The Chinook Wind
Cold and snow took possession of the ranges on one occasion while I was making a stay in the winter quarters of a Montana cattle company. There was a quiet, heavy snow, a blizzard, and at last a sleet storm. At first the cattle collected with drooping heads and waited for the storm to end, but long before the sky cleared, they milled and trampled confusedly about. With the clearing sky came still and extreme cold. Stock water changed to ice, and the short, crisp grass of the plains was hopelessly cemented over with ice and snow. The suffering of the cattle was beyond description. For a time they wandered about, apparently without an aim. There were thousands of other herds in this appalling condition. At last, widely scattered, they stood humped up, awaiting death. But one morning the foreman burst in excitedly with the news, "The Chinook is coming!" Out in the snow the herds were aroused, and each "critter" was looking westward as though good news had been scented afar. Across the mountain-tops toward which the stock were looking, great wind-blown clouds were flying toward the plains. In less than an hour the rescuing Chinook rushed upon the scene. The temperature rose forty degrees in less than half as many minutes; then it steadied and rose more slowly. The warm, dry wind quickly increased to a gale. By noon both the sleet and the snow were gone, and thousands of cattle were eagerly feeding in the brown and curly grass of the wide, bleached plain.
This experience enabled me to understand the "Waiting for a Chinook" picture of the "Cowboy Artist." This picture was originally intended to be the spring report, after a stormy Montana winter, to the eastern stockholders of a big cattle company. It showed a spotted solitary cow standing humped in a snowy plain. One horn is broken and her tail is frozen off. Near are three hungry coyotes in different waiting attitudes. The picture bore the legend "The Last of Five Thousand, Waiting for a Chinook."
It is "Presto! Change!" when the warm Chinook wind appears. Wintry landscapes vanish in the balmy, spring-like breath of this strange, hospitable, though inconstant Gulf Stream of the air. This wind is extra dry and warm; occasionally it is almost hot. Many times in Montana I have experienced the forcing, transforming effectiveness of this hale, eccentric wind.
The completion of the big copper refinery at Great Falls was celebrated with a banquet. One of the larger rooms in the new building was used for the banquet-hall. Out to this, a mile or so from the city, the banqueters were taken in a sleigh. That evening the roads were snow-and-ice-covered, and the temperature was several degrees below zero. A Chinook wind arrived while the banquet was in session, and although the feast was drawn out no longer than usual, the banqueters, on adjourning, found the snow and ice entirely gone, the earth dry, and the air as balmy as though just off an Arizona desert in June.
The Chinook blows occasionally over the Northwest during the five colder months of the year. Though of brief duration, these winds are very efficacious in softening the asperities of winter with their moderating warmth, and they are of great assistance to the stock and other interests. Apparently the Chinook starts from the Pacific, in the extreme Northwest, warm and heavily moisture-laden. Sweeping eastward, it is chilled in crossing the mountains, on which it speedily releases its moisture in heavy snowfalls. Warmed through releasing moisture, it is still further warmed through compression while descending the Cascades, and it goes forward extremely feverish and thirsty. It now feels like a hot desert wind, and, like air off the desert's dusty face, it is insatiably dry and absorbs moisture with astounding rapidity.
It may come from the west, the southwest, or the northwest. Its eastward sweep sometimes carries it into Wisconsin, Iowa, and Kansas, but it most frequently floods and favors the Canadian plains, Oregon, Washington, Montana, Idaho, Wyoming, and Colorado. It may come gently and remain as a moderate breeze or it may appear violently and blow a gale. Its duration is from a few hours to several days.
There are numerous instances on record of a Chinook greatly raising the temperature, removing several inches of snow, and drying the earth in an unbelievably short time. An extreme case of this kind took place in northern Montana in December, 1896. Thirty inches of snow lay over everything; and the quicksilver-tip in thermometers was many lines below zero. In this polar scene the Chinook appeared. Twelve hours later the snow had entirely vanished! The Blackfoot Indians have a graphic term for this wind,—"the snow-eater."
In most respects this wind is climatically beneficial. A thorough warming and drying a few times each winter renders many localities comfortably habitable that otherwise scarcely would be usable. The occasional removal of snow-excesses has its advantages to all users of roads, both wagon and rail, as well as being helpful to stock interests. There are times when this wind leaves the plains too dry, but far more frequently it prevents terrible floods by reducing the heavy snow covering over the sources of the Columbia and the Missouri before the swift spring thaw appears. The Chinook is not likely to create floods through the rapidity of its action, for it changes snow and water to vapor and carries this away through the air.
The Chinook is nothing if not eccentric. Sometimes it warms the mountain-tops and ignores the cold lowlands. Often in snowy time it assists the railroad men to clear the tracks on the summit before it goes down the slope a few miles to warm the muffled and discouraged snow-shovelers in the valley. Now and then a wind tempers the clime for a sheepman, while in an adjoining valley only a few miles away the stockman and his herd wait in vain for the Chinook.
The Chinook may appear at any hour of the day or night. Occasionally with a rush it chases winter. Frequently and fortunately it follows a blizzard. Often it dramatically saves the suffering herds, both wild and tame, and at the eleventh hour it brings the balm of the southland to the waiting, starving birds.
The Chinook wind is a Westerner. Similar though less far-reaching winds blow in the mountains of Europe and Asia. In the West, and especially the Northwest, it has a happy and important place, and the climate of this region cannot be comprehended without understanding the influence of the Chinook wind.
Associating with Snow-Slides
Associating with
Snow-Slides
Every snow-fall caused a snow-slide to rush down Bobtail Gulch. This run-off of snow was as regular as the run-off of storm-water. The snow which accumulated at the head of this gulch was a danger to the trail below, and if the snow showed the slightest hesitation to "run" when the storm had ended, a miner from a neighboring mine started it by rolling a few stones into it or by exploding a stick of dynamite near by.
During my stay at a miners' boarding-house in the San Juan Mountains a heavy snow-fall came to a close. "Has the Greagory run yet?" inquired the foreman of one of the miners. "No." "Better start it, then." Ten minutes later fifty thousand tons of snow went plunging down Greagory Gulch.
"This cabin will never be caught by a snow-slide!" said the prospector with whom I was having supper. "A slide hit my cabin in the Sawtooth Mountains. No more sleeping for me in the possible right-of-way of a slide! I sized up the territory before building this cabin and I've put it out of the range of slides."
All this was encouraging, as I was to spend the night in the cabin and had arrived after the surrounding mountains were hidden in darkness. A record-breaking snow of eight days and nights had just ended a few hours before. During the afternoon, as I came down from Alpine Pass on snowshoes, the visible peaks and slopes loomed white and were threateningly overladen with snow. Avalanches would run riot during the next few hours, and the sliding might begin at any minute. Gorges and old slide-ways would hold most of these in the beaten slide-tracks, but there was the possibility of an overladen mountain sending off a shooting star of a slide which might raise havoc by smashing open a new orbit.
The large spruces around the cabin showed that if ever a slide had swept this site it was longer ago than a century. As no steep slope came down upon the few acres of flat surrounding the cabin, we appeared to be in a slide-proof situation. However, to the north was a high snow-piled peak that did not look assuring, even though between it and the cabin was a gorge and near by a rocky ridge. Somewhat acquainted with the ways of slides, I lay awake in the cabin, waiting to hear the muffled thunder-storm of sound which would proclaim that slides were "running."
Snow-slides may be said to have habits. Like water, they are governed by gravity. Both in gulches and on mountain-sides, they start most readily on steep and comparatively smooth slopes. If a snow-drift is upon a thirty-degree incline, it may almost be pushed into sliding with a feather. A slope more steeply inclined than thirty degrees does not offer a snow-drift any visible means of support. Unless this slope be broken or rough, a snow-drift may slide off at any moment.
In the course of a winter, as many as half a dozen slides may start from the same place and each shoot down through the same gorge or over the same slope as its predecessor. Only so much snow can cling to a slope; therefore the number of slides during each winter is determined by the quantity of snow and the character of the slope. As soon as snow is piled beyond the holding-limit, away starts the slide. A slide may have slipped from this spot only a few days before, and here another may slip away a few days later; or a year may elapse before another runs. Thus local topography and local weather conditions determine local slide habits,—when a slide will start and the course over which it will run.
The prospector was snoring before the first far-off thunder was heard. Things were moving. Seashore storm sounds could be heard in the background of heavy rumbling. This thunder swelled louder until there was a heavy rumble everywhere. Then came an earthquake jar, closely followed by a violently explosive crash. A slide was upon us! A few seconds later tons of snow fell about us, crushing the trees and wrecking the cabin. Though we escaped without a scratch, a heavy spruce pole, a harpoon flung by the slide, struck the cabin at an angle, piercing the roof and one of the walls.
The prospector was not frightened, but he was mad! Outwitted by a snow-slide! That we were alive was no consolation to him. "Where on earth did the thing come from?" he kept repeating until daylight. Next morning we saw that to the depth of several feet about the cabin and on top of it were snow-masses, mixed with rock-fragments, broken tree-trunks, and huge wood-splinters,—the fragment remains of a snow-slide.
This slide had started from a high peak-top a mile to the north of the cabin. For three quarters of a mile it had coasted down a slope at the bottom of which a gorge curved away toward the west; but so vast was the quantity of snow that this slide filled and blocked the gorge with less than half of its mass. Over the snowy bridge thus formed, the momentum carried the remainder straight across the gulch. Landing, it swept up a steep slope for three hundred feet and rammed the rocky ridge back of the cabin. The greater part came to a stop and lay scattered about the ridge. Not one tenth of the original bulk went over and up to wreck the cabin! The prospector stood on this ridge, surveying the scene and thinking, when I last looked back.
LIZARD HEAD PEAK IN THE SAN JUAN MOUNTAINS
Heavy slides sometimes rush so swiftly down steep slopes that their momentum carries their entire mass destructively several hundred feet up the slope of the mountain opposite.
Desiring fuller knowledge of the birth and behavior of avalanches, or snow-slides, I invaded the slide zone on snowshoes at the close of a winter which had the "deepest snow-fall on record." Several days were spent watching the snow-slide action in the San Juan Mountains. It was a wild, adventurous, dramatic experience, which closed with an avalanche that took me from the heights on a thrilling, spectacular coast down a steep mountain-side.
A thick, snowy, marble stratum overlay the slopes and summits. Appearing on the scene at the time when, on the steeps, spring was melting the icy cement that held winter's wind-piled snows, I saw many a snowy hill and embankment released. Some of these, as slides, made meteoric plunges from summit crags to gentler places far below.
A snow-storm prevailed during my first night in the slide region, and this made a deposit of five or six inches of new snow on top of the old. On the steeper places this promptly slipped off in dry, small slides, but most of it was still in place when I started to climb higher.
While I was tacking up a comparatively smooth slope, one of my snowshoes slipped, and, in scraping across the old, crusted snow, started a sheaf of the fluffy new snow to slipping. Hesitatingly at first, the new snow skinned off. Suddenly the fresh snow to right and left concluded to go along, and the full width of the slope below my level was moving and creaking; slowly the whole slid into swifter movement and the mass deepened with the advance. Now and then parts of the sliding snow slid forward over the slower-moving, crumpling, friction-resisted front and bottom.
With advance it grew steadily deeper from constantly acquired material and from the influence of converging water-channels which it followed. A quarter of a mile from its birthplace it was about fifty feet deep and twice as wide, with a length of three hundred feet. Composed of new snow and coasting as swiftly as a gale, it trailed a white streamer of snow-dust behind. A steeper or a rougher channel added to the volume of snow-dust or increased the agitation of the pace-keeping pennant. The morning was clear, and, by watching the wigwagging snow flag, I followed easily the fortunes of the slide to the bottom of the slope. After a swift mile of shooting and plunging, the slide, greatly compressed, sprawled and spread out over a level glacier meadow, where its last remnant lingered for the warmth of July.
Dismissing this slide, I watched along the range to the north and south, and from time to time saw the white scudding plumes of other slides, which, hidden in the cañons, were merrily coasting down from the steep-sloping crest.
These slides, unless they had run down an animal, did no damage. They were composed of freshly fallen snow and in their flight had moved in old channels that had been followed and perhaps formed by hundreds of slides in years gone by. Slides of this kind—those which accompany or follow each storm and which promptly make away with new-fallen snow by carrying it down through stream-channels—may be called Storm, or Flood, slides. These usually are formed in smooth gulches or on steep slopes.
The other kinds of slides may be called the Annual and the Century. In places of rough surface or moderate slope there must be a large accumulation of snow before a slide will start. Weeks or even months may pass before storm and wind assemble sufficient snow for a slide. Places of this kind commonly furnish but one slide a year, and this one in the springtime. At last the snow-drifts reach their maximum; warmth assists starting by melting snow-cornices that have held on through the winter; these drop, and by dropping often start things going. Crags wedged off by winter ice are also released in spring; and these, in going recklessly down, often knock hesitating snow-drifts into action. A fitting name for those slides that regularly run at the close of winter would be Spring, or Annual. These are composed of the winter's local accumulation of snow and slide rock, and carry a much heavier percentage of rock-débris than the Storm slide carries. They transport from the starting-place much of the annual crumbling and the weatherings of air and water, along with the tribute pried off by winter's ice levers; with this material from the heights also goes the year's channel accumulation of débris. The Annual slide does man but little damage and, like the Flood slide, it follows the gulches and the water-courses.
In snowy zones the avalanche is commonly called a snow-slide, or simply a slide. A slide, with its comet tail of powdered snow, makes an intense impression on all who see one. It appears out of order with the scheme of things; but, as a matter of fact, it is one of gravity's working ways, a demonstration of the laws of sliding bodies. A smooth, steep slope which receives a heavy fall of snow will promptly produce or throw off a sliding mass of snow. Raise, lower, or roughen this slope, increase or decrease the annual snow-fall, or change the direction of the wind,—and thus the position of snow-drifts,—and there will follow corresponding slide-action. Wind and calm, gravity, friction, adhesion, cohesion, geology, temperature and precipitation, all have a part and place in snow-piling and in slide-starting.
The Century slides are the damaging ones. These occur not only at unexpected times but in unexpected places. The Century slide is the deadly one. It usually comes down a course not before traversed by a slide, and sometimes crashes through a forest or a village. It may be produced by a record-breaking snow or by snow-drifts formed in new places by winds from an unusual quarter; but commonly the mass is of material slowly accumulated. This may contain the remnant snows and the wreckage spoils of a hundred years or more. Ten thousand snows have added to its slowly growing pile; tons of rock-dust have been swept into it by the winds; gravel has been deposited in it by water; and gravity has conducted to it the crumbling rocks from above. At last—largely ice—it breaks away. In rushing down, it gathers material from its predestined way.
In the spring of 1901, one of these slides broke loose and came down the slope of Gray's Peak. For years the snow had accumulated on a ridge above timber-line. The mass shot down a steep slope, struck the woods, and swept to the bottom about four thousand feet below, mowing down every tree in a pathway about three hundred feet wide. About one hundred thousand trees were piled in wild, broken wreckage in the gorge below.
Although a snow-slide is almost irresistible, it is not difficult, in many localities, to prevent slides by anchoring the small snow-drift which would slip and start the slide. In the West, a number of slides have been suppressed by setting a few posts in the upper reaches of slopes and gulches. These posts pinned fast the snow that would slip. The remainder held its own. The Swiss, too, have eliminated many Alpine slides by planting hardy shrubbery in the slippery snowy areas. This anchorage gives the snow a hold until it can compact and freeze fast. Shrubbery thus is preventing the white avalanche!
A slide once took me with it. I was near the bottom of one snowy arm of a V gulch, waiting to watch Gravity, the world-leveler, take his next fragment of filling to the lowlands. Separating these arms was a low, tongue-like rock-ledge. A gigantic snow-cornice and a great snow-field filled, with full-heaped and rounded measure, the uppermost parts of the other arm.
Deep rumblings through the earth, echoings from crags and cañons through the communicative air, suddenly heralded the triumphant starting of an enormous slide. About three hundred feet up the heights, a broken end-on embankment of rocks and snow, it came coasting, dusting into view, plunging towards me. As a rock-ledge separated the two ravines above the junction, I felt secure, and I did not realize until too late that I was to coast down on the slide. Head-on, it rumbled heavily toward me with its mixed and crumbling front, making a most impressive riot of moving matter. Again and again the snowy monster smashed its shoulder into the impregnable farther wall. At last, one hundred feet high and twice as wide, came its impinging, crumbling front. At times the bottom caught and rolled under, leaving the overhanging front to cave and tumble forward with snowy splashes.
This crumbling front was not all snow; occasionally an iceberg or a cargo of stones fell forward. With snow flying from it as from a gale-swept, snow-piled summit, this monster of half a million tons roared and thundered by in a sound-burst and reverberation of incomparable depth and resonance, to plunge into a deeper, steeper rock-walled gorge. It probably was moving thirty-five or forty miles an hour and was gaining in velocity every second.
The noise of its passing suppressed the sounds of the slide that started in the gulch above me. Before I could realize it, this slide swept down, and the snow on which I was standing burst up with me into the air, struck and leaped the low ledge, rammed the rear end of the passing slide, and landed me, snowshoes down, on top of it.
The top was unstable and dangerous; it lurched, burst up, curled under, yawned, and gave off hissing jets of snow powder; these and the plunging movements kept me desperately active, even with my broad snowshoes, to avoid being swallowed up, or overturned and smothered, or crushed in the chaotic, fissuring mass.
As its speed increased, I now and then caught a glimpse, through flying, pelting snow-particles, of shooting rocks which burst explosively through the top. At timber-line the gorge walls abruptly ended and the channel curved swiftly to the left in a broad, shallow ravine. The momentum of this monster carried it out of the ravine and straight ahead over a rough, forested ridge.
Trees before it were crushed down, and those alongside were thrown into a wild state of excitement by the violence of swiftly created and entangling gale-currents. From the maelstrom on the top I looked down upon the panic through the snow-dust-filled air and saw trees flinging their arms wildly about, bowing and posturing to the snow. Occasionally a treetop was snapped off, and these broken tops swirled wildly about, hurried forward or backward, or were floated upward on rotating, slower currents. The sides of the slide crumbled and expanded; so it became lower, flatter, and wider, as it slid forward on a moderate up grade. A half-mile after leaving the gorge, the slide collided at right angles with a high moraine. The stop telescoped the slide, and the shock exploded the rear third and flung it far to right and left, scattering it over a wide area. Half a minute later I clawed out of the snow-pile, almost suffocated, but unhurt.
Toward the close of my last winter as government "Snow Observer" I made a snowshoe trip along the upper slopes of the Continental Divide and scaled a number of peaks in the Rocky Mountains of central Colorado. During this trip I saw a large and impressive snow-slide at a thrillingly close range. It broke loose and "ran"—more correctly, plunged—by me down a frightful slope. Everything before it was overwhelmed and swept down. At the bottom of the slope it leaped in fierce confusion from the top of a precipice down into a cañon.
For years this snowy mass had accumulated upon the heights. It was one of the "eternal snows" that showed in summer to people far below and far away. A century of winters had contributed snows to its pile. A white hill it was in the upper slope of a gulch, where it clung, pierced and anchored by granite pinnacles. Its icy base, like poured molten lead, had covered and filled all the inequalities of the foundation upon which it rested. Time and its tools, together with its own height and weight, at last combined to release it to the clutch and eternal pull of gravity. The expanding, shearing, breaking force of forming ice, the constant cutting of emery-edged running water, and the undermining thaw of spring sent thundering downward with ten thousand varying echoes a half-million tons of snow, ice, and stones.
Head-on the vast mass came exploding toward me. Wildly it threw off masses of snowy spray and agitated, confused whirlwinds of snow-dust. I was watching from the top of a precipice. Below, the wide, deep cañon was filled with fleecy clouds,—a bay from a sea of clouds beyond. The slide shot straight for the cloud-filled abyss and took with it several hundred broken trees from an alpine grove that it wrecked just above the precipice.
This swift-moving monster disturbed the air, and excited, stampeding, and cyclonic winds flung me headlong, as it tore by with rush and roar. I arose in time to see the entire wreckage deflected a few degrees upward as it shot far out over the cloud-made bay of the ocean. A rioting acre of rock-fragments, broken trees, shattered icebergs, and masses of dusting snow hesitated momentarily in the air, then, separating, they fell whirling, hurtling, and scattering, with varying velocities,—rocks, splintered trees, and snow,—in silent flight to plunge into the white bay beneath. No sound was given forth as they fell into, and disappeared beneath, the agitated sea of clouds. How strange this noiseless fall was! A few seconds later, as the wreckage reached the bottom, there came from beneath the silent surface the muffled sounds of crash and conflict.
Wild Folk of the Mountain-Summits
Wild Folk of the
Mountain-Summits
The higher mountain-ranges rise far above the zone of life and have summits that are deeply overladen with ancient snow and ice, but the upper slopes and summits of the Rocky Mountains of Colorado and the Sierra of California are not barren and lifeless, even though they stand far above the timber-line. There is no other mountain-range on the earth that I know of that can show such a varied and vigorous array of life above the tree-line as do these ranges. In the Alps the upper slopes and summits stand in eternal desolation, without life even in summertime. The icy stratum that overlies the summit Alps is centuries old, and is perpetual down to nine thousand feet. Timber-line there is only sixty-four hundred feet above sea-level. How different the climatic conditions in the Rocky Mountains and in the Sierra, where timber-line is at approximately eleven thousand five hundred feet, or a vertical mile higher than it is in the Alps!
Even the high peaks of this region have touches of plant-life and are visited by birds and beasts. The list of living things which I have seen on the summit of Long's Peak (14,255 feet above sea-level) includes the inevitable and many-tinted lichens, spike-grass, dainty blue polemonium, and clumps of crimson purple primroses, all exquisitely beautiful. There are straggling bumblebees, grasshoppers, and at least two kinds of prettily robed butterflies. Among the mammals visiting the summit I have seen a mountain lion, a bob-cat, a rabbit, and a silver fox, though only one of each. The bird callers embrace flocks of rosy finches, ptarmigan, and American pipits, and numbers of white-crowned sparrows and juncos, together with a scattering of robins, bluebirds, golden eagles, red-tailed hawks, and hummingbirds!
The summit life zone in the Rocky Mountains not only sweeps up to exceptionally high altitudes, but it embraces vast territory. In Colorado alone the Arctic-Alpine territory above the tree-line probably extends over five million or more acres. Thrust high in this summit area are the tops of more than three hundred peaks. Many of these tower three thousand feet above the timber-line. Much of this region is made up of steep slopes, shattered summits, and precipitous walls, many of which bound cañons. There is a scattering of lakes, gentle slopes, stretches of rolling moorlands, and bits of wet meadow or arctic tundra. In this high and far-extending mountain land one may travel day after day always above the uppermost reaches of the forest. In this strange treeless realm there is a largeness of view. Up close to the clouds and the sky, the big world far below, the scene stretches away in boundless, magnificent distances.
The snow-fall of this region varies with locality, and ranges from a few feet up to fifty feet annually. In most localities this snow is rapidly evaporated by the exceedingly dry air of the heights. The remnants of each year's fall commonly rest upon the accumulations of preceding years, but during midsummer not one tenth of the heights is snow-covered. Vast areas are occupied by craggy peaks and barren rock-fields. The barrenness is due almost entirely to a lack of soil, not to altitude nor to the rigors of the climate. The climate is in many respects similar to that which wraps the Arctic Circle near sea-level, and it allows many forms of vigorous life.
ALPINE PASTURES ABOVE TIMBER-LINE
Near Specimen Mountain in the Rocky Mountain National Park
Numerous moraines, terraces, steppes, and moorlands—the wide sky plains—have their soil, and this in the warmth of summer generously produces green grass and brilliant flowers. These, together with big game, birds, and circling butterflies, people this zone with life and turn the towering and terraced heights into the rarest of hanging wild gardens. In favored places for a mile or so above timber-line are scattered acres of heathy growths. Stunted by cold, clipped off by the wind, and heavily pressed by the snow, these growths are thickly tangled, bristly, and rarely more than a few inches in height. Among these are wintergreen, bunchberry, huckleberry, kalmia, currant, black birch, and arctic willow. There are miles of moorlands covered with short, thin grasses, while deeply soil-covered terraces, cozy slopes, and wet meadows have plushy grass carpets several inches thick. These growths form the basic food-supply of both the insects and the warm-blooded life of the heights.
These alpine pastures are the home of many mountain sheep. Between Long's Peak and Mt. Meeker there is a shattered shoulder of granite that is fourteen thousand feet above sea-level and at all times partly covered with an ancient snow-field, the remains of a former glacier. During earlier years I occasionally used the sky-line by this snow-field for a view-point and a lingering-place. One day after a long outlook, I emerged from between two blocks of granite and surprised a flock of mountain sheep near by. A majority of them were lying comfortably among the stones. One was nosing about, another was scratching his side with his hind hoof, while the patriarchal ram was poised on a huge block of granite. He, too, was looking down upon the world, but he was also scouting for enemies. Upon my appearance, the flock broke away at good speed but in excellent order, the old ram leading the way. In scrambling up for a farewell view, I disturbed a mountain lion. He bounded among the scattered wreckage of granite and vanished. Here was big game and its well-fed pursuer, in the mountain heights, above the limits of tree growth and almost three miles above the surface of the sea. Many flocks live at an altitude of twelve thousand feet. Here the lambs are born, and from this place they all make spring foraging excursions far down the slopes into a warmer zone for green stuffs not yet in season on the heights. Their warm covering of soft hair protects them from the coldest blasts. Winter quarters appear to be chosen in localities from which winds regularly sweep the snow. This sweeping prevents the snow from burying food beyond reach, and lessens the danger of these short-legged mountaineers becoming snowbound. They commonly endure wind-storms by crowding closely against the lee side of a ledge. Now and then they are so deeply drifted over with snow that many of the weaker ones perish, unable to wallow out. The snow-slide, the white terror of the heights, occasionally carries off an entire flock of these bold, vigilant sheep.
The mountain lion is a prowler, a cowardly, rapacious slaughterer, and may visit the heights at any time. Though apparently irregular in his visits, he seems to keep track of the seasons and to know the date for spring lamb, and he is likely to appear while the sheep are weak or snowbound. He is a wanton killer and is ever vigilant to slay. He lurks and lies in wait and preys upon all the birds and beasts except the bear.
This treeless realm is roamed by both the grizzly and the black bear; both pay most visits during the autumn, and the grizzly occasionally hibernates in these uplands. In summer they range the forests far below, but with the coming of autumn they climb the slopes to dig out fat woodchucks and to get the last of the season's berries, with which to put on final fat for hibernating. They overturn stones for mice and lick up the accumulations of chilled insects which they find along the snow and ice fields. Myriads of flies, moths, grasshoppers, and other insects often accumulate along or on the edge of snow or ice fields in the heights, attracted, apparently, by the brilliant whiteness of the ice or the snow. The cold closely surrounding air zone appears to benumb or paralyze them, and they drop in great numbers near the margin. Occasionally swarms of insects are carried by storms up the heights and dropped upon the snow or ice fields which lie in the eddying-places of the wind.
One autumn I accompanied a gentleman to the Hallett Glacier. On arriving, we explored a crevasse and examined the bergschrund at the top. When we emerged from the bergschrund, the new snow on the glacier was so softened in the sunshine that we decided to have the fun of coasting down the steep face to the bottom of the slope. Just as we slid away, I espied a bear at the bottom, toward which we were speeding. He was so busily engaged in licking up insects that he had not noticed us. Naturally the gentleman with me was frightened, but it was impossible to stop on the steep, steel-like, and snow-lubricated slope. Knowing something of bear nature, the situation, though most interesting, did not appear serious to me. Meantime, the bear heard us and made lively and awkward efforts to be gone. He fled at a racing gallop, and gave us an excellent side view of his clumsy, far-outreaching lively hind legs going it flatfooted.
Deer are among the summer visitors in the cool uplands, climbing a thousand feet or more above the uppermost trees. With the first autumn snow they start to descend, and they commonly winter from three to six thousand feet below their summer range. There are a few woodchuck colonies as high as twelve thousand feet. The woodchuck, in the spring, despite short legs and heavy body, gives way to wanderlust, and as a change from hibernation wanders afar and occasionally climbs a mountain-peak. Sometimes, too, a mountain lion prevents his return. The silver fox is a permanent resident of these heights and ranges widely over them. He catches woodchucks and ptarmigan and feasts on big game that has met with accident or that has been left to waste by that wild game-hog, the mountain lion. In summer, and occasionally in winter, both the coyote and the wolf come into the fox's territory.
In slide rock and in bouldery moraines up as high as thirteen thousand feet, one finds the pika, or cony. Almost nothing is known of his domestic life. Apparently he does not hibernate, for on sunny days he may be seen the year round. Like the beaver he each autumn lays up supplies for winter. Hay is his harvest. This hay is frequently placed in conical piles in the shelter of shelving rocks. These piles are sometimes two feet in diameter. His haymaking is done with much hurry. After quickly biting off a number of plants or grasses, he commonly seizes these by their ends and simply scampers for the harvest pile. Quickly thrusting them in, he hurries away for more. His ways are decidedly in contrast to the beaver's deliberate movements. When he is sunning himself, one may, by moving slowly, approach within a few feet. He has a squeaky whistle and a birdlike call, each of which it is difficult to describe. He is a tailless little fellow, and has round ratlike ears; is dark gray above and whitish beneath. In appearance he reminds one of a small guinea-pig, or a young rabbit.
Up in this region, the most skyward of life zones, nature, as everywhere, is red in tooth and claw. There are strength and cunning, victor and vanquished, pursuit and death. One day, while watching a beetle, I saw a deadly attack. For more than an hour the beetle had been doing nothing except turn this way and then that without getting two inches from the grass-edge on the top of a stone. Suddenly a black bit darted past my face, struck the beetle, and knocked him over. It was a wasp, and for a few seconds these two warriors clinched, and fought with all their strength, cunning, and weapons. While locked in deadly struggle, they fell over a cliff that was twelve inches high; the fall broke their hold; this was instantly renewed, but presently they ceased to struggle, with the wasp victor.
The weasel is the white wolf among the small people of the heights. In winter his pure white fur allows him to slip almost unsuspected through the snow. He preys upon the cony and the birds of the alpine zone. Like the mountain lion and some human hunters, he does wanton killing just for amusement. He is bloodthirsty, cunning, and even bold. Many times, within a few feet, he has glared fiendishly at me, seeming almost determined to attack; his long, low-geared body and sinister and snaky eyes make him a mean object to look upon.
An experience with a number of rosy finches in the midst of a blizzard was one of the most cheerful ever given me by wild fellow creatures. While snowshoeing across one of the high passes, I was caught in a terrific gale, which dashed the powdered snow-dust so thickly and incessantly that breathing was difficult and at times almost strangling. Crawling beneath an enormous rock-slab to rest and breathe, I disturbed a dozen or so rosy finches already in possession and evidently there for the same purpose as myself. They moved to one side and made room for me, but did not go out. As I settled down, they looked at me frankly and without a fear. Such trust! After one calm look, they gave me no further attention. Although trustful and friendly, they were reserved and mannerly. From time to time there were comings and goings among them. Almost every snow-dashed incoming stranger gave me a look as he entered, and then without the least suspicion turned to his own feathers and affairs. With such honor, I forgot my frosted nose and the blizzard. Presently, however, I crawled forth and groped through the blinding hurricane and entered a friendly forest, where wind-shaped trees at timber-line barely peeped beneath the drifted snow.
The rosy finch, the brown-capped leucosticte of the Rockies (in the Sierra it is the gray-crowned), is a little larger than a junco and is one of the bravest and most trusting of the winged mountaineers. It is the most numerous of the resident bird-population. These cheery little bits live in the mountain snows, rarely descending below timber-line. Occasionally they nest as high as thirteen thousand five hundred feet.
The largest bird resident of the snowy heights is the ptarmigan. Rarely does this bird descend below the timber-line. But a late and prolonged winter storm may drive him and his neighbor the rosy finch a mile or so down the slopes. The first fine day he is back again to the happy heights. The ptarmigan lives in the heathery growths among huge rocky débris. Much of the winter-time he shelters himself in deeply penetrating holes or runs in the compacted snow. His food consists of the seeds and buds of alpine plants, grasses, and insects. His ways remind one of a grouse, though he is a smaller bird. During winter he appears in suit of white, stockings and all. In spring a few black and cinnamon-colored feathers are added, and by midsummer his dress is grayish-brown. During all seasons he is fairly well concealed from enemies by the protective coloration of his clothes, and he depends largely upon this for protection. He is preyed upon by the weasel, fox, bear, eagle, and lion.
Although the mountain-tops have only a few resident birds, they have numerous summer bird builders and sojourners. Many birds nest in these heights instead of going to similar conditions in the great Arctic Circle nursery. Thus most birds met with in the heights during the summer season are the migratory ones. Among the summer residents are the American pipit, the white-crowned sparrow, and the gray-headed junco, the latter occasionally raising two broods in a summer. Here, too, in autumn come flocks of robins and other birds for late berries before starting southward.
The golden eagle may soar above the peaks during all the seasons, but he can hardly be classed as a resident, for much of the winter he spends in the lower slopes of the mountains. Early in the spring he appears in the high places and nests among the crags, occasionally twelve thousand feet above sea-level. The young eaglets are fed in part upon spring lamb from the near-by wild flocks.
One day, while in a bleak upland above the timber-line, I paused by a berg-filled lake, a miniature Arctic Ocean, with barren rock-bound shores. A partly snow-piled, half-frozen moor stretched away into an arctic distance. Everything was silent. Near by a flock of ptarmigan fed upon the buds of a clump of arctic willow that was dwarfed almost out of existence. I felt as though in the polar world. "Here is the environment of the Eskimo," I discoursed to myself. "He ought to be found in this kind of place. Here are icebergs, frozen tundras, white ptarmigan, dwarf willows, treeless distances. If arctic plants were transported down here on the Big Ice Floe, surely some Eskimo must have been swept along. Why didn't he stay? The climate was better, but perhaps he missed his blubber and sea food, and there was no midnight sun and the nights were extremely short. The pale and infrequent aurora borealis must have reminded him of better nights, if not better days. Anyway, even for the Eskimo, there is no place like home, even though it be in a domed and dingy ice house amid the eternal snows and beneath the wonderful sky of northern lights."
AT THE EDGE OF THE ARCTIC-ALPINE LIFE ZONE IN THE SAN JUAN MOUNTAINS
There are fields of varied wild flowers. Brilliant in color, dainty, beautiful, and graceful, they appear at their best amid the wild magnificence of rocky peaks, alpine lakes, and aged snow-fields, and on the far-extending lonely moorlands. Many of these flowers are your lowland friends, slightly dwarfed in some cases, but with charms even fresher, brighter, and more lovely than those of the blooms you know. Numerous upland stretches are crowded and colored in indescribable richness,—acres of purple, blue, and gold. The flowers, by crowding the moist outskirts of snow-drifts, make striking encircling gardens of bloom. In contributed and unstable soil-beds, amid ice and boulders, they take romantic rides and bloom upon the cold backs of the crawling glaciers, and thus touch with color and beauty the most savage of wild scenes.
The distribution and arrangement of the flowers has all the charm of the irregular, and for the most part is strikingly effective and delightfully artistic. They grow in bunches and beds; the stalks are long and short; rock towers and barren débris frown on meadow gardens and add to the attractiveness of the millions of mixed blossoms that dance or smile. Ragged tongues of green and blossoms extend for miles. One of the peculiarities of a few of these plants is that they have stems and axes horizontal rather than vertical. Others are masses of mossy, cushion-like bloom. In many cases there is a marked enlargement of the root-growth, but the flowers compare favorably in size, sweetness, and brilliancy of coloring with their lowland relatives.
Among the blossoms that shine in these polar gardens are the spring beauty, the daisy, the buttercup, and the forget-me-not. There are numbers of the pink and the saxifrage families, white and purple monkshood, purple asters, and goldenrod. Whole slopes are covered with paintbrushes, and among these commonly is a scattering of tall, white-tipped wild buckwheat. Some of these are scentless, while others diffuse a rich perfume.
There are numerous hanging gardens that are grander than all the kings of the earth could create! White cascades with the soft, fluttering veils of spray pour through the brilliant bloom and the bright green of the terraces. In these gardens may bloom the bluest of mertensia, gentians, and polemonium, the brightest of yellow avens, the ruddy stonecrop, and gaillardias as handsome as any black-eyed Susan; then there is a fine scattering of shooting-stars, starworts, pentstemons of prettiest shades, and the tall and stately columbine, a burst of silver and blue.
Many of the polar plants that bloom in this Arctic world were probably brought here from the Arctic Circle by the vast and prolonged flow of ice from the north during the last ice age. Stranded here by the receding, melting ice, they are growing up with the country under conditions similar to those in the Northland. They are quick to seize and beautify each new soil-bed that appears,—soil exposed by the shrinking of snow-fields, piled by landslides, washed down by water, or made by the dropped or deposited sweepings of the winds.
Bees and butterflies follow the flowers, and every wild garden has the buzz of busy wings and the painted sails of idle ones. Mountain sheep occasionally pose and group among the flowers and butterflies. Often sheep, crags, ptarmigan, and green spaces, flowers, and waterfalls are caught in one small space that sweeps up into the blue and cloud in one grand picture.
In many localities there are such numbers of dwarfed plants that one may blunder through a fairy flower-garden without seeing it. To see these tiny flowers at their best, one needs to lie down and use a reading-glass. There are diminutive bellflowers that rise only half an inch above the earth and masses of cushion pinks and tiny phlox still finer and shorter.
The Arctic-Alpine zone, with its cloud and bright sunshine, rests upon the elevated and broken world of the Rockies. This realm is full of interest through all the seasons, and with its magnificence are lovely places, brilliant flowers, and merry birds to cheer its solitudes. During winter these polar mountain-stretches have a strange charm, and many a time my snowshoe tracks have left dotted trails upon their snowy distances.
These cheerful wild gardens are threatened with ruin. Cattle and sheep are invading them farther and farther, and leaving ruin behind. With their steep slopes, coarse soil, and shallow root-growths these alpine growths cannot endure pasturage. The biting, the pulling, and the choppy hoof-action are ruinous. Destined to early ruin if pastured, and having but little value when so used, these sky gardens might rightly be kept unimpaired for ourselves. They would make delightful National Parks. They have a rapidly increasing value for parks. Used for recreation places, they would have a high commercial value; and thus used they would steadily pay dividends in humanity.
Some Forest History