The western mountains.
Saddles and passes.
The character of the land lying along the western boundaries of the deserts is very different from that of the Arizona canyon country. Moving toward the Pacific you meet with no mesas of consequence, nor do you traverse many plateaus or foot-hills. The sands extend up to the bases of the Coast Range and then stop short. The mountains rise abruptly from the desert like a barrier or wall. Sometimes they lift vertically for several thousand feet, but more often they present only a steep rough grade. There are cracks in the wall called passes, through which railways lead on to the Pacific; and there are high divides and saddles—dips in the top of the wall—through which in the old days the Indians trailed from desert to sea, and which are to-day known only to the inquisitive few.
The view from the mountain-top.
From the saddles—and better still from the topmost peaks—there are wonderful sights to be seen. You will never know the vast reach of the deserts until you see them from a point of rock ten thousand feet in air. Then you are standing on the Rim of the Bowl and can see the yellow ocean of sand within and the blue ocean of water without. The ascent to that high point is, however, not easy, especially if undertaken from the desert side. But nothing could be more interesting in quick change and new surprise than the rise from the hot waste at the bottom to the cold white-capped peaks of the top. It is not often that you find mountains with their feet thrust into tropic sands and their heads thrust into clouds of snow.
Looking up toward the peak.
Lost streams.
Before you start to climb, before you reach the foot of the mountains, you are struck by the number of dry washes leading down from the sides and gradually losing themselves in the sands. As the eyes trace these arroyos up the mountain-side they are seen to turn into green streaks and finally, near the peak, into white streaks. You know what that means and yet can hardly believe that those white lines are snow-banks packed many feet deep in the canyons; that from them run streams which lower down become green lines because of the grasses, bushes, and trees growing on their banks; and that finally the streams, after plunging through canyons, fall into the arroyos and are drunk up by the desert sands before they have left the mountain-bases. It seems incredible that a stream should be born; run its course through valley, gorge, and canyon; and then disappear forever in the sands, all within a few miles. Yet not one but many of these mountain-streams have that brief history.
Avalanches and bowlder-beds.
And at one time they must have been larger, or there were slips of glaciers or avalanches on the mountains; for the arroyos are piled with great blocks of granite and there are rows of bowlders on either side which might have been rolled there by floods or pushed there by an ice-sheet. As you draw nearer, the bowlders crop out in large fields and beds. They surround the rock bases like a deposit rather than a talus, and over them one must pass on his way up the mountain-side.