So we thought on that sunny morning when we left Sisson’s, starting ahead of wagons and pack animals, and riding out into the woodland on our trip round Shasta; a march of a hundred miles, with many proposed side-excursions into the mountain.
The California haze had again enveloped Shasta, this time nearly obscuring it. In forest along the southeast base, we came upon the stream flowing from McCloud Glacier, its cold waters milky white with fine, sandy sediment. Such dense, impenetrable fields of chaparral cover the south foothills that we were only able to fight our way through limited parts, getting, however, a clear idea of lava flows and topography. Farther east, the plains rise to seven thousand feet, and fine wood ridges sweep down from Shasta, inviting approach.
While Munger and Watkins camped to make studies and negatives of the peak, Fred Clark and I packed one mule with a week’s provisions, and, mounting our saddle-animals, struck off into dark, silent forest.
It was a steep climb of eight or ten miles up tree-covered ridges and among outcrops of gray trachyte, nearly every foot showing more or less evidence of glacial action; long trains of morainal rocks upon which large forest-trees seemed satisfied to grow; great, rough regions of terminal rubbish, with enclosed patches of level earth commonly grass-grown and picturesque. It was sunset before we came upon water, and then it flowed a thousand feet below us in the bottom of a sharp, narrow cañon, cut abruptly down in what seemed glacial débris. I thought it unwise to take our mules down its steep wall if there were any camp-spot high up in the opener head of the cañon, and went off on foot to climb the wooded moraines still farther, hoping to come upon a bit of alpine sward with icy pool, or even upon a spring. When up between two and three hundred feet the trees became less and less frequent, rugged trains of stone and glacier-scored rock in places covering the spurs. I could now overlook the snow amphitheatre, which opened vast and shadowy above. Not a sign of vegetation enlivened its stony bed. The icy brook flowed between slopes of débris. At my feet a trachyte ridge narrowed the stream with a tortuous bed, and led it to the edge of a five-hundred-feet cliff, over which poured a graceful cascade. Finding no camp-spot there, I turned northward and made a detour through deep woods, by-and-by coming back to Clark. We faced the necessity, and by dark were snugly camped in the wild cañon bottom. It was one of the loneliest bivouacs of my life: shut in by high, dark walls, a few clustered trees growing here and there, others which floods had undermined lying prostrate, rough bowlders thrown about, an icy stream hurrying by, and chilly winds coming down from the height, against which our blankets only half defended us.
Our excursion next day was south and west, across high, scantily wooded moraines, till we came to the deep cañon of the McCloud Glacier.
I describe this gorge, as it is one of several similar, all peculiar to Shasta. We had climbed to a point about ten thousand feet above the sea, and were upon the eastern edge of a cañon of eleven or twelve hundred feet depth. From the very crest of the Shasta, with here and there a few patches of snow, a long and remarkably even débris slope swept down. It seemed as if these small pieces of trachyte formed a great part of the region, for to the very bottom our cañon walls were worked out of it. A half mile below us the left bank was curiously eroded by side streams, resulting in a family of pillars from one to seven hundred feet high, each capped with some hard lava bowlder which had protected the soft débris beneath from weathering. From its lofty névé the McCloud Glacier descended over rugged slopes in one long cascade to a little above our station, where it impinged against a great rock buttress and turned sharply from the south wall toward us, rounding over in a great, solid ice-dome eight or nine hundred feet high. For a mile farther a huge accumulation looking like a river of débris cumbered the bottom. Here and there, on close scrutiny, we found it to be pierced with caverns whose ice-walls showed that the glacier underlay all this vast amount of stone. Bowlders rattled continually from the upper glacier and down both cañon walls, increasing the already great burden. Along both sides were evidences of motion in the lateral moraine embankments, and a very perceptible rounding up of terminal ramparts, from which in white torrent poured the sub-glacial brook.
It is instructive to consider what an amount of freighting labor this shrunken ice-stream has to perform besides dragging its own vast weight along. In descending Shasta we had found glacial ice which evidently for a mile or more deeply underlaid a mass of rock similar to this. It is one of the curiosities of Mount Shasta that such a great bulk of ice should be buried, and in large part preserved, by loads of rock fragments. Fine contrasts of color were afforded high up among the sérac by a combination of blue ice and red lavas. We hammered and surveyed here for half the day, then descended to our mules, who bore us eagerly back to their home, our weird little cañon camp.
A pleasant day’s march, altogether in woods and over glacial ridges, during which not a half hour passed without opening views of the cone, brought us high on the northern slope, at the upper forest limit, in a region of barren avalanche tracks and immense moraines.
Between those great, straight ridges which jut almost parallel from the volcano’s base are wide, shelving valleys, the pathways of extinct glaciers; and here the forest, although it must once have obtained foothold, has been uprooted and swept away before powerful avalanches, crushed and up-piled trunks in sad wreck marking spots where the snow-rush stopped.
Two brooks, separated by a wide, gently rounding zone of drift, flowed down through the glacier valley which opened directly in front of our camp.