Here savage rock-grandeur and splendid sunlight forever struggle for mastery of effect. A cloud drifts over us, and the dark headlands of granite loom up with impending mightiness, and seem to advance toward each other from opposite ranks; about their feet the wreck of centuries of avalanche, and above leaden vapors hurrying and whirling. All is dimness and gloom. Then overhead the clouds are furled away, and there is light—light joyous, pure, gloom-dispelling, before whose intense, searching vividness shadows unfold and mystery vanishes.
Through such alternating sensations we wound our way round the débris-cumbered margin of two lakes of deep, transparent, beryl-colored water, and up to the very head of our amphitheatre, reaching an elevation of about thirteen thousand feet. We had thus far encountered very little snow, and absolutely no climbing. All along it had seemed to us that from the cañon-head we might easily climb to the dividing summit of the Sierras, and follow it along to Mount Whitney. I had taken pains to diverge from my unsuccessful route of 1864, which lay now to the east, and separated from us by a high wall, terminating in fantastic spires.
Upon mounting the ridge-top we found it impossible to reach the true summit of the range without first descending into a deep cañon, the ancient bed of a tributary glacier of the Kern; the ice now replaced by imposing slopes of granite débris, partly masked by snow, and plunging down into a lake of startling vitriol color.
We toiled cautiously down over insecure wreck of granite, whose huge blocks threatened constantly to topple us over or to rush out from under foot and gather into an avalanche. A draught from the icy lake water, a brief rest on the sunny side of a huge erratic, and we began the slow, laborious ascent of the summit ridge. Unfortunately, the footing was bad, being composed chiefly of granite gravel. Of every stone in place and each snow spot we took advantage, making pauses for breath now and then, until at last we reached the crest, here a thin ridge, and hurriedly turned our eyes in the direction of Mount Whitney.
The sharp, dominating blade of granite rising a couple of miles northwest of us, over a group of spiry pinnacles, was unmistakable. The same severe, beautiful crest I had struggled for in 1864 rose proudly into the blue, and, though near, seemed as inaccessible as ever.
In the opposite direction, about three miles away, in clear, uncolored plainness, stood the peak where, in 1871, I had been led by the map, and my error perpetuated by the clouds.
In full view of both peaks it seemed strange I could have mistaken one for the other.
Infallibility in retrospect is one of the easiest conditions imaginable; yet when the ever-fresh memory of those seething cloud-forms comes back to me, when I see again the gloom made even wilder and darker by bolts of sunlight and illumined gauzes of mist, when I realize that the cloud-compelling peak itself never shone forth, I am free to confess that I should make the mistake again.
In charging this error upon the map, I do not in any sense intend to reflect on Mr. C. F. Hoffmann, the accomplished chief topographer of the Survey, to whose skilful hand we owe the forthcoming map of Central California. His location of Mount Whitney depended upon two compass bearings only—his own from Mount Brewer, which proves to have been unvitiated by local magnetic attraction, and mine from Mount Tyndall, which evidently is in error.
It is most curious to discover that my bearings made from a station on the northwest edge of Mount Tyndall, where I placed myself to observe on the peaks lying in that direction, are, when corrected for variation, true, while those taken from a block on the south edge of the summit not sixty feet from the first station are abnormal. This reminds me of the observations made by Professor Brewer during our hours of rest on the top of Lassen’s Peak, where he found the summit block a local magnet.