A Summer in the Sierras
UR Western literary disciple, Bret Harte, is responsible for some such statement as this, through the mouthpiece of one of his lively mountaineers:
"Tain't no use, you ain't got good sense no more. Why, sometimes you talk jest as if you lived in a valley!"
Doesn't that epitomize the contempt of the highlander for the lowlander?
A lover of the Californian Sierra reasonably would be expected to originate such a philosophy. For while all mountains approach perfection, existence in the California cordillera is as near Utopian as this old earth offers. That, of course, applies only to the out-of-door lover. For the others I dare venture no judgment; in their blindness they love best their cities and their rabbit-warren homes, and the logical desires of sunshine and forest are dried out of them by steam heat and contaminated by breathing much-used oxygen.
Humans, generally speaking, have their chief habitat in the lowlands. Compelling reasons, aside from choice, are responsible for this state of affairs. For instance, there are not enough highlands to go around. Then, too, valleys and plains are better adapted to the customary occupations of the genus homo, especially that obsessing mania for the accumulation of cash. But despite their habits and their environment, a satisfactory proportion of the valley dwellers love the hill country, and when they have mountains for neighbors revel in the opportunities thereby afforded.
In California the lot of the lowlander is blessed beyond compare, for the most enticing playland imaginable is at his beck, and he is offered a scenic menu à la carte, so to speak, which includes about everything the Creator devised in the way of out-of-door attractions. There is sea beach and forest, poppy-gilded plain and snow-quilted mountain. From a semi-tropical riviera, with the scent of orange blossoms still in his nostrils, he may mount above the snow line in a few brief hours. One day he bathes in the Pacific, inhaling the dank, sea-smelling fog, and the next finds himself in the grandest forests of America, breathing the crisp air of lofty altitudes. Revel in the gentle south of France or Alpine Switzerland; enjoy the mildness of Florida or the rugged mountaineering of the Rockies; drink Chianti in an Italian vineyard or cast a trout fly in a brawling Scottish stream; view fragments of Canton within gunshot of the Golden Gate and then glimpse utter desert by the shores of the Salton Sea—in short, choose what you will, and in California it awaits you.
The breezy bay of San Francisco, blue Tamalpais, and the live-oaks of Berkeley's campus we left behind, swinging easterly and south through the hot, rich valley of the San Joaquin until the railroad ended and our trail began. Before us lay a summer in the Sierras; a summer in no wise definitely organized in advance, but ninety days of wandering at will unburdened by itinerary and guided chiefly by the whim of the moment.
A wonder of the world supremely worth seeing is Yosemite and when you see it, if the possibility offers, avoid the hackneyed methods. The best way ever devised to get acquainted with the Wonder-Valley, or any other of Nature's masterpieces, is the simplest: it consists in progressing upon your own two feet. So it was that we entered the Yosemite Park, and under our own power, so to speak, we negotiated many scores of miles over trails good and bad, and often guided by no trail at all.
"The live oaks of Berkeley's campus"
From a photograph by Wells Drury, Berkeley, Cal.
Looking across the clouds to Mount Adams from the flanks
of Rainier Copyright 1909 by L. G. Linkletter
To add even a modest description of Yosemite Valley to the far-reaching bibliography already in existence would be indeed carrying coals to a literary Newcastle. If you want guidebooks, history, or information upon its flowers and its trees, simply whisper the word "Yosemite" in any west-coast bookstore and you will be led to shelves bulging with volumes that are authoritative, comprehensive, attractive, and, many of them, interesting. It is suggested, however, that the wonders of the Valley will break upon you with all the greater splendor if reading about them is postponed until after you have made visual acquaintance with what Nature has written under the blue California sky in characters of trees, cliffs, rushing rivers, giant trees, and myriad flowers.
Go, then, as did we, with a pack on your back and without plans. Or, if needs be, patronize the hotel or one of the luxurious camps, and thence see the sights of the Park at leisure through the medium of the stagecoaches which go nearly everywhere over the excellent roads.
As for us, we had a scrap of a tent and a box of provisions which we trundled, after a deal of vexatious bargaining, a mile or so in a borrowed wheelbarrow to an enchanted camping spot beside a brimful brook, shaded by primeval trees and sheltered from the welter of humans who promenade promiscuously by a convenient arboreal jungle. There we made our headquarters, by extending our fragmentary canvas fly between our blankets and the heavens and establishing a megalithic fireplace at arm's reach from the running water, where we cooked three or more times a day.
For a happy fortnight we did those things which Yosemite visitors are supposed to do. We gloried in the sheer mightiness of El Capitan from below, and reveled in the views from its crest. From Inspiration Point, on the road to the Big Trees, we were inspired beyond expectation by the magnificent panorama of the cliff-encompassed canyon, with the silver waterfalls lighting its shadowed walls like threads of gossamer against the gray background of the rocks. Close at hand we were deafened by the thundering waters of Bridal Veil and Nevada, and we clambered up the trails to see the highland rivers that gave them birth. A glad summer day was devoted to the Mariposa Grove pilgrimage where discreet soldiers watched lest we abscond with a flower or treelet, or, I suppose, commit that universal sin of American self-publicity, scratch our puny initials upon the gnarled columns of the most ancient and the grandest monuments Nature has erected on our continent—the Sequoias.
"We gloried in the sheer mightiness of El Capitan"
Then, having reveled in the prosaic recreations of Yosemite—and the first view of the Valley alone is worth the entire pilgrimage, remember—we picked up our beds and walked. That is, the blankets were strapped on our backs, and the rudiments of a commissary stowed in our ricksacks. So equipped, with our creature comforts provided for to the extent of about fifty pounds per man, we "cached" the balance of our provender and equipment in a rocky cave (where a bear subsequently effected destructive inroads) and struck out for Tuolumne Meadows and Hetch-Hetchy.
In the course of our unplanned wanderings we followed up the Merced River, past Nevada Falls and through the meadowed beauties of the Little Yosemite. Ultimately, by ways uncharted, so far as we were aware, we viewed the Merced Canyon where Lakes Washburn and Merced nestle in the heart of a little-traveled fairyland, and thence struck 'cross-country to the upper regions of the other great river of the Park, the Tuolumne.
All the Tuolumne Meadow country is sheer delight, for mountaineer, fisherman, naturalist, and lover of the out-of-doors whose tastes are unspecific; well has John Muir called it "the grand central camp-ground of the Sierras." It is a vast meadow, hemmed in by a mountain region beyond compare for expeditioning, with legions of royal trout ready for the fly, and a vast flower garden maintained enticingly by Dame Nature during the summer sunshine season.
The trip we took from the Meadows, again without trail, was down the Tuolumne to Hetch-Hetchy Valley. The journey's start literally was flower-strewn, and we tramped carefully lest we crush over-many of the purple daisies and tiny violets dotting the dewy grass, while lupin offered gentle resistance to our progress. First came the canyon of Conness Creek, shaded with groves of hemlock, and neighbored by three falls, the first of the countless cataracts which mark the wild river's course through the rockbound gorge, to the valley of our destination, miles below.
Beyond the falls the stream flows quietly for a space, between banks lined with pines and deciduous trees. As Marion Randall Parsons has quoted, here,
Willows whiten, aspens quiver,
Little breezes dusk and shiver
Thro' the wave that runs forever
By the island in the river
Flowing down to Camelot.
And standing beside the white waters with the ground shaking underfoot to the tune of their mighty onrush, with the meadows, trees, and flowers round about, the awesome cliffs for guardians, and the bright blue sky over all, it requires no visionary to conjure up legendary cities at this river's end, for but half lend yourself to the notion and the glorious Sierran stream becomes a beckoning highway to a land of pleasant dreams.
"A vast flower garden maintained enticingly by Dame Nature"
Copyright 1912 by Kiser Photo Co., Portland, Ore.
Light and shadow in Yosemite
Of the Tuolumnic canyon journey this same lover of the Sierras, Mrs. Parsons, has sketched the following description:
It is impossible to do justice to the canyon after one brief journey through it; impossible to set down in order the details of that day's travel and the next, confused as they were by the consciousness of tired muscles and eyes bewildered by the all too hurried succession of interests. Little more than impressions remain—memories of cliffs rising from three to five thousand feet above us; of a walk of half a mile on stepping stones along the river; of more talus-piles; of the entrance into the rattlesnake zone; of a walk through a still forest of tall firs and young cedars, where our voices seemed to break the silence of ages; of more talus-piles; of a camp beneath the firs among deep fern-beds, and of the red ants that there congregated; of more brush and more talus-piles; of a look down Muir Gorge and a hot climb up a thousand feet over the rocks to the cairn of stones containing the precious register; of a cliff extending to the river's edge which presented the alternative of edging across it on a crack or climbing a five-hundred-foot hill to get around it.
The Tuolumne is one of the largest of our Sierra rivers, much greater in volume than its quieter neighbor, the Merced. Its falls, often of an imposing height, are none of them sheer, none of them giving that impression of pure joy of living with which the Merced waters leap into the great Nevada abyss. For the Tuolumne's is a sterner, stormier course, beset with giant rocks against which even its splendid strength is impotently hurled, and its joy is the joy of battles. But it is a strange thing, standing beside one of these giant cataracts where the ground shakes with the impact and where every voice of wind or living creature is silenced in the roar of the maddened waters, to see under what a delicate fabric this Titan's force is veiled—a billowing, gossamer texture, iris-tinted, with jeweled spray flying high upon the wind.
Then came Hetch-Hetchy, after two days of strenuous pursuit of the Tuolumne's galloping waters.
When we were there Hetch-Hetchy was a valley untrammeled, carpeted with grass and flowers, walled by mighty cliffs, traversed by the unfettered Tuolumne. Of late, as all the outdoor world knows, its freedom has been bartered and its fate sealed—the fate of being drowned beneath a reservoir whose waters are to quench the thirst of San Francisco. Probably, from an engineering standpoint, the knell of Hetch-Hetchy is a masterpiece; perhaps economically it is wisdom; but none who have delighted in the valley's hospitality but deem it tragedy of the darkest die.
Be that as it may, the waters are yet unstored and Hetch-Hetchy is still a camp-ground, and for the city-bred or the city-weary it offers panacea beyond compare as it has since the beginning of all things, when cities were as little thought of as reservoirs. Regarding the horrors of industrial civilization, William Morris once urged humanitarian effort "until the contrast is less disgraceful between the fields where the beasts live and the streets where men live." And Hetch-Hetchy, even in a region of loveliness, is perhaps Nature's strongest sermon in her wordless arraignment of the physical follies of civilization—at least that so-called civilization which is wound around with unashamed artificialities and the ugliness of urban existence.
Our week in Hetch-Hetchy we wished might have been a month, but the calendar moves relentlessly in the Sierra as elsewhere, and only too soon the days were numbered until we must abandon Yosemite Park and strike southward into other mountain regions, with other companionship. So back we "hiked" to our valley base camp, rescued what the bears had left of our stored property, and renewed acquaintance with the railroad at Merced.
During the rest of that most excellent summer my fortunes were thrown in with those of the Sierra Club, the Californian member of the Coast's trio of notable mountain-climbing organizations, the other two being the Mazamas of Portland and the Mountaineers of Seattle.
Sunrise at Hetch-Hetchy
The Government road that leads to Mount Rainier
This organized back-to-naturing, so to speak, deserves a large measure of attention and a vast deal of praise. The official purpose of the Sierra Club is "to explore, enjoy, and render accessible the mountain regions of the Pacific Coast." Its aim, like those of its brother organizations of the West and East, is to "publish authentic information concerning the mountain regions and to enlist the support and cooperation of the people and the Government in preserving the forests and other natural features of the Sierra Nevada Mountains." With such a platform these clubs of the Pacific accomplish much real good and often are the sponsors for forward-looking movements of wide importance. Also, their experience and their organized methods each summer make possible lengthy excursions into the mountain regions whose scope would be beyond the individual means of many who join forces with the club on these community outings. Hundreds of miles of new trails are laid out and old ones improved, peaks are climbed and records left, often trout are planted in barren lakes, and everyone is given an educational experience in the ways of the Open. Also—and primarily—all hands have a royal good time.
At Tracy, in the San Joaquin Valley, where the Sierra Club special train stopped for supper, I joined the party. That night I felt conspicuous, for six weeks of tramping in the Yosemite had removed the last traces of presentability from my costume; however, when at dawn the hikers of the morrow emerged from the sleeping-cars at Porterville, white collars, low shoes, long skirts, and all the other impedimenta of civilized apparel were replaced by workaday garments, while khaki and flannel shirts were much in evidence.
For two days the long line struggled along the trail leading into the canyon of the Kern. From oak and chaparral to pines and bear clover, silver fir, and nature-made gardens of columbine, red snow plant, and cyclamen we mounted, and then still higher to a silent tamarack country. Then down interminably to Fish Creek, and camp, and Charlie Tuck, who was—and no doubt still is—the Celestial ruler of the club's all-important culinary department.
Fishing, minor side trips, some fish-planting, and all the attractions of outdoor camp life occupied a week in the lower Kern Valley. Then camp was removed ten miles up the canyon to the junction of the Big Arroya and the Kern, whence were engineered ascents of the Red Kaweah and of Whitney, highest of all the mountains in the United States, each reached through side trips of several days' duration, and each opening up a fresh, new field of highland delights.
The trails of the Sierra, like trails the world over, are endlessly appealing—only the Sierran footways seem somehow richer in variety than others known to me. The entire mountain world unfolds from the shifting vantage points of these ribbons, threading its most sacred temples, clear and strong through the valleys, distinguishable only by the presence of many blazes upon the tree trunks where pine needles plot their obliteration, zigzagging dizzily up steep slopes, crossing rivers on perilous logs or buried knee-deep beneath the rushing waters of the ford, skirting sky-reflecting lakes, hiding beneath summer snowbanks, or traversing waste highlands, marked only by the cairns that lift their welcome heads against the sky. Underfoot there is the needle carpet, springy ground, shoe-cutting rocks, or deep-trodden dust, where the wayfarer comes to the journey's end a monument of ghostly gray. Overhead is always the tender blue of the summer California sky, with here and there a snowy cloud, for contrast's sake. Most impressive is the trail that clambers among the snow-clad heights, where the chilling air of the peaks makes the blood run fast and the heart rejoice; its beauty most appreciable where it follows brawling brooks and shadowed valleys, or meanders among woods, pillared with great trees and roofed with swaying boughs, ever and anon emerging into tiny, exquisite glades. Such is the Sierra trail, each mile a thing of individual charm and happy memory.
The physical ways and means of the outing are as near perfect as may be where one hundred and twenty humans are turned loose in the wilderness. The perfection is, of course, the outgrowth of long experience and careful planning. Pack-trains take in the provisions well in advance; the day's "hike" is laid out, and "grub" is in waiting when the allotted number of miles lie behind; side trips are arranged, and when there is climbing of consequence, experienced leaders pilot the way. And yet, withal, the month-long holiday is far from being disagreeably "cut and dried," and there seems always sufficient opportunity for freedom to satisfy individual tastes. Nor, because of the numbers, need one lack privacy; on the trail and at camp the excursionist may restrict himself to his own unimpeachable society, he may join a small group of chosen spirits, or associate with the general unit. In short, there is opportunity to satisfy every taste on a Sierra Club outing, which holds equally true of the other mountain organizations of the Coast, each of which conducts admirable activities in its chosen field.
The last bright recollection of that Sierra summer is the camp-fire which closed the final day—and all camp-fires are pleasant memories. It was beneath the mighty trees of the Giant Forest that we spent the final night, the light of our blaze insignificant 'midst the shadows of these huge trunks, the quiet summer night all about. The inner circle of faces showed ruddy in the reflected firelight, the outer edges of the group were deep in shadow. In the center, close to the fire, his figure outlined by its glow, stood John Muir, president of the Club, naturalist, explorer, lover of the Sierras, and loved by all. That night he shared with us, as often he had done before, his knowledge of those intimates of his, the Californian mountains, with whom he had lived so long and so understandingly. And now, in this December, six years since that evening in the Giant Forest, comes the news that John Muir has been gathered to his fathers, and that this splendid apostle of the out-of-doors will never again share its treasured secrets at Sierran camp-fires.
An amusing, instructive, and tempting account of travel in the byways just off the new highway.—N. Y. Sun.
The Southland
of
North America
Rambles and Observations in
Central America