California: The Land of the Sun

by Mary Austin

LAKE TAHOE, THE HIGH SIERRAS

But from the heights, all feeling for the process of the forest is lost in the sense of its irresistible march—it creeps and winds, it waits darkly for the word. Above the tree-line no sound ascends but a faint vibration, the body of sound making itself felt in the silence. On windless days the forest lies black like weed at the bottom of a lake of air as clear as a vacuum. When the great wind rivers pour about the peaks, it can be seen lashing like weed in the currents, but still almost soundlessly—the roar of it passes down the cañons, and is heard in the cities of the plain. But if the peaks cannot hear what the trees are plotting about, it is not so with the voices of the water. These are sharper, more definitive; they rise re-echoing from the rocky walls and are recognisable each by its distinctive note at incredible heights of the sheer, glassy, granite frontlets.

In the glacial valleys, such as Yosemite, Tehipite, and Hetch Hetchy, where young rivers drop from the headlands in long streaming falls, the noise of them contending with the wind makes mimic thunder. Immense curtains of falling water are tossed this way and that, they are caught up and suspended in mid-air, and let fall crashing to the lower levels. When the wind blows straight up the cañon they will rear against it, and leap out a shining arc, shattering in mid-air like bursting bombs of spray. But later in the season, when the streams are heavy with the melting snows, the wind itself is shattered by the weight of falling water—it exhausts itself in obscuring clouds of silver dust. When from Whitney or Williamson or King's Mountain you can see half-a-hundred such young rivers roaring to the morning, it is as beautiful and as terrifying as the sight of youth to timorous age. They go leaping with their shining shields, and their shouting shakes the rocks. Neither you nor they believe that the most and the best they will come to is an irrigating canal between sober rows of prunes and barley.

Higher than the forests, or the waters rising out of them, is the Py-weack, the Land of Shining Rocks. They shine with glacier polish; horses on the high trails sniff suspiciously at their glittering surfaces. Time can lay slight hold on them by thunder, by frost, and the little grey moss; it has not yet subdued the front of Oppapago. Here between snowless ribs and buttresses are the shrunken glaciers that feed the streams, little toy models of the ancient rivers of ice. The snowfields of the Sierras are not so inconsiderable as they seem: they are dwarfed by the precipices among which they hide. Inaccessible to ordinary mountain travel, they make their best showing from the surrounding plains, where, lifted in the middle air, they glow with ethereal whiteness. Close by they display a bewildering waste of broken ice, boulders, and crevasses, made bleaker by the cobalt shadows.

MOUNT SHASTA—SIERRA GLOW

North the line of peaks stretches, broken by the passes that give access to the west. Between them, above the source of streams, in the ice-gouged hollows, lie unfathomable waters that take all their life from the sky. Or perhaps they are reservoirs from which the sky is made, fluid jade and azulite and hyacinth and chrysoprase, as if the skies of many days had run their colours in those bleak bowls. For at this altitude the wave contour of the range comes out most sharply; the sky is strangely deep and darker, as if through its translucence one glimpsed the void of space. One sees the moon and the planets wandering there with pale lamps held aloft.

No life of any sort is visible from here. Farther down toward the coast, over the forested moraines, the condor may be seen leaning against the wind at sunrise. On the edge of the abysmal cañons eagles make their nests and go dropping down the shadowy depths to seek their food from God, but they do not rise to these stark heights. Sometimes a clanging horde of water-fowl, beating up from the Gulf of California overland to the Canadian marshes, will grow bewildered in the face of the great wall-sided cliffs; circling they attempt the forward flight, only to circle and rise anew, until, wing-weary in that thin air, they sink exhausted to the margin of a mountain lake, satisfied at last to thread their way humbly along the creek-beds to open country.

The live forces of the High Sierra are the forces of wind and light. One feels the push of tremendous currents flowing between the peaks as among rocky islands. Day by day they may be charted by the cloud fragments floating on them, by the banners of dry snow dust, streaming out like long grass from the island shores. Thundering fleets of cumuli drift up the wind rivers and assault the great domes of Whitney and Oppapago. The light breaks through all the varying cloud strata, and colours them with splendour; the glow of the clouds reflected on the snow is caught by the watchful mountain-lover far down the valleys of Inyo and San Joaquin. This painted hour of sunset is the apotheosis of mountains, but for me it has less of majesty than the morning after deep snows. These come usually early in the season. The air for days will be full of the formless stir, then the range withdraws itself behind a veil which closes from tented peak to peak, and includes sometimes the parallel desert ranges which lie along its eastern coast. Twenty feet will fall in a single session of the white gods behind the veil. Then comes a morning blue and sharp as a spear-thrust. Every tree is like an arrow feathered in green and white. Airy bridges built upon the bending stems shut in the water-courses; the moraines are smooth and soft as the backs of huddled sheep. By night the range shows from the valley as a procession of winged figures holding the snows upon their bosoms. And that, after all, is the business of mountains. The western front of the Sierra Nevada, which receives the full force of the Pacific storms, is rewarded with the stateliest forests. Before those extended snowy mountain arms lie the great Twin Valleys; behind them stretches the illimitable sage-brush country, the backyard of the Sierra.