From any high place during a mountain storm you can see twenty, yes, often a hundred torrents, and the noise of the water and the moving stones makes a wonderful storm chorus. Reclus compares the sound made by the stones to dull thunder.
WHERE TO LOOK FOR HIDING RIVERS
Rivers, both young and old, play hide and seek. Possibly the older rivers get to dreaming of their infancy when they were springs, and want to play they are springs again; anyhow, they disappear in the ground in one place and then come out laughing in another as if they really were springs! And how they must chuckle to themselves when they fool people into thinking they are brand new rivers! This happens sometimes, and so the river gets a different name at the place where it comes out from the name it bears up to the point where it disappears. Such hide-and-seek rivers are found in regions where it doesn't often rain. The Tujunga, which you cross in going from Los Angeles to San Francisco, is such a river. At one place in its course it comes out of a canyon, looks around a minute, and then disappears in the pebbles, sand and gravel of the plain. Down it goes until it reaches a bed of hard rock. Along this underground bed it runs until it gets to a place north of Cahuenga Peak, where it comes up in springs and flows into the Los Angeles River.
THE LOST RIVERS AND THE THOUSAND SPRINGS
These are the waters of some hidden tributaries of the Snake River gushing out as springs from its beautiful banks. The group is called "The Thousand Springs," and is supposed to be the reappearance of two "Lost Rivers" that disappeared back in the sand wastes.
Mountain lakes are where the lively little torrents stop to sleep. "The sea," says Ruskin, "seems only to pause; the mountain lake to sleep and to dream."
But after this sleep how they laugh and play—those baby rivers—as they go dancing over the pebbles and down the falls; for in these lakes they gather themselves together into a larger volume of water, and so, of course, flow on with increased energy.
"As soon as a 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 basin. Then swirling and curving drowsily (dropping off to sleep again!) 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 lake basin."[12]
[12] Muir, "The Sierra Nevada Mountains."