope, growing in fringes
among the battered rocks. Her blossoms had faded long ago, but they
were still clinging with happy memories to the evergreen sprays, and
still so beautiful as to thrill every fiber of one’s being. Winter and
summer, you may hear her voice, the low, sweet melody of her purple
bells. No evangel among all the mountain plants speaks Nature’s love
more plainly than cassiope. Where she dwells, the redemption of the
coldest solitude is complete. The very rocks and glaciers seem to feel
her presence, and become imbued with her own fountain sweetness. All
things were warming and awakening. Frozen rills began to flow, the
marmots came out of their nests in boulder-piles and climbed sunny
rocks to bask, and the dun-headed sparrows were flitting about seeking
their breakfasts. The lakes seen from every ridge-top were brilliantly
rippled and spangled, shimmering like the thickets of the low Dwarf
Pines. The rocks, too, seemed responsive to the vital
heat—rock-crystals and snow-crystals thrilling alike. I strode on
exhilarated, as if never more to feel fatigue, limbs moving of
themselves, every sense unfolding like the thawing flowers, to take
part in the new day harmony.

All along my course thus far, excepting when down in the cañons, the
landscapes were mostly open to me, and expansive, at least on one side.
On the left were the purple plains of Mono, reposing dreamily and warm;
on the right, the near peaks springing keenly into the thin sky with
more and more impressive sublimity. But these larger views were at
length lost. Rugged spurs, and moraines, and huge, projecting
buttresses began to shut me in. Every feature became more rigidly
alpine, without, however, producing any chilling effect; for going to
the mountains is like going home. We always find that the strangest
objects in these fountain wilds are in some degree familiar, and we
look upon them with a vague sense of having seen them before.

[Illustration: GENERAL GRANT TREE, GENERAL GRANT NATIONAL PARK]

On the southern shore of a frozen lake, I encountered an extensive
field of hard, granular snow, up which I scampered in fine tone,
intending to follow it to its head, and cross the rocky spur against
which it leans, hoping thus to come direct upon the base of the main
Ritter peak. The surface was pitted with oval hollows, made by stones
and drifted pine-needles that had melted themselves into the mass by
the radiation of absorbed sun-heat. These afforded good footholds, but
the surface curved more and more steeply at the head, and the pits
became shallower and less abundant, until I found myself in danger of
being shed off like avalanching snow. I persisted, however, creeping on
all fours, and shuffling up the smoothest places on my back, as I had
often done on burnished granite, until, after slipping several times, I
was compelled to retrace my course to the bottom, and make my way
around the west end of the lake, and thence up to the summit of the
divide between the head waters of Rush Creek and the northernmost
tributaries of the San Joaquin.

Arriving on the summit of this dividing crest, one of the most exciting
pieces of pure wilderness was disclosed that I ever discovered in all
my mountaineering. There, immediately in front, loomed the majestic
mass of Mount Ritter, with a glacier swooping down its face nearly to
my feet, then curving westward and pouring its frozen flood into a dark
blue lake, whose shores were bound with precipices of crystalline snow;
while a deep chasm drawn between the divide and the glacier separated
the massive picture from everything else. I could see only the one
sublime mountain, the one glacier, the one lake; the whole veiled with
one blue shadow—rock, ice, and water close together without a single
leaf or sign of life. After gazing spellbound, I began instinctively to
scrutinize every notch and gorge and weathered buttress of the
mountain, with reference to making the ascent. The entire front above
the glacier appeared as one tremendous precipice, slightly receding at
the top, and bristling with spires and pinnacles set above one another
in formidable array. Massive lichen-stained battlements stood forward
here and there, hacked at the top with angular notches, and separated
by frosty gullies and recesses that have been veiled in shadow ever
since their creation; while to right and left, as far as I could see,
were huge, crumbling buttresses, offering no hope to the climber. The
head of the glacier sends up a few finger-like branches through narrow
_couloirs_; but these seemed too steep and short to be available,
especially as I had no ax with which to cut steps, and the numerous
narrow-throated gullies down which stones and snow are avalanched
seemed hopelessly steep, besides being interrupted by vertical cliffs;
while the whole front was rendered still more terribly forbidding by
the chill shadow and the gloomy blackness of the rocks.

Descending the divide in a hesitating mood, I picked my way across the
yawning chasm at the foot, and climbed out upon the glacier. There were
no meadows now to cheer with their brave colors, nor could I hear the
dun-headed sparrows, whose cheery notes so often relieve the silence of
our highest mountains. The only sounds were the gurgling of small rills
down in the veins and crevasses of the glacier, and now and then the
rattling report of falling stones, with the echoes they shot out into
the crisp air.

I could not distinctly hope to reach the summit from this side, yet I
moved on across the glacier as if driven by fate. Contending with
myself, the season is too far spent, I said, and even should I be
successful, I might be storm-bound on the mountain; and in the
cloud-darkness, with the cliffs and crevasses covered with snow, how
could I escape? No; I must wait till next summer. I would only approach
the mountain now, and inspect it, creep about its flanks, learn what I
could of its history, holding myself ready to flee on the approach of
the first storm-cloud. But we little know until tried how much of the
uncontrollable there is in us, urging across glaciers and torrents, and
up dangerous heights, let the judgment forbid as it may.

I succeeded in gaining the foot of the cliff on the eastern extremity
of the glacier, and there discovered the mouth of a narrow avalanche
gully, through which I began to climb, intending to follow it as far as
possible, and at least obtain some fine wild views for my pains. Its
general course is oblique to the plane of the mountain-face, and the
metamorphic slates of which the mountain is built are cut by cleavage
planes in such a way that they weather off in angular blocks, giving
rise to irregular steps that greatly facilitate climbing on the sheer
places. I thus made my way into a wilderness of crumbling spires and
battlements, built together in bewildering combinations, and glazed in
many places with a thin coating of ice, which I had to hammer off with
stones. The situation was becoming gradually more perilous; but, having
passed several dangerous spots, I dared not think of descending; for,
so steep was the entire ascent, one would inevitably fall to the
glacier in case a single misstep were made. Knowing, therefore, the
tried danger beneath, I became all the more anxious concerning the
developments to be made above, and began to be conscious of a vague
foreboding of what actually befell; not that I was given to fear, but
rather because my instincts, usually so positive and true, seemed
vitiated in some way, and were leading me astray. At length, after
attaining an elevation of about 12,800 feet, I found myself at the foot
of a sheer drop in the bed of the avalanche channel I was tracing,
which seemed absolutely to bar further progress. It was only about
forty-five or fifty feet high, and somewhat roughened by fissures and
projections; but these seemed so slight and insecure, as footholds,
that I tried hard to avoid the precipice altogether, by scaling the
wall of the channel on either side. But, though less steep, the walls
were smoother than the obstructing rock, and repeated efforts only
showed that I must either go right ahead or turn back. The tried
dangers beneath seemed even greater than that of the cliff in front;
therefore, after scanning its face again and again, I began to scale
it, picking my holds with intense caution. After gaining a point about
halfway to the top, I was suddenly brought to a dead stop, with arms
outspread, clinging close to the face of the rock, unable to move hand
or foot either up or down. My doom appeared fixed. I _must_ fall. There
would be a moment of bewilderment, and then a lifeless rumble down the
one general precipice to the glacier below.

When this final danger flashed upon me, I became nerve-shaken for the
first time since setting foot on the mountains, and my mind seemed to
fill with a stifling smoke. But this terrible eclipse lasted only a
moment, when life blazed forth again with preternatural clearness. I
seemed suddenly to become possessed of a new sense. The other self,
bygone experiences, Instinct, or Guardian Angel,—call it what you
will,—came forward and assumed control. Then my trembling muscles
became firm again, every rift and flaw in the rock was seen as through
a microscope, and my limbs moved with a positiveness and precision with
which I seemed to have nothing at all to do. Had I been borne aloft
upon wings, my deliverance could not have been more complete.

Above this memorable spot, the face of the mountain is still more
savagely hacked and torn. It is a maze of yawning chasms and gullies,
in the angles of which rise beetling crags and piles of detached
boulders that seem to have been gotten ready to be launched below. But
the strange influx of strength I had received seemed inexhaustible. I
found a way without effort, and soon stood upon the topmost crag in the
blessed light.

How truly glorious the landscape circled around this noble
summit!—giant mountains, valleys innumerable, glaciers and meadows,
rivers and lakes, with the wide blue sky bent tenderly over them all.
But in my first hour of freedom from that terrible shadow, the sunlight
in which I was laving seemed all in all.

Looking southward along the axis of the range, the eye is first caught
by a row of exceedingly sharp and slender spires, which rise openly to
a height of about a thousand feet, above a series of short, residual
glaciers that lean back against their bases; their fantastic sculpture
and the unrelieved sharpness with which they spring out of the ice
rendering them peculiarly wild and striking. These are “The Minarets.”
Beyond them you behold a sublime wilderness of mountains, their snowy
summits towering together in crowded abundance, peak beyond peak,
swelling higher, higher as they sweep on southward, until the
culminating point of the range is reached on Mount Whitney, near the
head of the Kern River, at an elevation of nearly 14,700 feet above the
level of the sea.

Westward, the general flank of the range is seen flowing sublimely away
from the sharp summits, in smooth undulations; a sea of huge gray
granite waves dotted with lakes and meadows, and fluted with stupendous
cañons that grow steadily deeper as they recede in the distance. Below
this gray region lies the dark forest zone, broken here and there by
upswelling ridges and domes; and yet beyond lies a yellow, hazy belt,
marking the broad plain of the San Joaquin, bounded on its farther side
by the blue mountains of the coast.

Turning now to the northward, there in the immediate foreground is the
glorious Sierra Crown, with Cathedral Peak, a temple of marvelous
architecture, a few degrees to the left of it; the gray, massive form
of Mammoth Mountain to the right; while Mounts Ord, Gibbs, Dana,
Conness, Tower Peak, Castle Peak, Silver Mountain, and a host of noble
companions, as yet nameless, make a sublime show along the axis of the
range.

Eastward, the whole region seems a land of desolation covered with
beautiful light. The torrid volcanic basin of Mono, with its one bare
lake fourteen miles long; Owen’s Valley and the broad lava table-land
at its head, dotted with craters, and the massive Inyo Range, rivaling
even the Sierra in height; these are spread, map-like, beneath you,
with countless ranges beyond, passing and overlapping one another and
fading on the glowing horizon.

[Illustration: MAP OF THE YOSEMITE VALLEY]

At a distance of less than 3000 feet below the summit of Mount Ritter
you may find tributaries of the San Joaquin and Owen’s rivers, bursting
forth from the ice and snow of the glaciers that load its flanks; while
a little to the north of here are found the highest affluents of the
Tuolumne and Merced. Thus, the fountains of four of the principal
rivers of California are within a radius of four or five miles.

Lakes are seen gleaming in all sorts of places,—round, or oval, or
square, like very mirrors; others narrow and sinuous, drawn close
around the peaks like silver zones, the highest reflecting only rocks,
snow, and the sky. But neither these nor the glaciers, nor the bits of
brown meadow and moorland that occur here and there, are large enough
to make any marked impression upon the mighty wilderness of mountains.
The eye, rejoicing in its freedom, roves about the vast expanse, yet
returns again and again to the fountain peaks. Perhaps some one of the
multitude excites special attention, some gigantic castle with turret
and battlement, or some Gothic cathedral more abundantly spired than
Milan’s. But, generally, when looking for the first time from an
all-embracing standpoint like this, the inexperienced observer is
oppressed by the incomprehensible grandeur, variety, and abundance of
the mountains rising shoulder to shoulder beyond the reach of vision;
and it is only after they have been studied one by one, long and
lovingly, that their far-reaching harmonies become manifest. Then,
penetrate the wilderness where you may, the main telling features, to
which all the surrounding topography is subordinate, are quickly
perceived, and the most complicated clusters of peaks stand revealed
harmoniously correlated and fashioned like works of art—eloquent
monuments of the ancient ice-rivers that brought them into relief from
the general mass of the range. The cañons, too, some of them a mile
deep, mazing wildly through the mighty host of mountains, however
lawless and ungovernable at first sight they appear, are at length
recognized as the necessary effects of causes which followed each other
in harmonious sequence—Nature’s poems carved on tables of stone—the
simplest and most emphatic of her glacial compositions.

Could we have been here to observe during the glacial period, we should
have overlooked a wrinkled ocean of ice as continuous as that now
covering the landscapes of Greenland; filling every valley and cañon
with only the tops of the fountain peaks rising darkly above the
rock-encumbered ice-waves like islets in a stormy sea—those islets the
only hints of the glorious landscapes now smiling in the sun. Standing
here in the deep, brooding silence all the wilderness seems motionless,
as if the work of creation were done. But in the midst of this outer
steadfastness we know there is incessant motion and change. Ever and
anon, avalanches are falling from yonder peaks. These cliff-bound
glaciers, seemingly wedged and immovable, are flowing like water and
grinding the rocks beneath them. The lakes are lapping their granite
shores and wearing them away, and every one of these rills and young
rivers is fretting the air into music, and carrying the mountains to
the plains. Here are the roots of all the life of the valleys, and here
more simply than elsewhere is the eternal flux of nature manifested.
Ice changing to water, lakes to meadows, and mountains to plains. And
while we thus contemplate Nature’s methods of landscape creation, and,
reading the records she has carved on the rocks, reconstruct, however
imperfectly, the landscapes of the past, we also learn that as these we
now behold have succeeded those of the pre-glacial age, so they in turn
are withering and vanishing to be succeeded by others yet unborn.

But in the midst of these fine lessons and landscapes, I had to
remember that the sun was wheeling far to the west, while a new way
down the mountain had to be discovered to some point on the timber line
where I could have a fire; for I had not even burdened myself with a
coat. I first scanned the western spurs, hoping some way might appear
through which I might reach the northern glacier, and cross its snout;
or pass around the lake into which it flows, and thus strike my morning
track. This route was soon sufficiently unfolded to show that, if
practicable at all, it would require so much time that reaching camp
that night would be out of the question. I therefore scrambled back
eastward, descending the southern slopes obliquely at the same time.
Here the crags seemed less formidable, and the head of a glacier that
flows northeast came in sight, which I determined to follow as far as
possible, hoping thus to make my way to the foot of the peak on the
east side, and thence across the intervening cañons and ridges to camp.

The inclination of the glacier is quite moderate at the head, and, as
the sun had softened the _névé_, I made safe and rapid progress,
running and sliding, and keeping up a sharp outlook for crevasses.
About half a mile from the head, there is an ice-cascade, where the
glacier pours over a sharp declivity and is shattered into massive
blocks separated by deep, blue fissures. To thread my way through the
slippery mazes of this crevassed portion seemed impossible, and I
endeavored to avoid it by climbing off to the shoulder of the mountain.
But the slopes rapidly steepened and at length fell away in sheer
precipices, compelling a return to the ice. Fortunately, the day had
been warm enough to loosen the ice-crystals so as to admit of hollows
being dug in the rotten portions of the blocks, thus enabling me to
pick my way with far less difficulty than I had anticipated. Continuing
down over the snout, and along the left lateral moraine, was only a
confident saunter, showing that the ascent of the mountain by way of
this glacier is easy, provided one is armed with an ax to cut steps
here and there.

The lower end of the glacier was beautifully waved and barred by the
outcropping edges of the bedded ice-layers which represent the annual
snowfalls, and to some extent the irregularities of structure caused by
the weathering of the walls of crevasses, and by separate snowfalls
which have been followed by rain, hail, thawing and freezing, etc.
Small rills were gliding and swirling over the melting surface with a
smooth, oily appearance, in channels of pure ice—their quick, compliant
movements contrasting most impressively with the rigid, invisible flow
of the glacier itself, on whose back they all were riding.

Night drew near before I reached the eastern base of the mountain, and
my camp lay many a rugged mile to the north; but ultimate success was
assured. It was now only a matter of endurance and ordinary
mountain-craft. The sunset was, if possible, yet more beautiful than
that of the day before. The Mono landscape seemed to be fairly
saturated with warm, purple light. The peaks marshaled along the summit
were in shadow, but through every notch and pass streamed vivid
sun-fire, soothing and irradiating their rough, black angles, while
companies of small, luminous clouds hovered above them like very angels
of light.

Darkness came on, but I found my way by the trends of the cañons and
the peaks projected against the sky. All excitement died with the
light, and then I was weary. But the joyful sound of the waterfall
across the lake was heard at last, and soon the stars were seen
reflected in the lake itself. Taking my bearings from these, I
discovered the little pine thicket in which my nest was, and then I had
a rest such as only a tired mountaineer may enjoy. After lying loose
and lost for awhile, I made a sunrise fire, went down to the lake,
dashed water on my head, and dipped a cupful for tea. The revival
brought about by bread and tea was as complete as the exhaustion from
excessive enjoyment and toil. Then I crept beneath the pine-tassels to
bed. The wind was frosty and the fire burned low, but my sleep was none
the less sound, and the evening constellations had swept far to the
west before I awoke.

After thawing and resting in the morning sunshine, I sauntered
home,—that is, back to the Tuolumne camp,—bearing away toward a cluster
of peaks that hold the fountain snows of one of the north tributaries
of Rush Creek. Here I discovered a group of beautiful glacier lakes,
nestled together in a grand amphitheater. Toward evening, I crossed the
divide separating the Mono waters from those of the Tuolumne, and
entered the glacier basin that now holds the fountain snows of the
stream that forms the upper Tuolumne cascades. This stream I traced
down through its many dells and gorges, meadows and bogs, reaching the
brink of the main Tuolumne at dusk.

A loud whoop for the artists was answered again and again. Their
camp-fire came in sight, and half an hour afterward I was with them.
They seemed unreasonably glad to see me. I had been absent only three
days; nevertheless, though the weather was fine, they had already been
weighing chances as to whether I would ever return, and trying to
decide whether they should wait longer or begin to seek their way back
to the lowlands. Now their curious troubles were over. They packed
their precious sketches, and next morning we set out homeward bound,
and in two days entered the Yosemite Valley from the north by way of
Indian Cañon.




CHAPTER V
THE PASSES


The sustained grandeur of the High Sierra is strikingly illustrated by
the great height of the passes. Between latitude 36° 20′ and 38° the
lowest pass, gap, gorge, or notch of any kind cutting across the axis
of the range, as far as I have discovered, exceeds 9000 feet in height
above the level of the sea; while the average height of all that are in
use, either by Indians or whites, is perhaps not less than 11,000 feet,
and not one of these is a carriage-pass.

Farther north a carriage-road has been constructed through what is
known as the Sonora Pass, on the head waters of the Stanislaus and
Walker’s rivers, the summit of which is about 10,000 feet above the
sea. Substantial wagon-roads have also been built through the Carson
and Johnson passes, near the head of Lake Tahoe, over which immense
quantities of freight were hauled from California to the mining regions
of Nevada, before the construction of the Central Pacific Railroad.

Still farther north, a considerable number of comparatively low passes
occur, some of which are accessible to wheeled vehicles, and through
these rugged defiles during the exciting years of the gold period long
emigrant-trains with foot-sore cattle wearily toiled. After the
toil-worn adventurers had escaped a thousand dangers and had crawled
thousands of miles across the plains the snowy Sierra at last loomed in
sight, the eastern wall of the land of gold. And as with shaded eyes
they gazed through the tremulous haze of the desert, with what joy must
they have descried the pass through which they were to enter the better
land of their hopes and dreams!

Between the Sonora Pass and the southern extremity of the High Sierra,
a distance of nearly 160 miles, there are only five passes through
which trails conduct from one side of the range to the other. These are
barely practicable for animals; a pass in these regions meaning simply
any notch or cañon through which one may, by the exercise of unlimited
patience, make out to lead a mule, or a sure-footed mustang; animals
that can slide or jump as well as walk. Only three of the five passes
may be said to be in use, viz.: the Kearsarge, Mono, and Virginia
Creek; the tracks leading through the others being only obscure Indian
trails, not graded in the least, and scarcely traceable by white men;
for much of the way is over solid rock and earthquake avalanche
taluses, where the unshod ponies of the Indians leave no appreciable
sign. Only skilled mountaineers are able to detect the marks that serve
to guide the Indians, such as slight abrasions of the looser rocks, the
displacement of stones here and there, and bent bushes and weeds. A
general knowledge of the topography is, then, the main guide, enabling
one to determine where the trail ought to go—_must_ go. One of these
Indian trails crosses the range by a nameless pass between the head
waters of the south and middle forks of the San Joaquin, the other
between the north and middle forks of the same river, just to the south
of “The Minarets”; this last being about 9000 feet high, is the lowest
of the five. The Kearsarge is the highest, crossing the summit near the
head of the south fork of King’s River, about eight miles to the north
of Mount Tyndall, through the midst of the most stupendous
rock-scenery. The summit of this pass is over 12,000 feet above
sea-level; nevertheless, it is one of the safest of the five, and is
used every summer, from July to October or November, by hunters,
prospectors, and stock-owners, and to some extent by enterprising
pleasure-seekers also. For, besides the surpassing grandeur of the
scenery about the summit, the trail, in ascending the western flank of
the range, conducts through a grove of the giant Sequoias, and through
the magnificent Yosemite Valley of the south fork of King’s River. This
is, perhaps, the highest traveled pass on the North American continent.

[Illustration: MAP OF THE YOSEMITE VALLEY, SHOWING PRESENT RESERVATION
BOUNDARY.]

The Mono Pass lies to the east of Yosemite Valley, at the head of one
of the tributaries of the south fork of the Tuolumne. This is the best
known and most extensively traveled of all that exist in the High
Sierra. A trail was made through it about the time of the Mono gold
excitement, in the year 1858, by adventurous miners and prospectors—men
who would build a trail down the throat of darkest Erebus on the way to
gold. Though more than a thousand feet lower than the Kearsarge, it is
scarcely less sublime in rock-scenery, while in snowy, falling water it
far surpasses it. Being so favorably situated for the stream of
Yosemite travel, the more adventurous tourists cross over through this
glorious gateway to the volcanic region around Mono Lake. It has
therefore gained a name and fame above every other pass in the range.
According to the few barometrical observations made upon it, its
highest point is 10,765 feet above the sea. The other pass of the five
we have been considering is somewhat lower, and crosses the axis of the
range a few miles to the north of the Mono Pass, at the head of the
southernmost tributary of Walker’s River. It is used chiefly by roaming
bands of the Pah Ute Indians and “sheepmen.”

But, leaving wheels and animals out of the question, the free
mountaineer with a sack of bread on his shoulders and an ax to cut
steps in ice and frozen snow can make his way across the range almost
everywhere, and at any time of year when the weather is calm. To him
nearly every notch between the peaks is a pass, though much patient
step-cutting is at times required up and down steeply inclined
glaciers, with cautious climbing over precipices that at first sight
would seem hopelessly inaccessible.

In pursuing my studies, I have crossed from side to side of the range
at intervals of a few miles all along the highest portion of the chain,
with far less real danger than one would naturally count on. And what
fine wildness was thus revealed—storms and avalanches, lakes and
waterfalls, gardens and meadows, and interesting animals—only those
will ever know who give the freest and most buoyant portion of their
lives to climbing and seeing for themselves.

To the timid traveler, fresh from the sedimentary levels of the
lowlands, these highways, however picturesque and grand, seem terribly
forbidding—cold, dead, gloomy gashes in the bones of the mountains, and
of all Nature’s ways the ones to be most cautiously avoided. Yet they
are full of the finest and most telling examples of Nature’s love; and
though hard to travel, none are safer. For they lead through regions
that lie far above the ordinary haunts of the devil, and of the
pestilence that walks in darkness. True, there are innumerable places
where the careless step will be the last step; and a rock falling from
the cliffs may crush without warning like lightning from the sky; but
what then! Accidents in the mountains are less common than in the
lowlands, and these mountain mansions are decent, delightful, even
divine, places to die in, compared with the doleful chambers of
civilization. Few places in this world are more dangerous than home.
Fear not, therefore, to try the mountain-passes. They will kill care,
save you from deadly apathy, set you free, and call forth every faculty
into vigorous, enthusiastic action. Even the sick should try these
so-called dangerous passes, because for every unfortunate they kill,
they cure a thousand.

All the passes make their steepest ascents on the eastern flank. On
this side the average rise is not far from a thousand feet to the mile,
while on the west it is about two hundred feet. Another marked
difference between the eastern and western portions of the passes is
that the former begin at the very foot of the range, while the latter
can hardly be said to begin lower than an elevation of from seven to
ten thousand feet. Approaching the range from the gray levels of Mono
and Owen’s Valley on the east, the traveler sees before him the steep,
short passes in full view, fenced in by rugged spurs that come plunging
down from the shoulders of the peaks on either side, the courses of the
more direct being disclosed from top to bottom without interruption.
But from the west one sees nothing of the way he may be seeking until
near the summit, after days have been spent in threading the forests
growing on the main dividing ridges between the river cañons.

It is interesting to observe how surely the alp-crossing animals of
every kind fall into the same trails. The more rugged and inaccessible
the general character of the topography of any particular region, the
more surely will the trails of white men, Indians, bears, wild sheep,
etc., be found converging into the best passes. The Indians of the
western slope venture cautiously over the passes in settled weather to
attend dances, and obtain loads of pine-nuts and the larvae of a small
fly that breeds in Mono and Owen’s lakes, which, when dried, forms an
important article of food; while the Pah Utes cross over from the east
to hunt the deer and obtain supplies of acorns; and it is truly
astonishing to see what immense loads the haggard old squaws make out
to carry bare-footed through these rough passes, oftentimes for a
distance of sixty or seventy miles. They are always accompanied by the
men, who stride on, unburdened and erect, a little in advance, kindly
stooping at difficult places to pile stepping-stones for their patient,
pack-animal wives, just as they would prepare the way for their ponies.

Bears evince great sagacity as mountaineers, but although they are
tireless and enterprising travelers they seldom cross the range. I have
several times tracked them through the Mono Pass, but only in late
years, after cattle and sheep had passed that way, when they doubtless
were following to feed on the stragglers and on those that had been
killed by falling over the rocks. Even the wild sheep, the best
mountaineers of all, choose regular passes in making journeys across
the summits. Deer seldom cross the range in either direction. I have
never yet observed a single specimen of the mule-deer of the Great
Basin west of the summit, and rarely one of the black-tailed species on
the eastern slope, notwithstanding many of the latter ascend the range
nearly to the summit every summer, to feed in the wild gardens and
bring forth their young.

The glaciers are the pass-makers, and it is by them that the courses of
all mountaineers are predestined. Without exception every pass in the
Sierra was created by them without the slightest aid or predetermining
guidance from any of the cataclysmic agents. I have seen elaborate
statements of the amount of drilling and blasting accomplished in the
construction of the railroad across the Sierra, above Donner Lake; but
for every pound of rock moved in this way, the glaciers which descended
east and west through this same pass, crushed and carried away more
than a hundred tons.

The so-called practicable road-passes are simply those portions of the
range more degraded by glacial action than the adjacent portions, and
degraded in such a way as to leave the summits rounded, instead of
sharp; while the peaks, from the superior strength and hardness of
their rocks, or from more favorable position, having suffered less
degradation, are left towering above the passes as if they had been
heaved into the sky by some force acting from beneath.

The scenery of all the passes, especially at the head, is of the
wildest and grandest description,—lofty peaks massed together and laden
around their bases with ice and snow; chains of glacier lakes;
cascading streams in endless variety, with glorious views, westward
over a sea of rocks and woods, and eastward over strange ashy plains,
volcanoes, and the dry, dead-looking ranges of the Great Basin. Every
pass, however, possesses treasures of beauty all its own.

Having thus in a general way indicated the height, leading features,
and distribution of the principal passes, I will now endeavor to
describe the Mono Pass in particular, which may, I think, be regarded
as a fair example of the higher alpine passes in general.

The main portion of the Mono Pass is formed by Bloody Cañon, which
begins at the summit of the range, and runs in a general
east-northeasterly direction to the edge of the Mono Plain.

The first white men who forced a way through its somber depths were, as
we have seen, eager gold-seekers. But the cañon was known and traveled
as a pass by the Indians and mountain animals long before its discovery
by white men, as is shown by the numerous tributary trails which come
into it from every direction. Its name accords well with the character
of the “early times” in California, and may perhaps have been suggested
by the predominant color of the metamorphic slates in which it is in
great part eroded; or more probably by blood-stains made by the
unfortunate animals which were compelled to slip and shuffle awkwardly
over its rough, cutting rocks. I have never known an animal, either
mule or horse, to make its way through the cañon, either in going up or
down, without losing more or less blood from wounds on the legs.
Occasionally one is killed outright—falling headlong and rolling over
precipices like a boulder. But such accidents are rarer than from the
terrible appearance of the trail one would be led to expect; the more
experienced when driven loose find their way over the dangerous places
with a caution and sagacity that is truly wonderful. During the gold
excitement it was at times a matter of considerable pecuniary
importance to force a way through the cañon with pack-trains early in
the spring while it was yet heavily blocked with snow; and then the
mules with their loads had sometimes to be let down over the steepest
drifts and avalanche beds by means of ropes.

A good bridle-path leads from Yosemite through many a grove and meadow
up to the head of the cañon, a distance of about thirty miles. Here the
scenery undergoes a sudden and startling condensation. Mountains, red,
gray, and black, rise close at hand on the right, whitened around their
bases with banks of enduring snow; on the left swells the huge red mass
of Mount Gibbs, while in front the eye wanders down the shadowy cañon,
and out on the warm plain of Mono, where the lake is seen gleaming like
a burnished metallic disk, with clusters of lofty volcanic cones to the
south of it.

When at length we enter the mountain gateway, the somber rocks seem
aware of our presence, and seem to come thronging closer about us.
Happily the ouzel and the old familiar robin are here to sing us
welcome, and azure daisies beam with trustfulness and sympathy,
enabling us to feel something of Nature’s love even here, beneath the
gaze of her coldest rocks.

The effect of this expressive outspokenness on the part of the
cañon-rocks is greatly enhanced by the quiet aspect of the alpine
meadows through which we pass just before entering the narrow gateway.
The forests in which they lie, and the mountain-tops rising beyond
them, seem quiet and tranquil. We catch their restful spirit, yield to
the soothing influences of the sunshine, and saunter dreamily on
through flowers and bees, scarce touched by a definite thought; then
suddenly we find ourselves in the shadowy cañon, closeted with Nature
in one of her wildest strongholds.

After the first bewildering impression begins to wear off, we perceive
that it is not altogether terrible; for besides the reassuring birds
and flowers we discover a chain of shining lakelets hanging down from
the very summit of the pass, and linked together by a silvery stream.
The highest are set in bleak, rough bowls, scantily fringed with brown
and yellow sedges. Winter storms blow snow through the cañon in
blinding drifts, and avalanches shoot from the heights. Then are these
sparkling tarns filled and buried, leaving not a hint of their
existence. In June and July they begin to blink and thaw out like
sleepy eyes, the carices thrust up their short brown spikes, the
daisies bloom in turn, and the most profoundly buried of them all is at
length warmed and summered as if winter were only a dream.

Red Lake is the lowest of the chain, and also the largest. It seems
rather dull and forbidding at first sight, lying motionless in its
deep, dark bed. The cañon wall rises sheer from the water’s edge on the
south, but on the opposite side there is sufficient space and sunshine
for a sedgy daisy garden, the center of which is brilliantly lighted
with lilies, castilleias, larkspurs, and columbines, sheltered from the
wind by leafy willows, and forming a most joyful outburst of plant-life
keenly emphasized by the chill baldness of the onlooking cliffs.

After indulging here in a dozing, shimmering lake-rest, the happy
stream sets forth again, warbling and trilling like an ouzel, ever
delightfully confiding, no matter how dark the way; leaping, gliding,
hither, thither, clear or foaming: manifesting the beauty of its
wildness in every sound and gesture.

One of its most beautiful developments is the Diamond Cascade, situated
a short distance below Red Lake. Here the tense, crystalline water is
first dashed into coarse, granular spray mixed with dusty foam, and
then divided into a diamond pattern by following the diagonal
cleavage-joints that intersect the face of the precipice over which it
pours. Viewed in front, it resembles a strip of embroidery of definite
pattern, varying through the seasons with the temperature and the
volume of water. Scarce a flower may be seen along its snowy border. A
few bent pines look on from a distance, and small fringes of cassiope
and rock-ferns are growing in fissures near the head, but these are so
lowly and undemonstrative that only the attentive observer will be
likely to notice them.

On the north wall of the cañon, a little below the Diamond Cascade, a
glittering side stream makes its appearance, seeming to leap directly
out of the sky. It first resembles a crinkled ribbon of silver hanging
loosely down the wall, but grows wider as it descends, and dashes the
dull rock with foam. A long rough talus curves up against this part of
the cliff, overgrown with snow-pressed willows, in which the fall
disappears with many an eager surge and swirl and plashing leap,
finally beating its way down to its confluence with the main cañon
stream.

Below this point the climate is no longer arctic. Butterflies become
larger and more abundant, grasses with imposing spread of panicle wave
above your shoulders, and the summery drone of the bumblebee thickens
the air. The Dwarf Pine, the tree-mountaineer that climbs highest and
braves the coldest blasts, is found scattered in storm-beaten clumps
from the summit of the pass about half-way down the cañon. Here it is
succeeded by the hardy Two-leaved Pine, which is speedily joined by the
taller Yellow and Mountain Pines. These, with the burly juniper, and
shimmering aspen, rapidly grow larger as the sunshine becomes richer,
forming groves that block the view; or they stand more apart here and
there in picturesque groups, that make beautiful and obvious harmony
with the rocks and with one another. Blooming underbrush becomes
abundant,—azalea, spiraea, and the brier-rose weaving fringes for the
streams, and shaggy rugs to relieve the stern, unflinching rock-bosses.

[Illustration: RANCHERIA FALLS, HETCH-HETCHY VALLEY]

Through this delightful wilderness, Cañon Creek roves without any
constraining channel, throbbing and wavering; now in sunshine, now in
thoughtful shade; falling, swirling, flashing from side to side in
weariless exuberance of energy. A glorious milky way of cascades is
thus developed, of which Bower Cascade, though one of the smallest, is
perhaps the most beautiful of them all. It is situated in the lower
region of the pass, just where the sunshine begins to mellow between
the cold and warm climates. Here the glad creek, grown strong with
tribute gathered from many a snowy fountain on the heights, sings
richer strains, and becomes more human and lovable at every step. Now
you may by its side find the rose and homely yarrow, and small meadows
full of bees and clover. At the head of a low-browed rock, luxuriant
dogwood bushes and willows arch over from bank to bank, embowering the
stream with their leafy branches; and drooping plumes, kept in motion
by the current, fringe the brow of the cascade in front. From this
leafy covert the stream leaps out into the light in a fluted curve
thick sown with sparkling crystals, and falls into a pool filled with
brown boulders, out of which it creeps gray with foam-bells and
disappears in a tangle of verdure like that from which it came.

Hence, to the foot of the cañon, the metamorphic slates give place to
granite, whose nobler sculpture calls forth expressions of
corresponding beauty from the stream in passing over it,—bright trills
of rapids, booming notes of falls, solemn hushes of smooth-gliding
sheets, all chanting and blending in glorious harmony. When, at length,
its impetuous alpine life is done, it slips through a meadow with
scarce an audible whisper, and falls asleep in Moraine Lake.

This water-bed is one of the finest I ever saw. Evergreens wave
soothingly about it, and the breath of flowers floats over it like
incense. Here our blessed stream rests from its rocky wanderings, all
its mountaineering done,—no more foaming rock-leaping, no more wild,
exulting song. It falls into a smooth, glassy sleep, stirred only by
the night-wind, which, coming down the cañon, makes it croon and mutter
in ripples along its broidered shores.

Leaving the lake, it glides quietly through the rushes, destined never
more to touch the living rock. Henceforth its path lies through ancient
moraines and reaches of ashy sage-plain, which nowhere afford rocks
suitable for the development of cascades or sheer falls. Yet this
beauty of maturity, though less striking, is of a still higher order,
enticing us lovingly on through gentian meadows and groves of rustling
aspen to Lake Mono, where, spirit-like, our happy stream vanishes in
vapor, and floats free again in the sky.

Bloody Cañon, like every other in the Sierra, was recently occupied by
a glacier, which derived its fountain snows from the adjacent summits,
and descended into Mono Lake, at a time when its waters stood at a much
higher level than now. The principal characters in which the history of
the ancient glaciers is preserved are displayed here in marvelous
freshness and simplicity, furnishing the student with extraordinary
advantages for the acquisition of knowledge of this sort. The most
striking passages are polished and striated surfaces, which in many
places reflect the rays of the sun like smooth water. The dam of Red
Lake is an elegantly modeled rib of metamorphic slate, brought into
relief because of its superior strength, and because of the greater
intensity of the glacial erosion of the rock immediately above it,
caused by a steeply inclined tributary glacier, which entered the main
trunk with a heavy down-thrust at the head of the lake.

Moraine Lake furnishes an equally interesting example of a basin formed
wholly, or in part, by a terminal moraine dam curved across the path of
a stream between two lateral moraines.

At Moraine Lake the cañon proper terminates, although apparently
continued by the two lateral moraines of the vanished glacier. These
moraines are about 300 feet high, and extend unbrokenly from the sides
of the cañon into the plain, a distance of about five miles, curving
and tapering in beautiful lines. Their sunward sides are gardens, their
shady sides are groves; the former devoted chiefly to eriogonae,
compositae, and graminae; a square rod containing five or six profusely
flowered eriogonums of several species, about the same number of bahia
and linosyris, and a few grass tufts; each species being planted trimly
apart, with bare gravel between, as if cultivated artificially.

My first visit to Bloody Cañon was made in the summer of 1869, under
circumstances well calculated to heighten the impressions that are the
peculiar offspring of mountains. I came from the blooming tangles of
Florida, and waded out into the plant-gold of the great valley of
California, when its flora was as yet untrodden. Never before had I
beheld congregations of social flowers half so extensive or half so
glorious. Golden composite covered all the ground from the Coast Range
to the Sierra like a stratum of curdled sunshine, in which I reveled
for weeks, watching the rising and setting of their innumerable suns;
then I gave myself up to be borne forward on the crest of the summer
wave that sweeps annually up the Sierra and spends itself on the snowy
summits.

At the Big Tuolumne Meadows I remained more than a month, sketching,
botanizing, and climbing among the surrounding mountains. The
mountaineer with whom I then happened to be camping was one of those
remarkable men one so frequently meets in California, the hard angles
and bosses of whose characters have been brought into relief by the
grinding excitements of the gold period, until they resemble glacial
landscapes. But at this late day, my friend’s activities had subsided,
and his craving for rest caused him to become a gentle shepherd and
literally to lie down with the lamb.

Recognizing the unsatisfiable longings of my Scotch Highland instincts,
he threw out some hints concerning Bloody Cañon, and advised me to
explore it. “I have never seen it myself,” he said, “for I never was so
unfortunate as to pass that way. But I have heard many a strange story
about it, and I warrant you will at least find it wild enough.”

Then of course I made haste to see it. Early next morning I made up a
bundle of bread, tied my note-book to my belt, and strode away in the
bracing air, full of eager, indefinite hope. The plushy lawns that lay
in my path served to soothe my morning haste. The sod in many places
was starred with daisies and blue gentians, over which I lingered. I
traced the paths of the ancient glaciers over many a shining pavement,
and marked the gaps in the upper forests that told the power of the
winter avalanches. Climbing higher, I saw for the first time the
gradual dwarfing of the pines in compliance with climate, and on the
summit discovered creeping mats of the arctic willow overgrown with
silky catkins, and patches of the dwarf vaccinium with its round
flowers sprinkled in the grass like purple hail; while in every
direction the landscape stretched sublimely away in fresh wildness—a
manuscript written by the hand of Nature alone.

At length, as I entered the pass, the huge rocks began to close around
in all their wild, mysterious impressiveness, when suddenly, as I was
gazing eagerly about me, a drove of gray hairy beings came in sight,
lumbering toward me with a kind of boneless, wallowing motion like
bears.

I never turn back, though often so inclined, and in this particular
instance, amid such surroundings, everything seemed singularly
unfavorable for the calm acceptance of so grim a company. Suppressing
my fears, I soon discovered that although as hairy as bears and as
crooked as summit pines, the strange creatures were sufficiently erect
to belong to our own species. They proved to be nothing more formidable
than Mono Indians dressed in the skins of sage-rabbits. Both the men
and the women begged persistently for whisky and tobacco, and seemed so
accustomed to denials that I found it impossible to convince them that
I had none to give. Excepting the names of these two products of
civilization, they seemed to understand not a word of English; but I
afterward learned that they were on their way to Yosemite Valley to
feast awhile on trout and procure a load of acorns to carry back
through the pass to their huts on the shore of Mono Lake.

Occasionally a good countenance may be seen among the Mono Indians, but
these, the first specimens I had seen, were mostly ugly, and some of
them altogether hideous. The dirt on their faces was fairly stratified,
and seemed so ancient and so undisturbed it might almost possess a
geological significance. The older faces were, moreover, strangely
blurred and divided into sections by furrows that looked like the
cleavage-joints of rocks, suggesting exposure on the mountains in a
castaway condition for ages. Somehow they seemed to have no right place
in the landscape, and I was glad to see them fading out of sight down
the pass.

Then came evening, and the somber cliffs were inspired with the
ineffable beauty of the alpenglow. A solemn calm fell upon everything.
All the lower portion of the cañon was in gloaming shadow, and I crept
into a hollow near one of the upper lakelets to smooth the ground in a
sheltered nook for a bed. When the short twilight faded, I kindled a
sunny fire, made a cup of tea, and lay down to rest and look at the
stars. Soon the night-wind began to flow and pour in torrents among the
jagged peaks, mingling strange tones with those of the waterfalls
sounding far below; and as I drifted toward sleep I began to experience
an uncomfortable feeling of nearness to the furred Monos. Then the full
moon looked down over the edge of the cañon wall, her countenance
seemingly filled with intense concern, and apparently so near as to
produce a startling effect as if she had entered my bedroom, forgetting
all the world, to gaze on me alone.

The night was full of strange sounds, and I gladly welcomed the
morning. Breakfast was soon done, and I set forth in the exhilarating
freshness of the new day, rejoicing in the abundance of pure wildness
so close about me. The stupendous rocks, hacked and scarred with
centuries of storms, stood sharply out in the thin early light, while
down in the bottom of the cañon grooved and polished bosses heaved and
glistened like swelling sea-waves, telling a grand old story of the
ancient glacier that poured its crushing floods above them.

Here for the first time I met the arctic daisies in all their
perfection of purity and spirituality,—gentle mountaineers face to face
with the stormy sky, kept safe and warm by a thousand miracles. I
leaped lightly from rock to rock, glorying in the eternal freshness and
sufficiency of Nature, and in the ineffable tenderness with which she
nurtures her mountain darlings in the very fountains of storms. Fresh
beauty appeared at every step, delicate rock-ferns, and groups of the
fairest flowers. Now another lake came to view, now a waterfall. Never
fell light in brighter spangles, never fell water in whiter foam. I
seemed to float through the cañon enchanted, feeling nothing of its
roughness, and was out in the Mono levels before I was aware.

Looking back from the shore of Moraine Lake, my morning ramble seemed
all a dream. There curved Bloody Cañon, a mere glacial furrow 2000 feet
deep, with smooth rocks projecting from the sides and braided together
in the middle, like bulging, swelling muscles. Here the lilies were
higher than my head, and the sunshine was warm enough for palms. Yet
the snow around the arctic willows was plainly visible only four miles
away, and between were narrow specimen zones of all the principal
climates of the globe.

On the bank of a small brook that comes gurgling down the side of the
left lateral moraine, I found a camp-fire still burning, which no doubt
belonged to the gray Indians I had met on the summit, and I listened
instinctively and moved cautiously forward, half expecting to see some
of their grim faces peering out of the bushes.

Passing on toward the open plain, I noticed three well-defined terminal
moraines curved gracefully across the cañon stream, and joined by long
splices to the two noble laterals. These mark the halting-places of the
vanished glacier when it was retreating into its summit shadows on the
breaking-up of the glacial winter.

Five miles below the foot of Moraine Lake, just where the lateral
moraines lose themselves in the plain, there was a field of wild rye,
growing in magnificent waving bunches six to eight feet high, bearing
heads from six to twelve inches long. Rubbing out some of the grains, I
found them about five eighths of an inch long, dark-colored, and sweet.
Indian women were gathering it in baskets, bending down large handfuls,
beating it out, and fanning it in the wind. They were quite
picturesque, coming through the rye, as one caught glimpses of them
here and there, in winding lanes and openings, with splendid tufts
arching above their heads, while their incessant chat and laughter
showed their heedless joy.

Like the rye-field, I found the so-called desert of Mono blooming in a
high state of natural cultivation with the wild rose, cherry, aster,
and the delicate abronia; also innumerable gilias, phloxes, poppies,
and bush-compositae. I observed their gestures and the various
expressions of their corollas, inquiring how they could be so fresh and
beautiful out in this volcanic desert. They told as happy a life as any
plant-company I ever met, and seemed to enjoy even the hot sand and the
wind.

But the vegetation of the pass has been in great part destroyed, and
the same may be said of all the more accessible passes throughout the
range. Immense numbers of starving sheep and cattle have been driven
through them into Nevada, trampling the wild gardens and meadows almost
out of existence. The lofty walls are untouched by any foot, and the
falls sing on unchanged; but the sight of crushed flowers and stripped,
bitten bushes goes far toward destroying the charm of wildness.

The cañon should be seen in winter. A good, strong traveler, who knows
the way and the weather, might easily make a safe excursion through it
from Yosemite Valley on snow-shoes during some tranquil time, when the
storms are hushed. The lakes and falls would be buried then; but so,
also, would be the traces of destructive feet, while the views of the
mountains in their winter garb, and the ride at lightning speed down
the pass between the snowy walls, would be truly glorious.

[Illustration: VIEW OF THE MONO PLAIN FROM THE FOOT OF BLOODY CAÑON.]




CHAPTER VI
THE GLACIER LAKES


Among the many unlooked-for treasures that are bound up and hidden away
in the depths of Sierra solitudes, none more surely charm and surprise
all kinds of travelers than the glacier lakes. The forests and the
glaciers and the snowy fountains of the streams advertise their wealth
in a more or less telling manner even in the distance, but nothing is
seen of the lakes until we have climbed above them. All the upper
branches of the rivers are fairly laden with lakes, like orchard trees
with fruit. They lie embosomed in the deep woods, down in the grovy
bottoms of cañons, high on bald tablelands, and around the feet of the
icy peaks, mirroring back their wild beauty over and over again. Some
conception of their lavish abundance may be made from the fact that,
from one standpoint on the summit of Red Mountain, a day’s journey to
the east of Yosemite Valley, no fewer than forty-two are displayed
within a radius of ten miles. The whole number in the Sierra can hardly
be less than fifteen hundred, not counting the smaller pools and tarns,
which are innumerable. Perhaps two thirds or more lie on the western
flank of the range, and all are restricted to the alpine and subalpine
regions. At the close of the last glacial period, the middle and
foot-hill regions also abounded in lakes, all of which have long since
vanished as completely as the magnificent ancient glaciers that brought
them into existence.

Though the eastern flank of the range is excessively steep, we find
lakes pretty regularly distributed throughout even the most precipitous
portions. They are mostly found in the upper branches of the cañons,
and in the glacial amphitheaters around the peaks.

Occasionally long, narrow specimens occur upon the steep sides of
dividing ridges, their basins swung lengthwise like hammocks, and very
rarely one is found lying so exactly on the summit of the range at the
head of some pass that its waters are discharged down both flanks when
the snow is melting fast. But, however situated, they soon cease to
form surprises to the studious mountaineer; for, like all the love-work
of Nature, they are harmoniously related to one another, and to all the
other features of the mountains. It is easy, therefore, to find the
bright lake-eyes in the roughest and most ungovernable-looking
topography of any landscape countenance. Even in the lower regions,
where they have been closed for many a century, their rocky orbits are
still discernible, filled in with the detritus of flood and avalanche.
A beautiful system of grouping in correspondence with the glacial
fountains is soon perceived; also their extension in the direction of
the trends of the ancient glaciers; and in general their dependence as
to form, size, and position upon the character of the rocks in which
their basins have been eroded, and the quantity and direction of
application of the glacial force expended upon each basin.

In the upper cañons we usually find them in pretty regular succession,
strung together like beads on the bright ribbons of their
feeding-streams, which pour, white and gray with foam and spray, from
one to the other, their perfect mirror stillness making impressive
contrasts with the grand blare and glare of the connecting cataracts.
In Lake Hollow, on the north side of the Hoffman spur, immediately
above the great Tuolumne cañon, there are ten lovely lakelets lying
near together in one general hollow, like eggs in a nest. Seen from
above, in a general view, feathered with Hemlock Spruce, and fringed
with sedge, they seem to me the most singularly beautiful and
interestingly located lake-cluster I have ever yet discovered.

Lake Tahoe, 22 miles long by about 10 wide, and from 500 to over 1600
feet in depth, is the largest of all the Sierra lakes. It lies just
beyond the northern limit of the higher portion of the range between
the main axis and a spur that puts out on the east side from near the
head of the Carson River. Its forested shores go curving in and out
around many an emerald bay and pine-crowned promontory, and its waters
are everywhere as keenly pure as any to be found among the highest
mountains.

Donner Lake, rendered memorable by the terrible fate of the Donner
party, is about three miles long, and lies about ten miles to the north
of Tahoe, at the head of one of the tributaries of the Truckee. A few
miles farther north lies Lake Independence, about the same size as
Donner. But far the greater number of the lakes lie much higher and are
quite small, few of them exceeding a mile in length, most of them less
than half a mile.

Along the lower edge of the lake-belt, the smallest have disappeared by
the filling-in of their basins, leaving only those of considerable
size. But all along the upper freshly glaciated margin of the
lake-bearing zone, every hollow, however small, lying within reach of
any portion of the close network of streams, contains a bright,
brimming pool; so that the landscape viewed from the mountain-tops
seems to be sown broadcast with them. Many of the larger lakes are
encircled with smaller ones like central gems girdled with sparkling
brilliants. In general, however, there is no marked dividing line as to
size. In order, therefore, to prevent confusion, I would state here
that in giving numbers, I include none less than 500 yards in
circumference.

In the basin of the Merced River, I counted 131, of which 111 are upon
the tributaries that fall so grandly into Yosemite Valley. Pohono
Creek, which forms the fall of that name, takes its rise in a beautiful
lake, lying beneath the shadow of a lofty granite spur that puts out
from Buena Vista peak. This is now the only lake left in the whole
Pohono Basin. The Illilouette has sixteen, the Nevada no fewer than
sixty-seven, the Tenaya eight, Hoffmann Creek five, and Yosemite Creek
fourteen. There are but two other lake-bearing affluents of the Merced,
viz., the South Fork with fifteen, and Cascade Creek with five, both of
which unite with the main trunk below Yosemite.

[Illustration: LAKE TENAYA, ONE OF THE YOSEMITE FOUNTAINS.]

The Merced River, as a whole, is remarkably like an elm-tree, and it
requires but little effort on the part of the imagination to picture it
standing upright, with all its lakes hanging upon its spreading
branches, the topmost eighty miles in height. Now add all the other
lake-bearing rivers of the Sierra, each in its place, and you will have
a truly glorious spectacle,—an avenue the length and width of the
range; the long, slender, gray shafts of the main trunks, the milky way
of arching branches, and the silvery lakes, all clearly defined and
shining on the sky. How excitedly such an addition to the scenery would
be gazed at! Yet these lakeful rivers are still more excitingly
beautiful and impressive in their natural positions to those who have
the eyes to see them as they lie imbedded in their meadows and forests
and glacier-sculptured rocks.

When a mountain lake is born,—when, like a young eye, it first opens to
the light,—it is an irregular, expressionless crescent, inclosed in
banks of rock and ice,—bare, glaciated rock on the lower side, the
rugged snout of a glacier on the upper. In this condition it remains
for many a year, until at length, toward the end of some auspicious
cluster of seasons, the glacier recedes beyond the upper margin of the
basin, leaving it open from shore to shore for the first time,
thousands of years after its conception beneath the glacier that
excavated its basin. The landscape, cold and bare, is reflected in its
pure depths; the winds ruffle its glassy surface, and the sun fills it
with throbbing spangles, while its waves begin to lap and murmur around
its leafless shores,—sun-spangles during the day and reflected stars at
night its only flowers, the winds and the snow its only visitors.
Meanwhile, the glacier continues to recede, and numerous rills, still
younger than the lake itself, bring down glacier-mud, sand-grains, and
pebbles, giving rise to margin-rings and plats of soil. To these fresh
soil-beds come many a waiting plant. First, a hardy carex with arching
leaves and a spike of brown flowers; then, as the seasons grow warmer,
and the soil-beds deeper and wider, other sedges take their appointed
places, and these are joined by blue gentians, daisies, dodecatheons,
violets, honeyworts, and many a lowly moss. Shrubs also hasten in time
to the new gardens,—kalmia with its glossy leaves and purple flowers,
the arctic willow, making soft woven carpets, together with the heathy
bryanthus and cassiope, the fairest and dearest of them all. Insects
now enrich the air, frogs pipe cheerily in the shallows, soon followed
by the ouzel, which is the first bird to visit a glacier lake, as the
sedge is the first of plants.

So the young lake grows in beauty, becoming more and more humanly
lovable from century to century. Groves of aspen spring up, and hardy
pines, and the Hemlock Spruce, until it is richly overshadowed and
embowered. But while its shores are being enriched, the soil-beds creep
out with incessant growth, contracting its area, while the lighter
mud-particles deposited on the bottom cause it to grow constantly
shallower, until at length the last remnant of the lake
vanishes,—closed forever in ripe and natural old age. And now its
feeding-stream goes winding on without halting through the new gardens
and groves that have taken its place.

The length of the life of any lake depends ordinarily upon the capacity
of its basin, as compared with the carrying power of the streams that
flow into it, the character of the rocks over which these streams flow,
and the relative position of the lake toward other lakes. In a series
whose basins lie in the same cañon, and are fed by one and the same
main stream, the uppermost will, of course, vanish first unless some
other lake-filling agent comes in to modify the result; because at
first it receives nearly all of the sediments that the stream brings
down, only the finest of the mud-particles being carried through the
highest of the series to the next below. Then the next higher, and the
next would be successively filled, and the lowest would be the last to
vanish. But this simplicity as to duration is broken in upon in various
ways, chiefly through the action of side-streams that enter the lower
lakes direct. For, notwithstanding many of these side tributaries are
quite short, and, during late summer, feeble, they all become powerful
torrents in springtime when the snow is melting, and carry not only
sand and pine-needles, but large trunks and boulders tons in weight,
sweeping them down their steeply inclined channels and into the lake
basins with astounding energy. Many of these side affluents also have
the advantage of access to the main lateral moraines of the vanished
glacier that occupied the cañon, and upon these they draw for
lake-filling material, while the main trunk stream flows mostly over
clean glacier pavements, where but little moraine matter is ever left
for them to carry. Thus a small rapid stream with abundance of loose
transportable material within its reach may fill up an extensive basin
in a few centuries, while a large perennial trunk stream, flowing over
clean, enduring pavements, though ordinarily a hundred times larger,
may not fill a smaller basin in thousands of years.

The comparative influence of great and small streams as lake-fillers is
strikingly illustrated in Yosemite Valley, through which the Merced
flows. The bottom of the valley is now composed of level meadow-lands
and dry, sloping soil-beds planted with oak and pine, but it was once a
lake stretching from wall to wall and nearly from one end of the valley
to the other, forming one of the most beautiful cliff-bound sheets of
water that ever existed in the Sierra. And though never perhaps seen by
human eye, it was but yesterday, geologically speaking, since it
disappeared, and the traces of its existence are still so fresh, it may
easily be restored to the eye of imagination and viewed in all its
grandeur, about as truly and vividly as if actually before us. Now we
find that the detritus which fills this magnificent basin was not
brought down from the distant mountains by the main streams that
converge here to form the river, however powerful and available for the
purpose at first sight they appear; but almost wholly by the small
local tributaries, such as those of Indian Cañon, the Sentinel, and the
Three Brothers, and by a few small residual glaciers which lingered in
the shadows of the walls long after the main trunk glacier had receded
beyond the head of the valley.

Had the glaciers that once covered the range been melted at once,
leaving the entire surface bare from top to bottom simultaneously, then
of course all the lakes would have come into existence at the same
time, and the highest, other circumstances being equal, would, as we
have seen, be the first to vanish. But because they melted gradually
from the foot of the range upward, the lower lakes were the first to
see the light and the first to be obliterated. Therefore, instead of
finding the lakes of the present day at the foot of the range, we find
them at the top. Most of the lower lakes vanished thousands of years
before those now brightening the alpine landscapes were born. And in
general, owing to the deliberation of the upward retreat of the
glaciers, the lowest of the existing lakes are also the oldest, a
gradual transition being apparent throughout the entire belt, from the
older, forested, meadow-rimmed and contracted forms all the way up to
those that are new born, lying bare and meadowless among the highest
peaks.

[Illustration: THE DEATH OF A LAKE.]

A few small lakes unfortunately situated are extinguished suddenly by a
single swoop of an avalanche, carrying down immense numbers of trees,
together with the soil they were growing upon. Others are obliterated
by land-slips, earthquake taluses, etc., but these lake-deaths compared
with those resulting from the deliberate and incessant deposition of
sediments, may be termed accidental. Their fate is like that of trees
struck by lightning.

The lake-line is of course still rising, its present elevation being
about 8000 feet above sea-level; somewhat higher than this toward the
southern extremity of the range, lower toward the northern, on account
of the difference in time of the withdrawal of the glaciers, due to
difference in climate. Specimens occur here and there considerably
below this limit, in basins specially protected from inwashing
detritus, or exceptional in size. These, however, are not sufficiently
numerous to make any marked irregularity in the line. The highest I
have yet found lies at an elevation of about 12,000 feet, in a glacier
womb, at the foot of one of the highest of the summit peaks, a few
miles to the north of Mount Hitter. The basins of perhaps twenty-five
or thirty are still in process of formation beneath the few lingering
glaciers, but by the time they are born, an equal or greater number
will probably have died. Since the beginning of the close of the
ice-period the whole number in the range has perhaps never been greater
than at present.

A rough approximation to the average duration of these mountain lakes
may be made from data already suggested, but I cannot stop here to
present the subject in detail. I must also forego, in the mean time,
the pleasure of a full discussion of the interesting question of
lake-basin formation, for which fine, clear, demonstrative material
abounds in these mountains. In addition to what has been already given
on the subject, I will only make this one statement. Every lake in the
Sierra is a glacier lake. Their basins were not merely remodeled and
scoured out by this mighty agent, but in the first place were eroded
from the solid.

I must now make haste to give some nearer views of representative
specimens lying at different elevations on the main lake-belt,
confining myself to descriptions of the features most characteristic of
each.

SHADOW LAKE

This is a fine specimen of the oldest and lowest of the existing lakes.
It lies about eight miles above Yosemite Valley, on the main branch of
the Merced, at an elevation of about 7350 feet above the sea; and is
everywhere so securely cliff-bound that without artificial trails only
wild animals can get down to its rocky shores from any direction. Its
original length was about a mile and a half; now it is only half a mile
in length by about a fourth of a mile in width, and over the lowest
portion of the basin ninety-eight feet deep. Its crystal waters are
clasped around on the north and south by majestic granite walls
sculptured in true Yosemitic style into domes, gables, and battlemented
headlands, which on the south come plunging down sheer into deep water,
from a height of from 1500 to 2000 feet. The South Lyell glacier eroded
this magnificent basin out of solid porphyritic granite while forcing
its way westward from the summit fountains toward Yosemite, and the
exposed rocks around the shores, and the projecting bosses of the
walls, ground and burnished beneath the vast ice-flood, still glow with
silvery radiance, notwithstanding the innumerable corroding storms that
have fallen upon them. The general conformation of the basin, as well
as the moraines laid along the top of the walls, and the grooves and
scratches on the bottom and sides, indicate in the most unmistakable
manner the direction pursued by this mighty ice-river, its great depth,
and the tremendous energy it exerted in thrusting itself into and out
of the basin; bearing down with superior pressure upon this portion of
its channel, because of the greater declivity, consequently eroding it
deeper than the other portions about it, and producing the lake-bowl as
the necessary result.

With these magnificent ice-characters so vividly before us it is not
easy to realize that the old glacier that made them vanished tens of
centuries ago; for, excepting the vegetation that has sprung up, and
the changes effected by an earthquake that hurled rock-avalanches from
the weaker headlands, the basin as a whole presents the same appearance
that it did when first brought to light. The lake itself, however, has
undergone marked changes; one sees at a glance that it is growing old.
More than two thirds of its original area is now dry land, covered with
meadow-grasses and groves of pine and fir, and the level bed of
alluvium stretching across from wall to wall at the head is evidently
growing out all along its lakeward margin, and will at length close the
lake forever.

[Illustration: SHADOW LAKE (MERCED LAKE), YOSEMITE NATIONAL PARK.]

Every lover of fine wildness would delight to saunter on a summer day
through the flowery groves now occupying the filled-up portion of the
basin. The curving shore is clearly traced by a ribbon of white sand
upon which the ripples play; then comes a belt of broad-leafed sedges,
interrupted here and there by impenetrable tangles of willows; beyond
this there are groves of trembling aspen; then a dark, shadowy belt of
Two-leaved Pine, with here and there a round carex meadow ensconced
nest-like in its midst; and lastly, a narrow outer margin of majestic
Silver Fir 200 feet high. The ground beneath the trees is covered with
a luxuriant crop of grasses, chiefly triticum, bromus, and
calamagrostis, with purple spikes and panicles arching to one’s
shoulders; while the open meadow patches glow throughout the summer
with showy flowers,—heleniums, goldenrods, erigerons, lupines,
castilleias, and lilies, and form favorite hiding and feeding-grounds
for bears and deer.

The rugged south wall is feathered darkly along the top with an
imposing array of spirey Silver Firs, while the rifted precipices all
the way down to the water’s edge are adorned with picturesque old
junipers, their cinnamon-colored bark showing finely upon the neutral
gray of the granite. These, with a few venturesome Dwarf Pines and
Spruces, lean out over fissured ribs and tablets, or stand erect back
in shadowy niches, in an indescribably wild and fearless manner.
Moreover, the white-flowered Douglas spiraea and dwarf evergreen oak
form graceful fringes along the narrower seams, wherever the slightest
hold can be effected. Rock-ferns, too, are here, such as allosorus,
pellaea, and cheilanthes, making handsome rosettes on the drier
fissures; and the delicate maidenhair, cistoperis, and woodsia hide
back in mossy grottoes, moistened by some trickling rill; and then the
orange wall-flower holds up its showy panicles here and there in the
sunshine, and bahia makes bosses of gold. But, notwithstanding all this
plant beauty, the general impression in looking across the lake is of
stern, unflinching rockiness; the ferns and flowers are scarcely seen,
and not one fiftieth of the whole surface is screened with plant life.

The sunnier north wall is more varied in sculpture, but the general
tone is the same. A few headlands, flat-topped and soil-covered,
support clumps of cedar and pine; and up-curving tangles of chinquapin
and live-oak, growing on rough earthquake taluses, girdle their bases.
Small streams come cascading down between them, their foaming margins
brightened with gay primulas, gilias, and mimuluses. And close along
the shore on this side there is a strip of rocky meadow enameled with
buttercups, daisies, and white violets, and the purple-topped grasses
out on its beveled border dip their leaves into the water.

The lower edge of the basin is a dam-like swell of solid granite,
heavily abraded by the old glacier, but scarce at all cut into as yet
by the outflowing stream, though it has flowed on unceasingly since the
lake came into existence.

As soon as the stream is fairly over the lake-lip it breaks into
cascades, never for a moment halting, and scarce abating one jot of its
glad energy, until it reaches the next filled-up basin, a mile below.
Then swirling and curving drowsily through meadow and grove, it breaks
forth anew into gray rapids and falls, leaping and gliding in glorious
exuberance of wild bound and dance down into another and yet another
filled-up lake basin. Then, after a long rest in the levels of Little
Yosemite, it makes its grandest display in the famous Nevada Fall. Out
of the clouds of spray at the foot of the fall the battered, roaring
river gropes its way, makes another mile of cascades and rapids, rests
a moment in Emerald Pool, then plunges over the grand cliff of the
Vernal Fall, and goes thundering and chafing down a boulder-choked
gorge of tremendous depth and wildness into the tranquil reaches of the
old Yosemite lake basin.

The color-beauty about Shadow Lake during the Indian summer is much
richer than one could hope to find in so young and so glacial a
wilderness. Almost every leaf is tinted then, and the golden-rods are
in bloom; but most of the color is given by the ripe grasses, willows,
and aspens. At the foot of the lake you stand in a trembling aspen
grove, every leaf painted like a butterfly, and away to right and left
round the shores sweeps a curving ribbon of meadow, red and brown
dotted with pale yellow, shading off here and there into hazy purple.
The walls, too, are dashed with bits of bright color that gleam out on
the neutral granite gray. But neither the walls, nor the margin meadow,
nor yet the gay, fluttering grove in which you stand, nor the lake
itself, flashing with spangles, can long hold your attention; for at
the head of the lake there is a gorgeous mass of orange-yellow,
belonging to the main aspen belt of the basin, which seems the very
fountain whence all the color below it had flowed, and here your eye is
filled and fixed. This glorious mass is about thirty feet high, and
extends across the basin nearly from wall to wall. Rich bosses of
willow flame in front of it, and from the base of these the brown
meadow comes forward to the water’s edge, the whole being relieved
against the unyielding green of the coniferae, while thick sun-gold is
poured over all.

During these blessed color-days no cloud darkens the sky, the winds are
gentle, and the landscape rests, hushed everywhere, and indescribably
impressive. A few ducks are usually seen sailing on the lake,
apparently more for pleasure than anything else, and the ouzels at the
head of the rapids sing always; while robins, grosbeaks, and the
Douglas squirrels are busy in the groves, making delightful company,
and intensifying the feeling of grateful sequestration without ruffling
the deep, hushed calm and peace.

[Illustration: VERNAL FALL, YOSEMITE VALLEY]

This autumnal mellowness usually lasts until the end of November. Then
come days of quite another kind. The winter clouds grow, and bloom, and
shed their starry crystals on every leaf and rock, and all the colors
vanish like a sunset. The deer gather and hasten down their well-known
trails, fearful of being snow-bound. Storm succeeds storm, heaping snow
on the cliffs and meadows, and bending the slender pines to the ground
in wide arches, one over the other, clustering and interlacing like
lodged wheat. Avalanches rush and boom from the shelving heights,
piling immense heaps upon the frozen lake, and all the summer glory is
buried and lost. Yet in the midst of this hearty winter the sun shines
warm at times, calling the Douglas squirrel to frisk in the snowy pines
and seek out his hidden stores; and the weather is never so severe as
to drive away the grouse and little nut-hatches and chickadees.

Toward May, the lake begins to open. The hot sun sends down innumerable
streams over the cliffs, streaking them round and round with foam. The
snow slowly vanishes, and the meadows show tintings of green. Then
spring comes on apace; flowers and flies enrich the air and the sod,
and the deer come back to the upper groves like birds to an old nest.

I first discovered this charming lake in the autumn of 1872, while on
my way to the glaciers at the head of the river. It was rejoicing then
in its gayest colors, untrodden, hidden in the glorious wildness like
unmined gold. Year after year I walked its shores without discovering
any other trace of humanity than the remains of an Indian camp-fire,
and the thigh-bones of a deer that had been broken to get at the
marrow. It lies out of the regular ways of Indians, who love to hunt in
more accessible fields adjacent to trails. Their knowledge of
deer-haunts had probably enticed them here some hunger-time when they
wished to make sure of a feast; for hunting in this lake-hollow is like
hunting in a fenced park. I had told the beauty of Shadow Lake only to
a few friends, fearing it might come to be trampled and “improved” like
Yosemite. On my last visit, as I was sauntering along the shore on the
strip of sand between the water and sod, reading the tracks of the wild
animals that live here, I was startled by a human track, which I at
once saw belonged to some shepherd; for each step was turned out 35° or
40° from the general course pursued, and was also run over in an
uncertain sprawling fashion at the heel, while a row of round dots on
the right indicated the staff that shepherds carry. None but a shepherd
could make such a track, and after tracing it a few minutes I began to
fear that he might be seeking pasturage; for what else could he be
seeking? Returning from the glaciers shortly afterward, nay worst fears
were realized. A trail had been made down the mountain-side from the
north, and all the gardens and meadows were destroyed by a horde of
hoofed locusts, as if swept by a fire. The money-changers were in the
temple.

ORANGE LAKE

Besides these larger cañon lakes, fed by the main cañon streams, there
are many smaller ones lying aloft on the top of rock benches, entirely
independent of the general drainage channels, and of course drawing
their supplies from a very limited area. Notwithstanding they are
mostly small and shallow, owing to their immunity from avalanche
detritus and the inwashings of powerful streams, they often endure
longer than others many times larger but less favorably situated. When
very shallow they become dry toward the end of summer; but because
their basins are ground out of seamless stone they suffer no loss save
from evaporation alone; and the great depth of snow that falls, lasting
into June, makes their dry season short in any case.

Orange Lake is a fair illustration of this bench form. It lies in the
middle of a beautiful glacial pavement near the lower margin of the
lake-line, about a mile and a half to the northwest of Shadow Lake. It
is only about 100 yards in circumference. Next the water there is a
girdle of carices with wide overarching leaves, then in regular order a
shaggy ruff of huckleberry bushes, a zone of willows with here and
there a bush of the Mountain Ash, then a zone of aspens with a few
pines around the outside. These zones are of course concentric, and
together form a wall beyond which the naked ice-burnished granite
stretches away in every direction, leaving it conspicuously relieved,
like a bunch of palms in a desert.

In autumn, when the colors are ripe, the whole circular grove, at a
little distance, looks like a big handful of flowers set in a cup to be
kept fresh—a tuft of goldenrods. Its feeding-streams are exceedingly
beautiful, notwithstanding their inconstancy and extreme shallowness.
They have no channel whatever, and consequently are left free to spread
in thin sheets upon the shining granite and wander at will. In many
places the current is less than a fourth of an inch deep, and flows
with so little friction it is scarcely visible. Sometimes there is not
a single foam-bell, or drifting pine-needle, or irregularity of any
sort to manifest its motion. Yet when observed narrowly it is seen to
form a web of gliding lacework exquisitely woven, giving beautiful
reflections from its minute curving ripples and eddies, and differing
from the water-laces of large cascades in being everywhere transparent.
In spring, when the snow is melting, the lake-bowl is brimming full,
and sends forth quite a large stream that slips glassily for 200 yards
or so, until it comes to an almost vertical precipice 800 feet high,
down which it plunges in a fine cataract; then it gathers its scattered
waters and goes smoothly over folds of gently dipping granite to its
confluence with the main cañon stream. During the greater portion of
the year, however, not a single water sound will you hear either at
head or foot of the lake, not oven the whispered lappings of
ripple-waves along the shore; for the winds are fenced out. But the
deep mountain silence is sweetened now and then by birds that stop here
to rest and drink on their way across the cañon.

LAKE STARR KING

A beautiful variety of the bench-top lakes occurs just where the great
lateral moraines of the main glaciers have been shoved forward in
outswelling concentric rings by small residual tributary glaciers.
Instead of being encompassed by a narrow ring of trees like Orange
Lake, these lie embosomed in dense moraine woods, so dense that in
seeking them you may pass them by again and again, although you may
know nearly where they lie concealed.

[Illustration: LAKE STARR KING.]

Lake Starr King, lying to the north of the cone of that name, above the
Little Yosemite Valley, is a fine specimen of this variety. The ouzels
pass it by, and so do the ducks; they could hardly get into it if they
would, without plumping straight down inside the circling trees.

Yet these isolated gems, lying like fallen fruit detached from the
branches, are not altogether without inhabitants and joyous, animating
visitors. Of course fishes cannot get into them, and this is generally
true of nearly every glacier lake in the range, but they are all well
stocked with happy frogs. How did the frogs get into them in the first
place? Perhaps their sticky spawn was carried in on the feet of ducks
or other birds, else their progenitors must have made some exciting
excursions through the woods and up the sides of the cañons. Down in
the still, pure depths of these hidden lakelets you may also find the
larvae of innumerable insects and a great variety of beetles, while the
air above them is thick with humming wings, through the midst of which
fly-catchers are constantly darting. And in autumn, when the
huckleberries are ripe, bands of robins and grosbeaks come to feast,
forming altogether delightful little byworlds for the naturalist.

Pushing our way upward toward the axis of the range, we find lakes in
greater and greater abundance, and more youthful in aspect. At an
elevation of about 9000 feet above sea-level they seem to have arrived
at middle age,—that is, their basins seem to be about half filled with
alluvium. Broad sheets of meadow-land are seen extending into them,
imperfect and boggy in many places and more nearly level than those of
the older lakes below them, and the vegetation of their shores is of
course more alpine. Kalmia, lodum, and cassiope fringe the meadow
rocks, while the luxuriant, waving groves, so characteristic of the
lower lakes, are represented only by clumps of the Dwarf Pine and
Hemlock Spruce. These, however, are oftentimes very picturesquely
grouped on rocky headlands around the outer rim of the meadows, or with
still more striking effect crown some rocky islet.

Moreover, from causes that we cannot stop here to explain, the cliffs
about these middle-aged lakes are seldom of the massive Yosemite type,
but are more broken, and less sheer, and they usually stand back,
leaving the shores comparatively free; while the few precipitous rocks
that do come forward and plunge directly into deep water are seldom
more than three or four hundred feet high.

I have never yet met ducks in any of the lakes of this kind, but the
ouzel is never wanting where the feeding-streams are perennial. Wild
sheep and deer may occasionally be seen on the meadows, and very rarely
a bear. One might camp on the rugged shores of these bright fountains
for weeks, without meeting any animal larger than the marmots that
burrow beneath glacier boulders along the edges of the meadows.

The highest and youngest of all the lakes lie nestled in glacier wombs.
At first sight, they seem pictures of pure bloodless desolation,
miniature arctic seas, bound in perpetual ice and snow, and
overshadowed by harsh, gloomy, crumbling precipices. Their waters are
keen ultramarine blue in the deepest parts, lively grass-green toward
the shore shallows and around the edges of the small bergs usually
floating about in them. A few hardy sedges, frost-pinched every night,
are occasionally found making soft sods along the sun-touched portions
of their shores, and when their northern banks slope openly to the
south, and are soil-covered, no matter how coarsely, they are sure to
be brightened with flowers. One lake in particular now comes to mind
which illustrates the floweriness of the sun-touched banks of these icy
gems. Close up under the shadow of the Sierra Matterhorn, on the
eastern slope of the range, lies one of the iciest of these glacier
lakes at an elevation of about 12,000 feet. A short, ragged-edged
glacier crawls into it from the south, and on the opposite side it is
embanked and dammed by a series of concentric terminal moraines, made
by the glacier when it entirely filled the basin. Half a mile below
lies a second lake, at a height of 11,500 feet, about as cold and as
pure as a snow-crystal. The waters of the first come gurgling down into
it over and through the moraine dam, while a second stream pours into
it direct from a glacier that lies to the southeast. Sheer precipices
of crystalline snow rise out of deep water on the south, keeping
perpetual winter on that side, but there is a fine summery spot on the
other, notwithstanding the lake is only about 300 yards wide. Here, on
August 25, 1873, I found a charming company of flowers, not pinched,
crouching dwarfs, scarce able to look up, but warm and juicy, standing
erect in rich cheery color and bloom. On a narrow strip of shingle,
close to the water’s edge, there were a few tufts of carex gone to
seed; and a little way back up the rocky bank at the foot of a
crumbling wall so inclined as to absorb and radiate as well as reflect
a considerable quantity of sun-heat, was the garden, containing a
thrifty thicket of Cowania covered with large yellow flowers; several
bushes of the alpine ribes with berries nearly ripe and wildly acid; a
few handsome grasses belonging to two distinct species, and one
goldenrod; a few hairy lupines and radiant spragueas, whose blue and
rose-colored flowers were set off to fine advantage amid green carices;
and along a narrow seam in the very warmest angle of the wall a
perfectly gorgeous fringe of _Epilobium obcordatum_ with flowers an
inch wide, crowded together in lavish profusion, and colored as royal a
purple as ever was worn by any high-bred plant of the tropics; and best
of all, and greatest of all, a noble thistle in full bloom, standing
erect, head and shoulders above his companions, and thrusting out his
lances in sturdy vigor as if growing on a Scottish brae. All this brave
warm bloom among the raw stones, right in the face of the onlooking
glaciers.

As far as I have been able to find out, these upper lakes are
snow-buried in winter to a depth of about thirty-five or forty feet,
and those most exposed to avalanches, to a depth of even a hundred feet
or more. These last are, of course, nearly lost to the landscape. Some
remain buried for years, when the snowfall is exceptionally great, and
many open only on one side late in the season. The snow of the closed
side is composed of coarse granules compacted and frozen into a firm,
faintly stratified mass, like the _névé_ of a glacier. The lapping
waves of the open portion gradually undermine and cause it to break off
in large masses like icebergs, which gives rise to a precipitous front
like the discharging wall of a glacier entering the sea. The play of
the lights among the crystal angles of these snow-cliffs, the pearly
white of the outswelling bosses, the bergs drifting in front, aglow in
the sun and edged with green water, and the deep blue disk of the lake
itself extending to your feet,—this forms a picture that enriches all
your afterlife, and is never forgotten. But however perfect the season
and the day, the cold incompleteness of these young lakes is always
keenly felt. We approach them with a kind of mean caution, and steal
unconfidingly around their crystal shores, dashed and ill at ease, as
if expecting to hear some forbidding voice. But the love-songs of the
ouzels and the love-looks of the daisies gradually reassure us, and
manifest the warm fountain humanity that pervades the coldest and most
solitary of them all.




CHAPTER VII
THE GLACIER MEADOWS


After the lakes on the High Sierra come the glacier meadows. They are
smooth, level, silky lawns, lying embedded in the upper forests, on the
floors of the valleys, and along the broad backs of the main dividing
ridges, at a height of about 8000 to 9500 feet above the sea.

They are nearly as level as the lakes whose places they have taken, and
present a dry, even surface free from rock-heaps, mossy bogginess, and
the frowsy roughness of rank, coarse-leaved, weedy, and shrubby
vegetation. The sod is close and fine, and so complete that you cannot
see the ground; and at the same time so brightly enameled with flowers
and butterflies that it may well be called a garden-meadow, or
meadow-garden; for the plushy sod is in many places so crowded with
gentians, daisies, ivesias, and various species of orthocarpus that the
grass is scarcely noticeable, while in others the flowers are only
pricked in here and there singly, or in small ornamental rosettes.

The most influential of the grasses composing the sod is a delicate
calamagrostis with fine filiform leaves, and loose, airy panicles that
seem to float above the flowery lawn like a purple mist. But, write as
I may, I cannot give anything like an adequate idea of the exquisite
beauty of these mountain carpets as they lie smoothly outspread in the
savage wilderness. What words are fine enough to picture them I to what
shall we liken them? The flowery levels of the prairies of the old
West, the luxuriant savannahs of the South, and the finest of
cultivated meadows are coarse in comparison. One may at first sight
compare them with the carefully tended lawns of pleasure-grounds; for
they are as free from weeds as they, and as smooth, but here the
likeness ends; for these wild lawns, with all their exquisite fineness,
have no trace of that painful, licked, snipped, repressed appearance
that pleasure-ground lawns are apt to have even when viewed at a
distance. And, not to mention the flowers with which they are
brightened, their grasses are very much finer both in color and
texture, and instead of lying flat and motionless, matted together like
a dead green cloth, they respond to the touches of every breeze,
rejoicing in pure wildness, blooming and fruiting in the vital light.

Glacier meadows abound throughout all the alpine and subalpine regions
of the Sierra in still greater numbers than the lakes. Probably from
2500 to 3000 exist between latitude 36° 30′ and 39°, distributed, of
course, like the lakes, in concordance with all the other glacial
features of the landscape.

On the head waters of the rivers there are what are called “Big
Meadows,” usually about from five to ten miles long. These occupy the
basins of the ancient ice-seas, where many tributary glaciers came
together to form the grand trunks. Most, however, are quite small,
averaging perhaps but little more than three fourths of a mile in
length.

One of the very finest of the thousands I have enjoyed lies hidden in
an extensive forest of the Two-leaved Pine, on the edge of the basin of
the ancient Tuolumne Mer de Glace, about eight miles to the west of
Mount Dana.

Imagine yourself at the Tuolumne Soda Springs on the bank of the river,
a day’s journey above Yosemite Valley. You set off northward through a
forest that stretches away indefinitely before you, seemingly unbroken
by openings of any kind. As soon as you are fairly into the woods, the
gray mountain-peaks, with their snowy gorges and hollows, are lost to
view. The ground is littered with fallen trunks that lie crossed and
recrossed like storm-lodged wheat; and besides this close forest of
pines, the rich moraine soil supports a luxuriant growth of
ribbon-leaved grasses—bromus, triticum, calamagrostis, agrostis, etc.,
which rear their handsome spikes and panicles above your waist. Making
your way through the fertile wilderness,—finding lively bits of
interest now and then in the squirrels and Clark crows, and perchance
in a deer or bear,—after the lapse of an hour or two vertical bars of
sunshine are seen ahead between the brown shafts of the pines, showing
that you are approaching an open space, and then you suddenly emerge
from the forest shadows upon a delightful purple lawn lying smooth and
free in the light like a lake. This is a glacier meadow. It is about a
mile and a half long by a quarter of a mile wide. The trees come
pressing forward all around in close serried ranks, planting their feet
exactly on its margin, and holding themselves erect, strict and orderly
like soldiers on parade; thus bounding the meadow with exquisite
precision, yet with free curving lines such as Nature alone can draw.
With inexpressible delight you wade out into the grassy sun-lake,
feeling yourself contained in one of Nature’s most sacred chambers,
withdrawn from the sterner influences of the mountains, secure from all
intrusion, secure from yourself, free in the universal beauty. And
notwithstanding the scene is so impressively spiritual, and you seem
dissolved in it, yet everything about you is beating with warm,
terrestrial, human love and life delightfully substantial and familiar.
The resiny pines are types of health and steadfastness; the robins
feeding on the sod belong to the same species you have known since
childhood; and surely these daisies, larkspurs, and goldenrods are the
very friend-flowers of the old home garden. Bees hum as in a harvest
noon, butterflies waver above the flowers, and like them you lave in
the vital sunshine, too richly and homogeneously joy-filled to be
capable of partial thought. You are all eye, sifted through and through
with light and beauty. Sauntering along the brook that meanders
silently through the meadow from the east, special flowers call you
back to discriminating consciousness. The sod comes curving down to the
water’s edge, forming bossy outswelling banks, and in some places
overlapping countersunk boulders and forming bridges. Here you find
mats of the curious dwarf willow scarce an inch high, yet sending up a
multitude of gray silky catkins, illumined here and there with, the
purple cups and bells of bryanthus and vaccinium.

Go where you may, you everywhere find the lawn divinely beautiful, as
if Nature had fingered and adjusted every plant this very day. The
floating grass panicles are scarcely felt in brushing through their
midst, so flue are they, and none of the flowers have tall or rigid
stalks. In the brightest places you find three species of gentians with
different shades of blue, daisies pure as the sky, silky leaved ivesias
with warm yellow flowers, several species of orthocarpus with blunt,
bossy spikes, red and purple and yellow; the alpine goldenrod,
pentstemon, and clover, fragrant and honeyful, with their colors massed
and blended. Parting the grasses and looking more closely you may trace
the branching of their shining stems, and note the marvelous beauty of
their mist of flowers, the glumes and pales exquisitely penciled, the
yellow dangling stamens, and feathery pistils. Beneath the lowest
leaves you discover a fairy realm of mosses,—hypnum, dicranum,
polytriclium, and many others,—their precious spore-cups poised
daintily on polished shafts, curiously hooded, or open, showing the
richly ornate peristomas worn like royal crowns. Creeping liverworts
are here also in abundance, and several rare species of fungi,
exceedingly small, and frail, and delicate, as if made only for beauty.
Caterpillars, black beetles, and ants roam the wilds of this lower
world, making their way through miniature groves and thickets like
bears in a thick wood.

And how rich, too, is the life of the sunny air! Every leaf and flower
seems to have its winged representative overhead. Dragon-flies shoot in
vigorous zigzags through the dancing swarms, and a rich profusion of
butterflies—the leguminosae of insects—make a fine addition to the
general show. Many of these last are comparatively small at this
elevation, and as yet almost unknown to science; but every now and then
a familiar vanessa or papilio comes sailing past. Humming-birds, too,
are quite common here, and the robin is always found along the margin
of the stream, or out in the shallowest portions of the sod, and
sometimes the grouse and mountain quail, with their broods of precious
fluffy chickens. Swallows skim the grassy lake from end to end,
fly-catchers come and go in fitful flights from the tops of dead spars,
while woodpeckers swing across from side to side in graceful festoon
curves,—birds, insects, and flowers all in their own way telling a deep
summer joy.

The influences of pure nature seem to be so little known as yet, that
it is generally supposed that complete pleasure of this kind,
permeating one’s very flesh and bones, unfits the student for
scientific pursuits in which cool judgment and observation are
required. But the effect is just the opposite. Instead of producing a
dissipated condition, the mind is fertilized and stimulated and
developed like sun-fed plants. All that we have seen here enables us to
see with surer vision the fountains among the summit-peaks to the east
whence flowed the glaciers that ground soil for the surrounding forest;
and down at the foot of the meadow the moraine which formed the dam
which gave rise to the lake that occupied this basin before the meadow
was made; and around the margin the stones that were shoved back and
piled up into a rude wall by the expansion of the lake ice during long
bygone winters; and along the sides of the streams the slight hollows
of the meadow which mark those portions of the old lake that were the
last to vanish.

I would fain ask my readers to linger awhile in this fertile
wilderness, to trace its history from its earliest glacial beginnings,
and learn what we may of its wild inhabitants and visitors. How happy
the birds are all summer and some of them all winter; how the pouched
marmots drive tunnels under the snow, and how fine and brave a life the
slandered coyote lives here, and the deer and bears! But, knowing well
the difference between reading and seeing, I will only ask attention to
some brief sketches of its varying aspects as they are presented
throughout the more marked seasons of the year.

The summer life we have been depicting lasts with but little abatement
until October, when the night frosts begin to sting, bronzing the
grasses, and ripening the leaves of the creeping heathworts along the
banks of the stream to reddish purple and crimson; while the flowers
disappear, all save the goldenrods and a few daisies, that continue to
bloom on unscathed until the beginning of snowy winter. In still nights
the grass panicles and every leaf and stalk are laden with frost
crystals, through which the morning sunbeams sift in ravishing
splendor, transforming each to a precious diamond radiating the colors
of the rainbow. The brook shallows are plaited across and across with
slender lances of ice, but both these and the grass crystals are melted
before midday, and, notwithstanding the great elevation of the meadow,
the afternoons are still warm enough to revive the chilled butterflies
and call them out to enjoy the late-flowering goldenrods. The divine
alpenglow flushes the surrounding forest every evening, followed by a
crystal night with hosts of lily stars, whose size and brilliancy
cannot be conceived by those who have never risen above the lowlands.

Thus come and go the bright sun-days of autumn, not a cloud in the sky,
week after week until near December. Then comes a sudden change. Clouds
of a peculiar aspect with a slow, crawling gait gather and grow in the
azure, throwing out satiny fringes, and becoming gradually darker until
every lake-like rift and opening is closed and the whole bent firmament
is obscured in equal structureless gloom. Then comes the snow, for the
clouds are ripe, the meadows of the sky are in bloom, and shed their
radiant blossoms like an orchard in the spring. Lightly, lightly they
lodge in the brown grasses and in the tasseled needles of the pines,
falling hour after hour, day after day, silently, lovingly,—all the
winds hushed,—glancing and circling hither, thither, glinting against
one another, rays interlocking in flakes as large as daisies; and then
the dry grasses, and the trees, and the stones are all equally abloom
again. Thunder-showers occur here during the summer months, and
impressive it is to watch the coming of the big transparent drops, each
a small world in itself,—one unbroken ocean without islands hurling
free through the air like planets through space. But still more
impressive to me is the coming of the snow-flowers,—falling stars,
winter daisies,—giving bloom to all the ground alike. Raindrops blossom
brilliantly in the rainbow, and change to flowers in the sod, but snow
comes in full flower direct from the dark, frozen sky.

The later snow-storms are oftentimes accompanied by winds that break up
the crystals, when the temperature is low, into single petals and
irregular dusty fragments; but there is comparatively little drifting
on the meadow, so securely is it embosomed in the woods. From December
to May, storm succeeds storm, until the snow is about fifteen or twenty
feet deep, but the surface is always as smooth as the breast of a bird.

Hushed now is the life that so late was beating warmly. Most of the
birds have gone down below the snow-line, the plants sleep, and all the
fly-wings are folded. Yet the sun beams gloriously many a cloudless day
in midwinter, casting long lance shadows athwart the dazzling expanse.
In June small flecks of the dead, decaying sod begin to appear,
gradually widening and uniting with one another, covered with creeping
rags of water during the day, and ice by night, looking as hopeless and
unvital as crushed rocks just emerging from the darkness of the glacial
period. Walk the meadow now! Scarce the memory of a flower will you
find. The ground seems twice dead. Nevertheless, the annual
resurrection is drawing near. The life-giving sun pours his floods, the
last snow-wreath melts, myriads of growing points push eagerly through
the steaming mold, the birds come back, new wings fill the air, and
fervid summer life comes surging on, seemingly yet more glorious than
before.

This is a perfect meadow, and under favorable circumstances exists
without manifesting any marked changes for centuries. Nevertheless,
soon or late it must inevitably grow old and vanish. During the calm
Indian summer, scarce a sand-grain moves around its banks, but in
flood-times and storm-times, soil is washed forward upon it and laid in
successive sheets around its gently sloping rim, and is gradually
extended to the center, making it dryer. Through a considerable period
the meadow vegetation is not greatly affected thereby, for it gradually
rises with the rising ground, keeping on the surface like water-plants
rising on the swell of waves. But at length the elevation of the
meadow-land goes on so far as to produce too dry a soil for the
specific meadow-plants, when, of course, they have to give up their
places to others fitted for the new conditions. The most characteristic
of the newcomers at this elevation above the sea are principally
sun-loving gilias, eriogonae, and compositae, and finally forest-trees.
Henceforward the obscuring changes are so manifold that the original
lake-meadow can be unveiled and seen only by the geologist.

Generally speaking, glacier lakes vanish more slowly than the meadows
that succeed them, because, unless very shallow, a greater quantity of
material is required to fill up their basins and obliterate them than
is required to render the surface of the meadow too high and dry for
meadow vegetation. Furthermore, owing to the weathering to which the
adjacent rocks are subjected, material of the finer sort, susceptible
of transportation by rains and ordinary floods, is more abundant during
the meadow period than during the lake period. Yet doubtless many a
fine meadow favorably situated exists in almost prime beauty for
thousands of years, the process of extinction being exceedingly slow,
as we reckon time. This is especially the case with meadows
circumstanced like the one we have described—embosomed in deep woods,
with the ground rising gently away from it all around, the network of
tree-roots in which all the ground is clasped preventing any rapid
torrential washing. But, in exceptional cases, beautiful lawns formed
with great deliberation are overwhelmed and obliterated at once by the
action of land-slips, earthquake avalanches, or extraordinary floods,
just as lakes are.

In those glacier meadows that take the places of shallow lakes which
have been fed by feeble streams, glacier mud and fine vegetable humus
enter largely into the composition of the soil; and on account of the
shallowness of this soil, and the seamless, water-tight, undrained
condition of the rock-basins, they are usually wet, and therefore
occupied by tall grasses and sedges, whose coarse appearance offers a
striking contrast to th

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