MOUNTAINEERING IN THE
SIERRA NEVADA

MOUNTAINEERING IN THE
SIERRA NEVADA

BY
CLARENCE KING
“Altiora petimus”
NEW YORK
CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS
1902

Copyright, 1871, by
JAMES R. OSGOOD & CO.
———
Copyright, 1902, by
CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS
TROW DIRECTORY
PRINTING AND BOOKBINDING COMPANY
NEW YORK

To
JOSIAH DWIGHT WHITNEY
AND HIS STAFF
MY COMRADES OF THE GEOLOGICAL SURVEY OF CALIFORNIA
THESE MOUNTAINEERING NOTES
ARE CORDIALLY INSCRIBED

NOTE

This book, originally published in 1871, has long been out of print, though in constant demand. Its publication was discontinued owing to the desire of the author to make certain emendations in the text, a work that the arduous activities of a professional scientific life left him no leisure to perform. A few changes, indicated by him, have been made. Otherwise the text of the present edition is that of the last, the revised and enlarged edition of 1874. Only the fastidiousness to which the extraordinary literary quality of the book is itself due, could suggest further modification of what is here republished with the motive of restoring to print and circulation a work too perfect in form and of too rare a quality to be allowed to lapse. It is accordingly with the view of renewing the accessibility of a genuine classic of American literature that the present edition is presented.

FROM THE PREFACE TO THE FOURTH EDITION

* * * * * * *

Mountaineers will realize, from these descriptions of Sierra climbs, how few dangers we encountered which might not have been avoided by time and caution. Since the uncertain perils of glacier work and snow copings do not exist in California, except on the northeast flank of Mount Shasta, our climbs proved safe and easy in comparison with the more serious Alpine ascents. And now that the topography of the higher Sierra has been all explored by the Geological Survey, nearly every peak is found to have an accessible side. Our difficulties and our joys were those of the pioneer.

My own share in the great work of exploring the Sierra under Professor Whitney has been small indeed beside that of the senior assistants of the Survey, Professors Brewer and Hoffmann. Theirs were the long, hard years of patient labor, theirs the real conquest of a great terra incognita; and if in these chapters I have not borne repeated witness to their skill and courage, it is not because I have failed in warm appreciation, but simply because my own mountaineering has always been held by me as of slight value, and not likely to be weighed against their long-continued service.

There are turning-points in all men’s lives which must give them both pause and retrospect. In long Sierra journeys the mountaineer looks forward eagerly, gladly, till pass or ridge-crest is gained, and then, turning with a fonder interest, surveys the scene of his march; letting the eye wander over each crag and valley, every blue hollow of pine-land or sunlit gem of alpine meadow; discerning perchance some gentle reminder of himself in yon thin blue curl of smoke floating dimly upward from the smouldering embers of his last camp-fire. With a lingering look he starts forward, and the closing pass-gate with its granite walls shuts away the retrospect, yet the delightful picture forever after hangs on the gallery wall of his memory. It is thus with me about mountaineering; the pass which divides youth from manhood is traversed, and the serious service of science must hereafter claim me. But as the cherished memories of Sierra climbs go ever with me, I may not lack the inspiring presence of sunlit snow nor the calming influence of those broad noble views. It is the mountaineer’s privilege to carry through life this wealth of unfading treasure. At his summons the white peaks loom above him as of old; the camp-fire burns once more for him, his study walls recede in twilight revery, and around him are gathered again stately columns of pine. If the few chapters I have gathered from these agreeable memories to make this little book are found to possess an interest, if along the peaks I have sought to describe there is reflected, however faintly, a ray of that pure, splendid light which thrills along the great Sierra, I shall not have amused myself with my old note-books in vain.

New York, March, 1874.

CONTENTS

MOUNTAINEERING IN THE SIERRA NEVADA

I
THE RANGE

The western margin of this continent is built of a succession of mountain chains folded in broad corrugations, like waves of stone upon whose seaward base beat the mild, small breakers of the Pacific.

By far the grandest of all these ranges is the Sierra Nevada, a long and massive uplift lying between the arid deserts of the Great Basin and the Californian exuberance of grain-field and orchard; its eastern slope, a defiant wall of rock plunging abruptly down to the plain; the western, a long, grand sweep, well watered and overgrown with cool, stately forests; its crest a line of sharp, snowy peaks springing into the sky and catching the alpenglow long after the sun has set for all the rest of America.

The Sierras have a structure and a physical character which are individual and unique. To Professor Whitney and his corps of the Geological Survey of California is due the honor of first gaining a scientific knowledge of the form, plan, and physical conditions of the Sierras. How many thousands of miles, how many toilsome climbs, we made, and what measure of patience came to be expended, cannot be told; but the general harvest is gathered in, and already a volume of great interest (the forerunner of others) has been published.

The ancient history of the Sierras goes back to a period when the Atlantic and Pacific were one ocean, in whose depths great accumulations of sand and powdered stone were gathering and being spread out in level strata.

It is not easy to assign the age in which these submarine strata were begun, nor exactly the boundaries of the embryo continents from whose shores the primeval breakers ground away sand and gravel enough to form such incredibly thick deposits.

It appears most likely that the Sierra region was submerged from the earliest Palæozoic, or perhaps even the Azoic, age. Slowly the deep ocean valley filled up, until, in the late Triassic period, the uppermost tables were in water shallow enough to drift the sands and clays into wave and ripple ridges. With what immeasurable patience, what infinite deliberation, has nature amassed the materials for these mountains! Age succeeded age; form after form of animal and plant life perished in the unfolding of the great plan of development, while the suspended sands of that primeval sea sank slowly down and were stretched in level plains upon the floor of stone.

Early in the Jurassic period an impressive and far-reaching movement of the earth’s crust took place, during which the bed of the ocean rose in crumpled waves towering high in the air and forming the mountain framework of the Western United States. This system of upheavals reached as far east as Middle Wyoming and stretched from Mexico probably into Alaska. Its numerous ridges and chains, having a general northwest trend, were crowded together in one broad zone whose western and most lofty member is the Sierra Nevada. During all of the Cretaceous period, and a part of the Tertiary, the Pacific beat upon its seaward foot-hills, tearing to pieces the rocks, crumbling and grinding the shores, and, drifting the powdered stone and pebbles beneath its waves, scattered them again in layers. This submarine table-land fringed the whole base of the range and extended westward an unknown distance under the sea. To this perpetual sea-wearing of the Sierra Nevada base was added the detritus made by the cutting out of cañons, which in great volumes continually poured into the Pacific, and was arranged upon its bottom by currents.

In the late Tertiary period a chapter of very remarkable events occurred. For a second time the evenly laid beds of the sea-bottom were crumpled by the shrinking of the earth. The ocean flowed back into deeper and narrower limits, and, fronting the Sierra Nevada, appeared the present system of Coast Ranges. The intermediate depression, or sea-trough as I like to call it, is the valley of California, and is therefore a more recent continental feature than the Sierra Nevada. At once then from the folded rocks of the Coast Ranges, from the Sierra summits and the inland plateaus, and from numberless vents caused by the fierce dynamical action, there poured out a general deluge of melted rock. From the bottom of the sea sprang up those fountains of lava whose cooled material forms many of the islands of the Pacific, and all along the coast of America, like a system of answering beacons, blazed up volcanic chimneys. The rent mountains glowed with outpourings of molten stone. Sheets of lava poured down the slopes of the Sierra, covering an immense proportion of its surface, only the high granite and metamorphic peaks reaching above the deluge. Rivers and lakes floated up in a cloud of steam and were gone forever. The misty sky of these volcanic days glowed with innumerable lurid reflections, and at intervals along the crest of the range great cones arose, blackening the sky with their plumes of mineral smoke. At length, having exhausted themselves, the volcanoes burned lower and lower, and at last by far the greater number went out altogether. With a tendency to extremes which “development” geologists would hesitate to admit, nature passed under the dominion of ice and snow.

The vast amount of ocean water which had been vaporized floated over the land, condensed upon hill-tops, chilled the lavas, and finally buried beneath an icy covering all the higher parts of the mountain system. According to well-known laws, the overburdened summits unloaded themselves by a system of glaciers. The whole Sierra crest was one pile of snow, from whose base crawled out the ice-rivers, wearing their bodies into the rock, sculpturing as they went the forms of valleys, and brightening the surface of their tracks by the friction of stones and sand which were bedded, armor-like, in their nether surface. Having made their way down the slope of the Sierra, they met a lowland temperature of sufficient warmth to arrest and waste them. At last, from causes which are too intricate to be discussed at present, they shrank slowly back into the higher summit fastnesses, and there gradually perished, leaving only a crest of snow. The ice melted, and upon the whole plateau, little by little, a thin layer of soil accumulated, and, replacing the snow, there sprang up a forest of pines, whose shadows fall pleasantly to-day over rocks which were once torrents of lava and across the burnished pathways of ice. Rivers, pure and sparkling, thread the bottom of these gigantic glacier valleys. The volcanoes are extinct, and the whole theatre of this impressive geological drama is now the most glorious and beautiful region of America.

As the characters of the Zauberflöte passed safely through the trial of fire and the desperate ordeal of water, so, through the terror of volcanic fires and the chilling empire of ice, has the great Sierra come into the present age of tranquil grandeur.

Five distinct periods divide the history of the range. First, the slow gathering of marine sediment within the early ocean during which incalculable ages were consumed. Second, in the early Jurassic period this level sea-floor came suddenly to be lifted into the air and crumpled in folds, through whose yawning fissures and ruptured axes outpoured wide zones of granite. Third, the volcanic age of fire and steam. Fourth, the glacial period, when the Sierras were one broad field of snow, with huge dragons of ice crawling down its slopes, and wearing their armor into the rocks. Fifth, the present condition, which the following chapters will describe, albeit in a desultory and inadequate manner.

From latitude 35° to latitude 39° 30´ the Sierra lifts a continuous chain, the profile culminating in several groups of peaks separated by deeply depressed curves or sharp notches, the summits varying from eight to fifteen thousand feet, seven to twelve thousand being the common range of passes. Near its southern extremity, in San Bernardino County, the range is cleft to the base with magnificent gateways opening through into the desert. From Walker’s Pass for two hundred miles northward the sky line is more uniformly elevated; the passes averaging nine thousand feet high, the actual summit a chain of peaks from thirteen to fifteen thousand feet. This serrated snow and granite outline of the Sierra Nevada, projected against the cold, clear blue, is the blade of white teeth which suggested its Spanish name.

Northward still the range gradually sinks; high peaks covered with perpetual snow are rarer and rarer. Its summit rolls on in broken, forest-covered ridges, now and then overlooked by a solitary pile of metamorphic or irruptive rock. At length, in Northern California, where it breaks down in a compressed medley of ridges, and open, level expanses of plain, the axis is maintained by a line of extinct volcanoes standing above the lowland in isolated positions. The most lofty of these, Mount Shasta, is a cone of lava fourteen thousand four hundred and forty feet high, its broad base girdled with noble forests, which give way at eight thousand feet to a cap of glaciers and snow.

Beyond this to the northward the extension of the range is quite difficult to definitely assign, for, geologically speaking, the Sierra Nevada system occupies a broad area in Oregon, consisting of several prominent mountain groups, while in a physical sense the chain ceases with Shasta; the Cascades, which are the apparent topographical continuation, being a tertiary structure formed chiefly of lavas which have been outpoured long subsequent to the main upheaval of the Sierra.

It is not easy to point out the actual southern limit either, because where the mountain mass descends into the Colorado desert it comes in contact with a number of lesser groups of hills, which ramify in many directions, all losing themselves beneath the tertiary and quartenary beds of the desert.

For four hundred miles the Sierras are a definite ridge, broad and high, and having the form of a sea-wave. Buttresses of sombre-hued rock, jutting at intervals from a steep wall, form the abrupt eastern slopes; irregular forests, in scattered growth, huddle together near the snow. The lower declivities are barren spurs, sinking into the sterile flats of the Great Basin.

Long ridges of comparatively gentle outline characterize the western side, but this sloping table is scored from summit to base by a system of parallel transverse cañons, distant from one another often less than twenty-five miles. They are ordinarily two or three thousand feet deep, falling at times in sheer, smooth-fronted cliffs, again in sweeping curves like the hull of a ship, again in rugged, V-shaped gorges, or with irregular, hilly flanks opening at last through gateways of low, rounded foot-hills out upon the horizontal plain of the San Joaquin and Sacramento.

Every cañon carries a river, derived from constant melting of the perpetual snow, which threads its way down the mountain—a feeble type of those vast ice-streams and torrents that formerly discharged the summit accumulation of ice and snow while carving the cañons out from solid rock. Nowhere on the continent of America is there more positive evidence of the cutting power of rapid streams than in these very cañons. Although much is due to this cause, the most impressive passages of the Sierra valleys are actual ruptures of the rock; either the engulfment of masses of great size, as Professor Whitney supposes in explanation of the peculiar form of the Yosemite, or a splitting asunder in yawning cracks. From the summits down half the distance to the plains, the cañons are also carved out in broad, round curves by glacial action. The summit-gorges themselves are altogether the result of frost and ice. Here, even yet, may be studied the mode of blocking out mountain peaks; the cracks riven by unequal contraction and expansion of the rock; the slow leverage of ice, the storm, the avalanche.

The western descent, facing a moisture-laden, aërial current from the Pacific, condenses on its higher portions a great amount of water, which has piled upon the summits in the form of snow, and is absorbed upon the upper plateau by an exuberant growth of forest. This prevalent wind, which during most undisturbed periods blows continuously from the ocean, strikes first upon the western slope of the Coast Range, and there discharges, both as fog and rain, a very great sum of moisture; but, being ever reinforced, it blows over their crest, and, hurrying eastward, strikes the Sierras at about four thousand feet above sea-level. Below this line the foothills are oppressed by an habitual dryness, which produces a rusty olive tone throughout nearly all the large conspicuous vegetation, scorches the red soil, and, during the long summer, overlays the whole region with a cloud of dust.

Dull and monotonous in color, there are, however, certain elements of picturesqueness in this lower zone. Its oak-clad hills wander out into the great, plain-like coast promontories, enclosing yellow or, in spring-time, green bays of prairie. The hill-forms are rounded, or stretch in long, longitudinal ridges, broken across by the river cañons. Above this zone of red earth, softly modelled undulations, and dull, grayish groves, with a chain of mining towns, dotted ranches and vineyards, rise the swelling middle heights of the Sierras, a broad, billowy plateau cut by sharp, sudden cañons, and sweeping up, with its dark, superb growth of coniferous forest to the feet of the summit-peaks.

For a breadth of forty miles, all along the chain, is spread this continuous belt of pines. From Walker’s Pass to Sitka one may ride through an unbroken forest, and will find its character and aspect vary constantly in strict accordance with the laws of altitude and moisture, each of the several species of coniferous trees taking its position with an almost mathematical precision. Where low gaps in the Coast Range give free access to the western wind, there the forest sweeps downward and encamps upon the foot-hills, and, continuing northward, it advances toward the coast, securing for itself over this whole distance about the same physical conditions; so that a tree which finds itself at home on the shore of Puget’s Sound, in the latitude of Middle California has climbed the Sierras to a height of six thousand feet, finding there its normal requirements of damp, cool air. As if to economize the whole surface of the Sierra, the forest is mainly made up of twelve species of coniferæ, each having its own definitely circumscribed limits of temperature, and yet being able successively to occupy the whole middle Sierra up to the foot of the perpetual snow. The average range in altitude of each species is about twenty-five hundred feet, so that you pass imperceptibly from the zone of one species into that of the next. Frequently three or four are commingled, their varied habit, characteristic foliage, and richly colored trunks uniting to make the most stately of forests.

In the centre of the coniferous belt is assembled the most remarkable family of trees. Those which approach the perpetual snow are imperfect, gnarled, storm-bent; full of character and suggestion, but lacking the symmetry, the rich, living green, and the great size of their lower neighbors. In the other extreme of the pine-belt, growing side by side with foothill oaks, is an equally imperfect species, which, although attaining a very great size, still has the air of an abnormal tree. The conditions of drought on the one hand, and rigorous storms on the other, injure and blast alike, while the more verdant centre, furnishing the finest conditions, produces a forest whose profusion and grandeur fill the traveller with the liveliest admiration.

Toward the south the growth of the forest is more open and grove-like, the individual trees becoming proportionally larger and reaching their highest development. Northward its density increases, to the injury of individual pines, until the branches finally interlock, and at last on the shores of British Columbia the trunks are so densely assembled that a dead tree is held in its upright position by the arms of its fellows.

At the one extremity are magnificent purple shafts ornamented with an exquisitely delicate drapery of pale golden and dark blue green; at the other the slender spars stand crowded together like the fringe of masts girdling a prosperous port. The one is a great, continuous grove, on whose sunny openings are innumerable brilliant parterres; the other is a dismal thicket, a sort of gigantic canebrake, void of beauty, dark, impenetrable, save by the avenues of streams, where one may float for days between sombre walls of forest. From one to the other of these extremes is an imperceptible transition; only in the passage of hundreds of miles does the forest seem to thicken northward, or the majesty of the single trees appear to be impaired by their struggle for room.

Near the centre is the perfection of forest. At the south are the finest specimen trees, at the north the densest accumulations of timber. In riding throughout this whole region and watching the same species from the glorious ideal life of the south gradually dwarfed toward the north, until it becomes a mere wand; or in climbing from the scattered, drought-scourged pines of the foot-hills up through the zone of finest vegetation to those summit crags, where, struggling against the power of tempest and frost, only a few of the bravest trees succeed in clinging to the rocks and to life,—one sees with novel effect the inexorable sway which climatic conditions hold over the kingdom of trees.

Looking down from the summit, the forest is a closely woven vesture, which has fallen over the body of the range, clinging closely to its form, sinking into the deep cañons, covering the hill-tops with even velvety folds, and only lost here and there where a bold mass of rock gives it no foothold, or where around the margin of the mountain lakes bits of alpine meadow lie open to the sun.

Along its upper limit the forest zone grows thin and irregular; black shafts of alpine pines and firs clustering on sheltered slopes, or climbing in disordered processions up broken and rocky faces. Higher, the last gnarled forms are passed, and beyond stretches the rank of silent, white peaks, a region of rock and ice lifted above the limit of life.

In the north, domes and cones of volcanic formation are the summit, but for about three hundred miles in the south it is a succession of sharp granite aiguilles and crags. Prevalent among the granitic forms are singularly perfect conoidal domes, whose symmetrical figures, were it not for their immense size, would impress one as having an artificial finish.

The alpine gorges are usually wide and open, leading into amphitheatres, whose walls are either rock or drifts of never-melting snow. The sculpture of the summit is very evidently glacial. Beside the ordinary phenomena of polished rocks and moraines, the larger general forms are clearly the work of frost and ice; and, although this ice-period is only feebly represented to-day, yet the frequent avalanches of winter and freshly scored mountain flanks are constant suggestions of the past.

Strikingly contrasted are the two countries bordering the Sierra on either side. Along the western base is the plain of California, an elliptical basin four hundred and fifty miles long by sixty-five broad; level, fertile, well watered, half tropically warmed; checkered with farms of grain, ranches of cattle, orchard and vineyard, and homes of commonplace opulence, towns of bustling thrift. Rivers flow over it, bordered by lines of oaks which seem characterless or gone to sleep, when compared with the vitality, the spring, and attitude of the same species higher up on the foot-hills. It is a region of great industrial future within a narrow range, but quite without charms for the student of science. It has a certain impressive breadth when seen from some overlooking eminence, or when in early spring its brilliant carpet of flowers lies as a foreground over which the dark pine-land and white crest of the Sierra loom indistinctly.

From the Mexican frontier up into Oregon, a strip of actual desert lies under the east slope of the great chain, and stretches eastward sometimes as far as five hundred miles, varied by successions of bare, white ground, effervescing under the hot sun with alkaline salts, plains covered by the low, ashy-hued sage-plant, high, barren, rocky ranges, which are folds of metamorphic rocks, and piled-up lavas of bright red or yellow colors; all over-arched by a sky which is at one time of a hot, metallic brilliancy, and again the tenderest of evanescent purple or pearl.

Utterly opposed are the two aspects of the Sierras from these east and west approaches. I remember how stern and strong the chain looked to me when I first saw it from the Colorado desert.

It was in early May, 1866. My companion, Mr. James Terry Gardiner, and I got into the saddle on the bank of the Colorado River, and headed westward over the road from La Paz to San Bernardino. My mount was a tough, magnanimous sort of mule, who at all times did his very best; that of my friend, an animal still hardier, but altogether wanting in moral attributes. He developed a singular antipathy for my mule, and utterly refused to march within a quarter of a mile of me; so that over a wearying route of three hundred miles we were obliged to travel just beyond the reach of a shout. Hour after hour, plodding along at a dog-trot, we pursued our solitary way without the spice of companionship, and altogether deprived of the melodramatic satisfaction of loneliness.

Far ahead of us a white line traced across the barren plain marked our road. It seemed to lead to nowhere, except onward over more and more arid reaches of desert. Rolling hills of crude color and low, gloomy contour rose above the general level. Here and there the eye was arrested by a towering crag, or an elevated, rocky mountain group, whose naked sides sank down into the desert, unrelieved by the shade of a solitary tree. The whole aspect of nature was dull in color, and gloomy with an all-pervading silence of death. Although the summer had not fairly opened, a torrid sun beat down with cruel severity, blinding the eye with its brilliance, and inducing a painful slow fever. The very plants, scorched to a crisp, were ready, at the first blast of a sirocco, to be whirled away and ground to dust. Certain bare zones lay swept clean of the last dry stems across our path, marking the track of whirlwinds. Water was only found at intervals of sixty or seventy miles, and, when reached, was more of an aggravation than a pleasure,—bitter, turbid, and scarce; we rode for it all day, and berated it all night, only to leave it at sunrise with a secret fear that we might fare worse next time.

About noon on the third day of our march, having reached the borders of the Chabazon Valley, we emerged from a rough, rocky gateway in the mountains, and I paused while my companion made up his quarter of a mile, that we might hold council and determine our course, for the water question was becoming serious; springs which looked cool and seductive on our maps proving to be dried up and obsolete upon the ground.

A fresh mule and a lively man get along, to be sure, well enough; but after all it is at best with perfunctory tolerance on both sides, a sort of diplomatic interchange of argument, the man suggesting with bridle, or mildly admonishing with spurs; but when the high contracting parties get tired, the entente cordiale goes to pieces, and actual hostilities open, in which I never knew a man to come out the better.

I had noticed a shambling uncertainty during the last half-hour’s trot, and those invariable indicators, “John’s” long, furry ears, either lopped diagonally down on one side, or lay back with ill omen upon his neck.

Gardiner reached me in a few minutes, and we dismounted to rest the tired mules, and to scan the landscape before us. We were on the margin of a great basin whose gently shelving rim sank from our feet to a perfectly level plain, which stretched southward as far as the eye could reach, bounded by a dim, level horizon, like the sea, but walled in to the west, at a distance of about forty miles, by the high, frowning wall of the Sierras. This plain was a level floor, as white as marble, and into it the rocky spurs from our own mountain range descended like promontories into the sea. Wide, deeply indented white bays wound in and out among the foot-hills, and, traced upon the barren slopes of this rocky coast, was marked, at a considerable elevation above the plain, the shore-line of an ancient sea,—a white stain defining its former margin as clearly as if the water had but just receded. On the dim, distant base of the Sierras the same primeval beach could be seen. This water-mark, the level, white valley, and the utter absence upon its surface of any vegetation, gave a strange and weird aspect to the country, as if a vast tide had but just ebbed, and the brilliant, scorching sun had hurriedly dried up its last traces of moisture.

In the indistinct glare of the southern horizon, it needed but slight aid from the imagination to see a lifting and tumbling of billows, as if the old tide were coming; but they were only shudderings of heat. As we sat there surveying this unusual scene, the white expanse became suddenly transformed into a placid blue sea, along whose rippling shores were the white blocks of roofs, groups of spire-crowned villages, and cool stretches of green grove. A soft, vapory atmosphere hung over this sea; shadows, purple and blue, floated slowly across it, producing the most enchanting effect of light and color. The dreamy richness of the tropics, the serene sapphire sky of the desert, and the cool, purple distance of mountains, were grouped as by miracle. It was as if Nature were about to repay us an hundred-fold for the lie she had given the topographers and their maps.

In a moment the illusion vanished. It was gone, leaving the white desert unrelieved by a shadow; a blaze of white light falling full on the plain; the sun-struck air reeling in whirlwind columns, white with the dust of the desert, up, up, and vanishing into the sky. Waves of heat rolled like billows across the valley, the old shores became indistinct, the whole lowland unreal. Shades of misty blue crossed over it and disappeared. Lakes with ragged shores gleamed out, reflecting the sky, and in a moment disappeared.

The bewildering effect of this natural magic, and perhaps the feverish thirst, produced the impression of a dream, which might have taken fatal possession of us but for the importunate braying of Gardiner’s mule, whose piteous discords (for he made three noises at once) banished all hallucination, and brought us gently back from the mysterious spectacle to the practical question of water. We had but one canteen of that precious elixir left; the elixir in this case being composed of one part pure water, one part sand, one part alum, one part saleratus, with liberal traces of Colorado mud, representing a very disgusting taste, and very great range of geological formations.

To search for the mountain springs laid down upon our maps was probably to find them dry, and afforded us little more inducement than to chase the mirages. The only well-known water was at an oasis somewhere on the margin of the Chabazon, and should, if the information was correct, have been in sight from our resting-place.

We eagerly scanned the distance, but were unable, among the phantom lakes and the ever-changing illusions of the desert, to fix upon any probable point. Indian trails led out in all directions, and our only clew to the right path was far in the northwest, where, looming against the sky, stood two conspicuous mountain piles lifted above the general wall of the Sierra, their bases rooted in the desert, and their precipitous fronts rising boldly on each side of an open gateway. The two summits, high above the magical stratum of desert air, were sharply defined and singularly distinct in all the details of rock-form and snow-field. From their position we knew them to be walls of the San Gorgonio Pass, and through this gateway lay our road.

After brief deliberation we chose what seemed to be the most beaten road leading in that direction, and I mounted my mule and started, leaving my friend patiently seated in his saddle waiting for the afflatus of his mule to take effect. Thus we rode down into the desert, and hour after hour travelled silently on, straining our eyes forward to a spot of green which we hoped might mark our oasis.

So incredulous had I become that I prided myself upon having penetrated the flimsy disguise of an unusually deceptive mirage, and philosophized, to a considerable extent, upon the superiority of my reason over the instinct of the mule, whose quickened pace and nervous manner showed him to be, as I thought, a dupe.

Whenever there comes to be a clearly defined mental issue between man and mule, the stubbornness of the latter is the expression of an adamantine moral resolve, founded in eternal right. The man is invariably wrong. Thus on this occasion, as at a thousand other times, I was obliged to own up worsted, and I drummed for a while with Spanish spurs upon the ribs of my conqueror, that being my habitual mode of covering my retreat.

It was the oasis, and not the mirage. John lifted up his voice, now many days hushed, and gave out spasmodic gusts of barytone, which were as dry and harsh as if he had drunk mirages only.

The heart of Gardiner’s mule relented. Of his own accord he galloped up to my side, and, for the first time together, we rode forward to the margin of the oasis. Under the palms we hastily threw off our saddles and allowed the parched brutes to drink their fill. We lay down in the grass, drank, bathed our faces, and played in the water like children. We picketed our mules knee-deep in the freshest of grass, and, unpacking our saddle-bags, sent up a smoke to heaven, and achieved that most precious solace of the desert traveller, a pot of tea.

By and by we plunged into the pool, which was perhaps thirty feet long, and deep enough to give us a pleasant swim. The water being almost blood-warm, we absorbed it in every pore, dilated like sponges, and came out refreshed.

It is well worth having one’s juices broiled out by a desert sun just to experience the renewal of life from a mild parboil. That About’s “Man with the Broken Ear,” under this same aqueous renovation, was ready to fall in love with his granddaughter, no longer appears to me odd. Our oasis spread out its disc of delicate green, sharply defined upon the enamel-like desert which stretched away for leagues, simple, unbroken, pathetic. Near the eastern edge of this garden, whose whole surface covered hardly more than an acre, rose two palms, interlocking their cool, dark foliage over the pool of pure water. A low, deserted cabin with wide, overhanging, flat roof, which had long ago been thatched with palm-leaves, stood close by the trees.

With its isolation, its strange, warm fountain, its charming vegetation varied with grasses, trailing water-plants, bright parterres in which were minute flowers of turquoise blue, pale gold, mauve, and rose, and its two graceful palms, this oasis evoked a strange sentiment. I have never felt such a sense of absolute and remote seclusion; the hot, trackless plain and distant groups of mountain shut it away from all the world. Its humid and fragrant air hung over us in delicious contrast with the oven-breath through which we had ridden. Weary little birds alighted, panting, and drank and drank again, without showing the least fear of us. Wild doves fluttering down bathed in the pool and fed about among our mules.

After straining over one hundred and fifty miles of silent desert, hearing no sound but the shoes of our mules grating upon hot sand, after the white glare, and that fever-thirst which comes from drinking alkali-water, it was a deep pleasure to lie under the palms and look up at their slow-moving green fans, and hear in those shaded recesses the mild, sweet twittering of our traveller-friends, the birds, who stayed, like ourselves, overcome with the languor of perfect repose.

Declining rapidly toward the west, the sun warned us to renew our journey. Several hours’ rest and frequent deep draughts of water, added to the feast of succulent grass, filled out and rejuvenated our saddle-animals. John was far less an anatomical specimen than when I unsaddled him, and Gardiner’s mule came up to be bridled with so mollified a demeanor that it occurred to us as just possible he might forget his trick of lagging behind; but with the old tenacity of purpose he planted his forefeet, and waited till I was well out on the desert.

As I rode I watched the western prospect. Completely bounding the basin in that direction rose the gigantic wall of the Sierra, its serrated line sharply profiled against the evening sky. This dark barrier became more and more shadowed, so that the old shore line and the lowland, where mountain and plain joined, were lost. The desert melted in the distance into the shadowed masses of the Sierra, which, looming higher and higher, seemed to rise as the sun went down. Scattered snow-fields shone along its crest; each peak and notch, every column of rock and detail of outline, were black and sharp.

On either side of the San Gorgonio stood its two guardian peaks, San Bernardino and San Jacinto, capped with rosy snow, and the pass itself, warm with western light, opened hopefully before us. For a moment the sun rested upon the Sierra crest, and then, slowly sinking, suffered eclipse by its ragged, black profile. Through the slow hours of darkening twilight a strange, ashy gloom overspread the desert. The forms of the distant mountain chains behind us, and the old shore line upon the Sierra base, stared at us with a strange, weird distinctness. At last all was gray and vague, except the black silhouette of the Sierras cut upon a band of golden heaven.

We at length reached their foot and, turning northward, rode parallel with the base toward the San Gorgonio. In the moonless night huge, rocky buttresses of the range loomed before us, their feet plunging into the pale desert floor. High upon their fronts, perhaps five hundred feet above us, was dimly traceable the white line of ancient shore. Over drifted hills of sand and hard alkaline clay we rode along the bottom of that primitive sea. Between the spurs deep mountain alcoves, stretching back into the heart of the range, opened grand and shadowy; far at their head, over crests of ridge and peak, loomed the planet Jupiter.

A long, wearisome ride of forty hours brought us to the open San Gorgonio Pass. Already scattered beds of flowers tinted the austere face of the desert; tufts of pale grass grew about the stones, and tall stems of yucca bore up their magnificent bunches of bluish flowers. Upon all the heights overhanging the road gnarled, struggling cedars grasp the rock, and stretch themselves with frantic effort to catch a breath of the fresh Pacific vapor. It is instructive to observe the difference between those which lean out into the vitalizing wind of the pass, and the fated few whose position exposes them to the dry air of the desert. Vigor, soundness, nerve to stand on the edge of sheer walls, flexibility, sap, fulness of green foliage, are in the one; a shroud of dull olive-leaves scantily cover the thin, straggling, bayonet-like boughs of the others; they are rigid, shrunken, split to the heart, pitiful. We were glad to forget them as we turned a last buttress and ascended the gentle acclivity of the pass.

Before us opened a broad gateway six or seven miles from wall to wall, in which a mere swell of green land rises to divide the desert and Pacific slopes. Flanking the pass along its northern side stands Mount San Bernardino, its granite framework crowded up above the beds of more recent rock about its base, bearing aloft tattered fragments of pine forest, the summit piercing through a marbling of perpetual snow, up to the height of ten thousand feet. Fronting it on the opposite wall rises its compeer, San Jacinto, a dark crag of lava, whose flanks are cracked, riven, and waterworn into innumerable ravines, each catching a share of the drainage from the snow-cap, and glistening with a hundred small waterfalls.

Numerous brooks unite to form two rivers, one running down the green slope among ranches and gardens into the blooming valley of San Bernardino, the other pouring eastward, shrinking as it flows out upon the hot sands, till, in a few miles, the unslakable desert has drunk it dry.

There are but few points in America where such extremes of physical condition meet. What contrasts, what opposed sentiments, the two views awakened! Spread out below us lay the desert, stark and glaring, its rigid hill-chains lying in disordered grouping, in attitudes of the dead. The bare hills are cut out with sharp gorges, and over their stone skeletons scanty earth clings in folds, like shrunken flesh; they are emaciated corses of once noble ranges now lifeless, outstretched as in a long sleep. Ghastly colors define them from the ashen plain in which their feet are buried. Far in the south were a procession of whirlwind columns slowly moving across the desert in spectral dimness. A white light beat down, dispelling the last trace of shadow, and above hung the burnished shield of hard, pitiless sky.

Sinking to the west from our feet the gentle golden-green glacis sloped away, flanked by rolling hills covered with a fresh, vernal carpet of grass, and relieved by scattered groves of dark oak-trees. Upon the distant valley were checkered fields of grass and grain just tinged with the first ripening yellow. The bounding Coast Ranges lay in the cool shadow of a bank of mist which drifted in from the Pacific, covering their heights. Flocks of bright clouds floated across the sky, whose blue was palpitating with light, and seemed to rise with infinite perspective. Tranquillity, abundance, the slow, beautiful unfolding of plant life, dark, shadowed spots to rest our tired eyes upon, the shade of giant oaks to lie down under, while listening to brooks, contralto larks, and the soft, distant lowing of cattle.

I have given the outlines of aspect along our ride across the Chabazon, omitting many amusing incidents and some genre pictures of rare interest among the Kaweah Indians, as I wished simply to illustrate the relations of the Sierra with the country bordering its east base,—the barrier looming above a desert.

In Nevada and California, farther north, this wall rises more grandly, but its face rests upon a modified form of desert plains of less extent than the Colorado, and usually covered with sage-plants and other brushy compositæ of equally pitiful appearance. Large lakes of complicated saline waters are dotted under the Sierra shadow, the ancient terraces built upon foot-hill and outlying volcanic ranges indicating their former expansion into inland seas; and farther north still, where plains extend east of Mount Shasta, level sheets of lava form the country, and open, black, rocky channels, for the numerous branches of the Sacramento and Klamath.

Approaching the Sierras anywhere from the west, one will perceive a totally different topographical and climatic condition. From the Coast Range peaks especially one obtains an extended and impressive prospect. I had fallen behind the party one May evening of our march across Pacheco’s Pass, partly because some wind-bent oaks trailing almost horizontally over the wild-oat surface of the hills, and marking, as a living record, the prevalent west wind, had arrested me and called out compass and note-book; and because there had fallen to my lot an incorrigibly deliberate mustang to whom I had abandoned myself to be carried along at his own pace, comforted withal that I should get in too late to have any hand in the cooking of supper. We reached the crest, the mustang coming to a conspicuous and unwarrantable halt; I yielded, however, and sat still in the saddle, looking out to the east.

Brown foot-hills, purple over their lower slopes with “fil-a-ree” blossoms, descended steeply to the plain of California, a great, inland, prairie sea, extending for five hundred miles, mountain-locked, between the Sierras and coast hills, and now a broad, arabesque surface of colors. Miles of orange-colored flowers, cloudings of green and white, reaches of violet which looked like the shadow of a passing cloud, wandering in natural patterns over and through each other, sunny and intense along near our range, fading in the distance into pale, bluish-pearl tones, and divided by long, dimly seen rivers, whose margins were edged by belts of bright emerald green. Beyond rose three hundred miles of Sierra half lost in light and cloud and mist, the summit in places sharply seen against a pale, beryl sky, and again buried in warm, rolling clouds. It was a mass of strong light, soft, fathomless shadows, and dark regions of forest. However, the three belts upon its front were tolerably clear. Dusky foot-hills rose over the plain with a coppery gold tone, suggesting the line of mining towns planted in its rusty ravines,—a suggestion I was glad to repel, and look higher into that cool, solemn realm where the pines stand, green-roofed, in infinite colonnade. Lifted above the bustling industry of the plains and the melodramatic mining theatre of the foot-hills, it has a grand, silent life of its own, refreshing to contemplate even from a hundred miles away.

While I looked the sun descended; shadows climbed the Sierras, casting a gloom over foot-hill and pine, until at last only the snow summits, reflecting the evening light, glowed like red lamps along the mountain wall for hundreds of miles. The rest of the Sierra became invisible. The snow burned for a moment in the violet sky, and at last went out.

II
THROUGH THE FOREST
1864

Visalia is the name of a small town embowered in oaks upon the Tulare Plain in Middle California, where we made our camp one May evening of 1864.

Professor Whitney, our chief, the State Geologist, had sent us out for a summer’s campaign in the High Sierras, under the lead of Professor William H. Brewer, who was more sceptical than I as to the result of the mission.

Several times during the previous winter Mr. Hoffman and I, while on duty at the Mariposa goldmines, had climbed to the top of Mount Bullion, and gained, in those clear January days, a distinct view of the High Sierra, ranging from the Mount Lyell group many miles south to a vast pile of white peaks, which, from our estimate, should lie near the heads of the King’s and Kaweah rivers. Of their great height I was fully persuaded; and Professor Whitney, on the strength of these few observations, commissioned us to explore and survey the new Alps.

We numbered five in camp:—Professor Brewer; Mr. Charles F. Hoffman, chief topographer; Mr. James T. Gardiner, assistant surveyor; myself, assistant geologist; and our man-of-all-work, to whom science already owes its debts.

When we got together our outfit of mules and equipments of all kinds, Brewer was going to re-engage, as general aid, a certain Dane, Jan Hoesch, who, besides being a faultless mule-packer, was a rapid and successful financier, having twice, when the field-purse was low and remittances delayed, enriched us by what he called “dealing bottom stock” in his little evening games with the honest miners. Not ungrateful for that, I, however, detested the fellow with great cordiality.

“If I don’t take him, will you be responsible for packing mules and for daily bread?” said Brewer to me, the morning of our departure from Oakland. “I will.” “Then we’ll take your man Cotter; only, when the pack-saddles roll under the mules’ bellies, I shall light my pipe and go botanizing. Sabe?”

So my friend, Richard Cotter, came into the service, and the accomplished but filthy Jan opened a poker and rum shop on one of the San Francisco wharves, where he still mixes drinks and puts up jobs of “bottom stock.” Secretly I longed for him as we came down the Pacheco Pass, the packs having loosened with provoking frequency. The animals of our small exploring party were upon a footing of easy social equality with us. All were excellent except mine. The choice of Hobson (whom I take to have been the youngest member of some company) falling naturally to me, I came to be possessed of the only hopeless animal in the band. Old Slum, a dignified roan mustang of a certain age, with the decorum of years and a conspicuous economy of force retained not a few of the affectations of youth, such as snorting theatrically and shying, though with absolute safety to the rider, Professor Brewer. Hoffman’s mount was a young half-breed, full of fire and gentleness. The mare Bess, my friend Gardiner’s pet, was a light-bay creature, as full of spring and perception as her sex and species may be. A rare mule, Cate, carried Cotter. Nell and Jim, two old geological mules, branded with Mexican hieroglyphics from head to tail, were bearers of the loads.

My Buckskin was incorrigibly bad. To begin with, his anatomy was desultory and incoherent, the maximum of physical effort bringing about a slow, shambling gait quite unendurable. He was further cursed with a brain wanting the elements of logic, as evinced by such non sequiturs as shying insanely at wisps of hay, and stampeding beyond control when I tried to tie him to a load of grain. My sole amusement with Buckskin grew out of a psychological peculiarity of his, namely, the unusual slowness with which waves of sensation were propelled inward toward the brain from remote parts of his periphery. A dig of the spurs administered in the flank passed unnoticed for a period of time varying from twelve to thirteen seconds, till the protoplasm of the brain received the percussive wave; then, with a suddenness which I never wholly got over, he would dash into a trot, nearly tripping himself up with his own astonishment.

A stroke of good fortune completed our outfit and my happiness by bringing to Visalia a Spaniard who was under some manner of financial cloud. His horse was offered for sale, and quickly bought for me by Professor Brewer. We named him Kaweah, after the river and its Indian tribe. He was young, strong, fleet, elegant, a pattern of fine modelling in every part of his bay body and fine black legs; every way good, only fearfully wild, with a blaze of quick electric light in his dark eye.

Shortly after sunrise one fresh morning we made a point of putting the packs on very securely, and, getting into our saddles, rode out toward the Sierras.

The group of farms surrounding Visalia is gathered within a belt through which several natural, and many more artificial, channels of the Kaweah flow. Groves of large, dark-foliaged oaks follow this irrigated zone; the roads, nearly always in shadow, are flanked by small ranch-houses, fenced in with rank jungles of weeds and rows of decrepit pickets.

There is about these fresh ruins, these specimens of modern decay, an air of social decomposition not pleasant to perceive. Freshly built houses, still untinted by time, left in rickety disorder, half-finished windows, gates broken down or unhinged, and a kind of sullen neglect staring everywhere. What more can I say of the people than that they are chiefly immigrants who subsist upon pork?

Rare exceptions of comfort and thrift shine out sometimes, with neat dooryards, well-repaired dwellings, and civilized-looking children. In these I never saw the mother of the family sitting cross-legged, smoking a corncob pipe, nor the father loafing about with a fiddle or shot-gun.

Our backs were now turned to this farm-belt, the road leading us out upon the open plain in our first full sight of the Sierras.

Grand and cool swelled up the forest; sharp and rugged rose the wave of white peaks, their vast fields of snow rolling over the summit in broad, shining masses.

Sunshine, exuberant vegetation, brilliant plant life, occupied our attention hour after hour until the middle of the second day. At last, after climbing a long, weary ascent, we rode out of the dazzling light of the foot-hills into a region of dense woodland, the road winding through avenues of pines so tall that the late evening light only came down to us in scattered rays. Under the deep shade of these trees we found an air pure and gratefully cool. Passing from the glare of the open country into the dusky forest, one seems to enter a door and ride into a vast covered hall. The whole sensation is of being roofed and enclosed. You are never tired of gazing down long vistas, where, in stately groups, stand tall shafts of pine. Columns they are, each with its own characteristic tinting and finish, yet all standing together with the air of relationship and harmony. Feathery branches, trimmed with living green, wave through the upper air, opening broken glimpses of the far blue, and catching on their polished surfaces reflections of the sun. Broad streams of light pour in, gilding purple trunks and falling in bright pathways along an undulating floor. Here and there are wide, open spaces, around which the trees group themselves in majestic ranks.

Our eyes often ranged upward, the long shafts leading the vision up to green, lighted spires, and on to the clouds. All that is dark and cool and grave in color, the beauty of blue umbrageous distance, all the sudden brilliance of strong local lights tinted upon green boughs or red and fluted shafts, surround us in ever-changing combination as we ride along these winding roadways of the Sierra.

We had marched a few hours over high, rolling, wooded ridges, when in the late afternoon we reached the brow of an eminence and began to descend. Looking over the tops of the trees beneath us, we saw a mountain basin fifteen hundred feet deep surrounded by a rim of pine-covered hills. An even, unbroken wood covered these sweeping slopes down to the very bottom, and in the midst, open to the sun, lay a circular green meadow, about a mile in diameter.

As we descended, side wood-tracks, marked by the deep ruts of timber wagons, joined our road on either side, and in the course of an hour we reached the basin and saw the distant roofs of Thomas’s Saw-Mill Ranch. We crossed the level disc of meadow, fording a clear, cold mountain stream, flowing, as the best brooks do, over clean, white granite sand, and near the northern margin of the valley, upon a slight eminence, in the edge of a magnificent forest, pitched our camp.

The hills to the westward already cast down a sombre shadow, which fell over the eastern hills and across the meadow, dividing the basin half in golden and half in azure green. The tall young grass was living with purple and white flowers. This exquisite carpet sweeps up over the bases of the hills in green undulations, and strays far into the forest in irregular fields. A little brooklet passed close by our camp and flowed down the smooth green glacis which led from our little eminence to the meadow. Above us towered pines two hundred and fifty feet high, their straight, fluted trunks smooth and without a branch for a hundred feet. Above that, and on to the very tops, the green branches stretched out and interwove, until they spread a broad, leafy canopy from column to column.

Professor Brewer determined to make this camp a home for the week during which we were to explore and study all about the neighborhood. We were on a great granite spur, sixty miles from east to west by twenty miles wide, which lies between the Kaweah and King’s River cañons. Rising in bold sweeps from the plain, this ridge joins the Sierra summit in the midst of a high group. Experience had taught us that the cañons are impassable by animals for any great distance; so the plan of campaign was to find a way up over the rocky crest of the spur as far as mules could go.

In the little excursions from this camp, which were made usually on horseback, we became acquainted with the forest, and got a good knowledge of the topography of a considerable region. On the heights above King’s Cañon are some singularly fine assemblies of trees. Cotter and I had ridden all one morning northeast from camp under the shadowy roof of forest, catching but occasional glimpses out over the plateau, until at last we emerged upon the bare surface of a ridge of granite, and came to the brink of a sharp precipice. Rocky crags lifted just east of us. The hour devoted to climbing them proved well spent.

A single little family of alpine firs growing in a niche in the granite surface, and partly sheltered by a rock, made the only shadow, and just shielded us from the intense light as we lay down by their roots. North and south, as far as the eye could reach, heaved the broad, green waves of plateau, swelling and merging through endless modulation of slope and form.

Conspicuous upon the horizon, about due east of us, was a tall, pyramidal mass of granite, trimmed with buttresses which radiated down from its crest, each one ornamented with fantastic spires of rock. Between the buttresses lay stripes of snow, banding the pale granite peak from crown to base. Upon the north side it fell off, grandly precipitous, into the deep upper cañon of King’s River. This gorge, after uniting a number of immense rocky amphitheatres, is carved deeply into the granite two and three thousand feet. In a slightly curved line from the summit it cuts westward through the plateau, its walls, for the most part, descending in sharp, bare slopes, or lines of ragged débris, the resting-place of processions of pines. We ourselves were upon the brink of the south wall; three thousand feet below us lay the valley, a narrow, winding ribbon of green, in which, here and there, gleamed still reaches of the river. Wherever the bottom widened to a quarter or half a mile, green meadows and extensive groves occupied the level region. Upon every niche and crevice of the walls, up and down sweeping curves of easier descent, were grouped black companies of trees.

The behavior of the forest is observed most interestingly from these elevated points above the general face of the table-land. All over the gentle undulations of the more level country sweeps an unbroken covering of trees. Reaching the edge of the cañon precipices, they stand out in bold groups upon the brink, and climb all over the more ragged and broken surfaces of granite. Only the most smooth and abrupt precipices are bare. Here and there a little shelf of a foot or two in width, cracked into the face of the bluff, gives foothold to a family of pines, who twist their roots into its crevices and thrive. With no soil from which the roots may drink up moisture and absorb the slowly dissolved mineral particles, they live by breathing alone, moist vapors from the river below and the elements of the atmosphere affording them the substance of life.

I believe no one can study from an elevated lookout the length and depth of one of these great Sierra cañons without asking himself some profound geological questions. Your eyes range along one or the other wall. The average descent is immensely steep. Here and there side ravines break down the rim in deep, lateral gorges. Again, the wall advances in sharp, salient precipices, rising two or three thousand feet, sheer and naked, with all the air of a recent fracture. At times the two walls approach each other, standing in perpendicular gateways. Toward the summits the cañon grows, perhaps, a little broader, and more and more prominent lateral ravines open into it, until at last it receives the snow drainage of the summit, which descends through broad, rounded amphitheatres, separated from each other by sharp, castellated snow-clad ridges.

Looking down the course of the river, vertical precipices are seen to be less and less frequent, the walls inclining to each other more and more gently, until they roll out on the north and south in round, wooded ridges. Solid, massive granite forms the material throughout its whole length. If you study the topography upon the plateaus above one of these cañons, you will see that the ridges upon one side are reproduced in the other, as if the outlines of wavy table-land topography had been determined before the great cañon was made.

It is not easy to propose a solution for this peculiar structure. I think, however, it is safe to say that actual rending asunder of the mountain mass determined the main outlines. Upon no other theory can we account for those blank walls. Where, in the upper course of the cañon, they descend in a smooth, ship-like curve, and the rocks bear upon their curved sides the markings and striations of glaciers, it is easy to see that those terrible ice-engines gradually modified their form; and toward the foot-hills the forces of aqueous erosion are clearly indicated in the rounded forms and broad undulations of the two banks.

Looking back from our isolated crag in the direction of our morning’s ride, we saw the green hills break down into the basin of Thomas’s Mill, but the disc of meadow lay too deep to be seen. Forests, dense and unbroken, grew to the base of our cliff. The southern sunlight reflected from its polished foliage gave to this whole sea of spiry tops a peculiar golden green, through which we looked down among giant red and purple trunks upon beds of bright mountain flowers. As the afternoon lengthened, the summit rank of peaks glowed warmer and warmer under inclined rays. The granite flushed with rosy brightness between the fields of glittering golden snow. A mild, pearly haziness came gradually to obscure the ordinary cold-blue sky, and, settling into cañon depths, and among the vast, open corridors of the summit, veiled the savage sharpness of their details.

I lay several hours sketching the outlines of the summit, studying out the systems of alpine drainage, and getting acquainted with the long chain of peaks, that I might afterward know them from other points of view. I became convinced from the great apparent elevation and the wide fields of snow that we had not formerly deceived ourselves as to their great height. Warned at length by the deepening shadow in the King’s Cañon, by the heightened glow suffusing the peaks, and the deep purple tone of the level expanse of forest, all forerunners of twilight, we quitted our eyrie, crept carefully down over half-balanced blocks of débris to the horses, and, mounting, were soon headed homeward, in what seemed, by contrast, to be almost a nocturnal darkness.

Wherever the ground opened level before us we gave our horses the rein, and went at a free gallop through the forest; the animals realized that they were going home, and pressed forward with the greatest spirit. A good-sized log across our route seemed to be an object of special amusement to Kaweah, who seized the bits in his teeth, and, dancing up, crouched, and cleared it with a mighty bound, in a manner that was indeed inspiring, yet left one with the impression that once was enough of that sort of thing. Fearing some manner of hostilities with him, I did my very best to quiet Kaweah, and by the end of an hour had gotten him down to a sensible, serious walk. I noticed that he insisted upon following his tracks of the morning’s march, and was not contented unless I let him go on the old side of every tree. Thus I became so thoroughly convinced of his faculty to follow the morning’s trail that I yielded all control of him, giving myself up to the enjoyment of the dimly lighted wood.

As the sun at last set, the shadow deepened into an impressive gloom; mighty trunks, rising into that dark region of interlocking boughs, only vaguely defined themselves against the twilight sky. We could no longer see our tracks, and the confused rolling topography looked alike whichever way we turned. Kaweah strode on in his confident way, and I was at last confirmed as to his sagacity by passing one after another the objects we had noted in the morning. Thus for a couple of hours we rode in the darkness. At length the rising moon poured down through broken tents of foliage its uncertain silvery light, which had the effect of deepening all the shadows, and lighting up in the strangest manner little local points. Here and there ahead of us the lighted trees rose like pillars of an ancient temple. The forest, which an hour before overpowered us with a sense of its dark enclosure, opened on in distant avenues as far as the eye could reach. As we rode through denser or more open passages the moon sailed into clear, violet sky, or was obscured again by the sharply traced crests of the pines. Ravines, dark and unfathomable, yawned before us, their flanks half in shadow, half in weird, uncertain light. Blocks of white granite gleamed here and there in contrast with the general depth of shade. At last, descending a hill, there shone before us a red light; the horses plunged forward at a gallop, and in a moment we were in camp. After this ride we supped, relishing our mountain fare, and then lay down upon blankets before a camp-fire for the mountaineer’s short evening. One keeps awake under stimulus of the sparkling, frosty air for awhile, and then turns in for the night, sleeping till daybreak with a light, sound sleep.

The charm of this forest life, in spite of its scientific interest, and the constant succession of exquisite, highly colored scenes, would string one’s feelings up to a high though monotonous key, were it not for the half-droll, half-pathetic genre picturesqueness which the Digger Indians introduce. Upon every stream and on all the finer camp-grounds throughout the whole forest are found these families of Indians who migrate up here during the hot weather, fishing, hunting, gathering pine-nuts, and lying off with that peculiar, bummerish ease, which, associated with natural mock dignity, throws about them a singular, and not infrequently deep interest.

I never forget certain bright June sunrises when I have seen the Indian paterfamilias gather together his little tribe and address them in the heroic style concerning the vital importance of the grasshopper crop, and the reverence due to the Giver of manzanita berries. You come upon them as you travel the trails, proud-stepping “braves” leading the way, unhampered and free, followed by troops of submissive squaws loaded down with immense packages and baskets. Their death and burial customs, too, have elements of weird, romantic interest.

I remember one morning when I was awakened before dawn by wild, unearthly shrieks ringing through the forest and coming back again in plaintive echoes from the hills all about. Beyond description wild, these wails of violent grief followed each other with regular cadence, dying away in long, despairing sobs. With a marvellous regularity they recurred, never varying the simple refrain. My curiosity was aroused so far as to get me out of my blankets, and, after a hurried bath in an icy stream, I joined my mountaineer acquaintance, Jerry, who was en route to the rancheria, “to see,” as he expressed it, “them tar-heads howl.” It seems my friend Buck, the Indian chief, had the night before lost his wife, Sally the Old, and the shouts came from professional mourners hired by her family to prepare the body and do up the necessary amount of grief. Old widows and superannuated wives who have outlived other forms of usefulness gladly enter this singular profession. They cut their hair short, and, with each new death, plaster on a fresh cap of pitch and ashes, daub the face with spots of tar, and, in general, array themselves as funeral experts.

The rancheria was astir when we arrived. It was a mere group of half a dozen smoky hovels, built of pine bark propped upon cones of poles, and arranged in a semi-circle within the edge of the forest, fronting on a brook and meadow. Jerry and I leaned our backs against a large tree, and watched the group.

Buck’s shanty was deserted, the body of his wife lying outside upon a blanket, being prepared by two of these funeral hags. Buck himself was quietly stuffing his stomach with a breakfast of venison and acorns, which were handed him at brief intervals by several sympathizing squaws.

Turning to Jerry with a countenance of stolid seriousness, he laconically remarked, “My woman she die! Very bad. To-night, sundown” (pointing to the sun), “she burn up.” Meanwhile the tar-heads rolled Sally the Old over and over, all the while alternately howling the same dismal phrase. Indian relatives and friends, having the general air of animated rag-bags, arrived occasionally, and sat down in silence at a fire a little removed from the other Diggers, never once saluting them.

As we walked back to our camp, I remarked on the stolid, cruel expression of Buck’s face, but Jerry, to my surprise, bade me not judge too hastily. He went on to explain that Indians have just as deep and tender attachments, just as much good sense, and, to wind up with, “as much human into ’em, as we edicated white folks.”

His own squaw had instilled this into Jerry’s naturally sentimental and credulous heart, so I refrained from expressing my convictions concerning Indians, which, I own, were formerly tinged with the most sanguinary Caucasian prejudice.

Jerry came for me by appointment just before sunset, and we walked leisurely across the meadow, and under lengthening pine shadows, to the rancheria. No one was stirring. Buck and the two vicarious mourners sat in his lodge door, uttering low, half-audible groans. In the opening before the line of huts a low pile of dry logs had been carefully laid, upon which, outstretched, and wrapped in a red blanket, lay the dead form of Sally the Old, her face covered in careful folds. Upon her heart were a grass-woven water-bowl and her last pappoose basket.

Just as the sun sank to the horizon, one tar-head stepped out in front of the funeral pile, lifted up both hands, and gazed steadily and silently at the sun. She might have been five minutes in this statuesque position, her face full of strange, half-animal intensity of expression, her eyes glittering, the whole hard figure glowing with a deep bronze reflection. Suddenly she sprang back with the old wild shriek, seized a brand from one of the camp-fires, and lighted the funeral heap, when all the Indians came out, and grouped themselves in little knots around it. Sally the Old’s children clung about an old mummy of a squaw, who squatted upon the ground and rocked her body to and fro, making a low cry as of an animal in pain. All the Indians looked serious; a group, who Jerry said were relatives, seemed stupefied with grief. Upon a few faces falling tears glistened in the light of the fire, which now shot up red tongues high in the air, lighting up with weird distinctness every feature of the whole group. Flames slowly lapped over, consuming the blanket, and caught the willow pappoose basket. When Buck saw this the tears streamed from his eyes; he waved his hands eloquently, looking up to heaven, and uttered heartbroken sobs. The pappoose basket crackled for a moment, flashed into a blaze, and was gone. The two old women yelled their sharp death-cry, dancing, posturing, gesticulating toward the fire, and in slow, measured chorus all the Indians intoned in pathetic measure, “Himalaya! Himalaya!” looking first at the mound of fire and then out upon the fading sunset.

It was all indescribably strange: monarch pines standing in solemn ranks far back into the dusky heart of the forest, glowing and brightening with pulsating reflections of firelight; the ring of Indians, crouching, standing fixed like graven images, or swaying mechanically to and fro; each tattered scarlet and white rag of their utterly squalid garments, every expression of barbaric grief or dull stolidity, being brought strongly out by the red, flaming fire.

Buck watched with wet eyes that slow-consuming fire burn to ashes the body of his wife of many years, the mother of his group of poor, frightened children. Not a stoical savage, but a despairing husband, stood before us. I felt him to be human. The body at last sank into a bed of flames which shot up higher than ever with fountains of sparks, and sucked together, hiding the remains forever from view. At this Buck sprang to the front and threw himself at the fire; but the two old women seized each a hand and dragged him back to his children, when he fell into a fit of stupor.

As we walked home Jerry was quick to ask, “Didn’t I tell you Injuns has feelings inside of ’em?” I answered promptly that I was convinced; and long after, as I lay awake through many night-hours listening to that shrill death-wail, I felt as if any policy toward the Indians based upon the assumption of their being brutes or devils was nothing short of a blot on this Christian century.

My sleep was light, and sunrise found me dressed, still listening, as under a kind of spell, to the mourners, who, though evidently exhausted, at brief intervals uttered the cry. Alone, and filled with serious reflections, I strolled over to the rancheria, finding every one there up and about his morning duties.

The tar-heads, withdrawn some distance into the forest, sat leaning against a stump, chatting and grinning together, now and then screeching by turns.

I asked Revenue Stamp, a good-natured, middle-aged Indian, where Buck was. He pointed to his hut, and replied, with an affable smile, “He whiskey drunk.” “And who,” I inquired, “is that fat girl with him?” “Last night he take her; new squaw,” was the answer. I could hardly believe, but it was the actual truth; and I went back to camp an enlightened but disillusioned man. I left that day, and never had an opportunity to “free my mind” to Jerry. Since then I guardedly avoid all discussion of the “Indian question.” When interrogated, I dodge, or protest ignorance; when pressed, I have been known to turn the subject; or, if driven to the wall, I usually confess my opinion that the Quakers will have to work a great reformation in the Indian before he is really fit to be exterminated.

The mill-people and Indians told us of a wonderful group of big trees (Sequoia gigantea), and about one particular tree of unequalled size. We found them easily, after a ride of a few miles in a northerly direction from our camp, upon a wide, flat-topped spur, where they grew, as is their habit elsewhere, in company with several other coniferous species, all grouped socially together, heightening each other’s beauty by contrasts of form and color.

In a rather open glade, where the ground was for the most part green with herbage, and conspicuously starred with upland flowers, stood the largest shaft we observed. A fire had formerly burned off a small segment of its base, not enough, however, to injure the symmetrical appearance. It was a slowly tapering, regularly round column of about forty feet in diameter at the base, and rising two hundred and seventy-four feet, adorned with a few huge branches, which start horizontally from the trunk, but quickly turn down and spray out. The bark, thick but not rough, is scored up and down at considerable intervals with deep, smooth grooves, and is of brightest cinnamon color, mottled in purple and yellow.

That which impresses one most after its vast bulk the grand, pillar-like stateliness, is the thin and inconspicuous foliage, which feathers out delicately on the boughs like a mere mist of pale apple-green. It would seem nothing when compared with the immense volume of tree for which it must do the ordinary respirative duty; but doubtless the bark performs a large share of this, its papery lamination and porous structure fitting it eminently for that purpose.

Near this “King of the Mountains” grew three other trees; one a sugar-pine (Pinus Lambertiana) of about eight feet in diameter, and hardly less than three hundred feet high (although we did not measure it, estimating simply by comparison of its rise above the Sequoia, whose height was quite accurately determined). For a hundred and fifty feet the pine was branchless, and as round as if turned, delicate bluish-purple in hue, and marked with a net-work of scorings. The branches, in nearly level poise, grew long and slenderly out from the shaft, well covered with dark yellow-green needles. The two remaining trees were firs (Picea grandis), which sprang from a common root, dividing slightly, as they rose, a mass of feathery branches, whose load of polished blue-green foliage, for the most part, hid the dark wood-brown trunk. Grace, exquisite, spire-like, taper boughs, whose plumes of green float lightly upon the air, elasticity and symmetry are its characteristics.

In all directions this family continue grouping themselves, always with attractive originality. There is something memorable in the harmonious yet positive colors of this sort of forest. First, the foliage and trunk of each separate tree contrasts finely,—cinnamon and golden apple-green in the Sequoia, dark purple and yellowish-green for the pine, deep wood-color and bluish-green of fir.

The sky, which at this elevation of six thousand feet is deep, pure blue and often cloudless, is seen through the tracery of boughs and tree-tops, which cast downward fine and filmy shadows across the glowing trunks. Altogether, it is a wonderful setting for the Sequoia. The two firs, judging by many of equal size whose age I have studied, were about three hundred years old; the pine, still hale and vigorous, not less than five hundred; and for the “King of the Mountains” we cannot assign a probable age of less than two thousand years.

A mountain, a fossil from deepest geological horizon, a ruin of human art, carry us back into the perspective of centuries with a force that has become, perhaps, a little conventional. No imperishableness of mountain-peak or of fragment of human work, broken pillar or sand-worn image half lifted over pathetic desert,—none of these link the past and to-day with anything like the power of these monuments of living antiquity, trees that began to grow before the Christian era, and, full of hale vitality and green old age, still bid fair to grow broad and high for centuries to come. Who shall predict the limits of this unexampled life? There is nothing which indicates suffering or degeneracy in the Sequoia as a species. I find pathological hints that several other far younger species in the same forest are gradually giving up their struggle for existence. That singular species Pinus Sabiniana appears to me to suffer death-pains from foot-hill extremes of temperature and dryness, and notably from ravenous parasites of the mistletoe type. At the other extreme the Pinus flexilis has about half given up the fight against cold and storms. Its young are dwarfed or huddled in thickets, with such mode of growth that they may never make trees of full stature; while higher up, standing among bare rocks and fields of ice, far above all living trees, are the stark, white skeletons of noble dead specimens, their blanched forms rigid and defiant, preserved from decay by a marvellous hardness of fibre, and only wasted by the cutting of storm-driven crystals of snow. Still the Sequoia maintains perfect health.

It is, then, the vast respiring power, the atmosphere, the bland, regular climate, which give such long life, and not any richness or abundance of food received from the soil.

If one loves to gather the material for travellers’ stories, he may find here and there a hollow fallen trunk through whose heart he may ride for many feet without bowing the head. But if he love the tree for its own grand nature, he may lie in silence upon the soft forest floor, in shadow or sunny warmth, if he please, and spend many days in wonder, gazing upon majestic shafts, following their gold and purple flutings from broad, firmly planted base up and on through the few huge branches and among the pale clouds of filmy green traced in open network upon the deep blue of the sky.

Groups of this ancient race grow along the middle heights of the Sierra for almost two hundred miles, marking a line of groves through the forest of lesser trees, still retaining their power of reproduction, ripening cones with regularity, whose seed germinates, springs up, and grows with apparently as great vital power as the descendants of younger conifers. Nor are these their only remarkable characteristics. They possess hardly any roots at all. Several in each grove have been blown down, and lie slowly decomposing. They are found usually to have rested upon the ground with a few short, pedestal-like feet penetrating the earth for a little way.

Too soon for my pleasure, the time came when we must turn our backs upon these stately groves and push up toward the snow. Our route lay eastward, between the King’s and Kaweah rivers, rising as we marched; the vegetation, as well as the barometer, accurately measuring the change.

We reached our camp on the Big Meadow plateau on the 22nd of June, and that night the thermometer fell to 20° above zero. This cold was followed by a chilly, overcast morning, and about ten o’clock an old-fashioned snowstorm set in. Wind howled fiercely through the trees, coming down from the mountains in terribly powerful gusts. The green, flower-colored meadow was soon buried under snow; and we explorers, who had no tent, hid ourselves under piles of brush, and on the lee side of hospitable stones. Our scant supply of blankets was a poor defence against such inclemency; so we crawled out and made a huge camp-fire, around which we sat for the rest of the day. During the afternoon we were visited. A couple of hunters, with their rifles over their shoulders, seeing the smoke of our camp-fire, followed it through the woods and joined our circle. They were typical mountaineers,—outcasts from society, discontented with the world, comforting themselves in the solitude of nature by the occasional excitement of a bear-fight. One was a half-breed Cherokee, rather over six feet high, powerfully built, and picturesquely dressed in buckskin breeches and green jacket; a sort of Trovatore hat completed his costume, and gave him an animated appearance. The other was unmistakably a Pike-Countian, who had dangled into a pair of butternut jeans. His greasy flannel shirt was pinned together with thorns in lieu of buttons, and his hat fastened back in the same way, having lost its stiffness by continual wetting. The Cherokee had a long, manly stride, and the Pike a rickety sort of shuffle. His anatomy was bad, his physical condition worse, and I think he added to that a sort of pride in his own awkwardness. Seeming to have a principle of suspension somewhere about his shoulders, which maintained his head at about the right elevation above the ground, he kept up a good rate in walking without apparently making an effort. His body swayed with a peculiar, corkscrew motion, and his long Mississippi rifle waved to and fro through the air.

We all noticed the utter contrast between them as these two men approached our fire. The hunter’s taciturnity is a well-known rôle, but they had evidently lived so long an isolated life that they were too glad of any company to play it unfailingly; so it was they who opened the conversation. We found that they were now camped only a half-mile from us, were hunting for deer-skins, and had already accumulated a very large number. They offered us plenty of venison, and were greatly interested in our proposed journeys into the high mountains. From them we learned that they had themselves penetrated farther than any others, and had only given up the exploration after wandering fruitlessly among the cañons for a month. They told us that not even Indians had crossed the Sierras to the east, and that if we did succeed in reaching this summit we would certainly be the first. We learned from them, also, that a mile to the northward was a great herd of cattle in charge of a party of Mexicans. Fleeing before the continued drought of the plains, all the cattle-men of California drove the remains of their starved herds either to the coast or to the High Sierras, and grazed upon the summer pastures, descending in the autumn, and living upon the dry foot-hill grasses, until, under the influence of winter rains, the plains again clothe themselves with pasturage.

The following morning, having received a present of two deer from the hunters, we packed our animals and started eastward, passing, after a few minutes’ ride, the encampment of the Spaniards. About four thousand cattle roamed over the plateau, and were only looked after once or twice a week. The four Spaniards divided their time between drinking coffee and playing cards. They were engaged in the latter amusement when we passed them; and although we halted and tried to get some information, they only answered us in monosyllables, and continued their game.

To the eastward the plateau rose toward the high mountains in immense, granite steps. We rode pleasantly through the forest over these level tables, and climbed with difficulty the rugged, rock-strewn fronts, each successive step bringing us nearer the mountains, and giving us a far-reaching view. Here and there the granite rose through the forest in broad, smooth domes; and many times we were obliged to climb these rocky slopes at the peril of our animals’ lives. After several days of marching and countermarching, we gave up the attempt to push farther in a southeast direction, and turned north, toward the great cañon of King’s River, which we hoped might lead us up to the Snow Group.

Reaching the brink of this gorge, we observed, about half-way down the slope, and standing at equal levels on both flanks, singular embankments—shelves a thousand feet in width—built at a height of fifteen hundred feet above the valley bottom, their smooth, evenly graded summits rising higher and higher to the eastward on the cañon-wall until they joined the snow. They were evidently the lateral moraines of a vast, extinct glacier, and that opposite us seemed to offer an easy ride into the heart of the mountains. With great difficulty we descended the long slope, through chaparral and forest, reaching, at length, the level, smooth glacier bottom. Here, threading its way through alternate groves and meadows, was the King’s River—a stream not over thirty feet in width, but rushing with all the force of a torrent. Its icy temperature was very refreshing after our weary climb down the wall. By a series of long zigzags we succeeded in leading our animals up the flank to the top of the north moraine, and here we found ourselves upon a forest-covered causeway, almost as smooth as a railroad embankment. Its fluted crest enclosed three separate pathways, each a hundred feet wide, divided from one another by roughly laid trains of rocks, showing it evidently to be a compound moraine. As we ascended toward the mountains, the causeway was more and more isolated from the cliff, until the depression between them widened to half a mile, and to at least five hundred feet deep.

Throughout nearly a whole day we rode comfortably along at a gentle grade, reaching at evening the region of the snow, where, among innumerable huge granite blocks, we threaded our way in search of a camp-ground. The mountain amphitheatre which gave rise to the King’s River opened to the east, a broad valley, into which we at length climbed; and, among scattered groves of alpine pines, and on patches of meadow, rode eastward till twilight, watching the high pyramidal peak which lay directly at the head of the gorge. By sunset we had gone as far as we could take the animals, and, in full view of our goal, camped for the night.

The form of the mountain at the head of our ravine was purely Gothic. A thousand upspringing spires and pinnacles pierce the sky in every direction, the cliffs and mountain-ridges are everywhere ornamented with countless needle-like turrets. Crowning the wall to the south of our camp were series of these jagged forms standing out against the sky like a procession of colossal statues. Whichever way we turned we were met by some extraordinary fulness of detail. Every mass seemed to have the highest possible ornamental finish. Along the lower flanks of the walls, tall, straight pines, the last of the forest, were relieved against the cliffs, and the same slender forms, although carved in granite, surmounted every ridge and peak.

Through this wide zone of forest we had now passed, and from its perpetual shadow had come out among the few black groves of fir into a brilliant alpine sunshine. The light, although surprisingly lively, was of a purity and refinement quite different from the strong glare of the plains.

III
THE ASCENT OF MOUNT TYNDALL
1864

Morning dawned brightly upon our bivouac among a cluster of dark firs in the mountain corridor opened by an ancient glacier of King’s River into the heart of the Sierras. It dawned a trifle sooner than we could have wished, but Professor Brewer and Hoffman had breakfasted before sunrise, and were off with barometer and theodolite upon their shoulders, purposing to ascend our amphitheatre to its head and climb a great pyramidal peak which swelled up against the eastern sky, closing the view in that direction.

We who remained in camp spent the day in overhauling campaign materials and preparing for a grand assault upon the summits. For a couple of hours we could descry our friends through the field-glasses, their minute, black forms moving slowly on among piles of giant débris; now and then lost, again coming to view, and at last disappearing altogether.

It was twilight of evening, and almost eight o’clock, when they came back to camp, Brewer leading the way, Hoffman following; and as they sat down by our fire without uttering a word, we read upon their faces terrible fatigue. So we hastened to give them supper of coffee and soup, bread and venison, which resulted, after a time, in our getting in return the story of the day. For eight whole hours they had worked up over granite and snow, mounting ridge after ridge, till the summit was made about two o’clock.

These snowy crests bounding our view at the eastward we had all along taken to be the summits of the Sierra, and Brewer had supposed himself to be climbing a dominant peak, from which he might look eastward over Owen’s Valley and out upon leagues of desert. Instead of this, a vast wall of mountains, lifted still higher than his peak, rose beyond a tremendous cañon which lay like a trough between the two parallel ranks of peaks. Hoffman showed us on his sketch-book the profile of this new range, and I instantly recognized the peaks which I had seen from Mariposa, whose great white pile had led me to believe them the highest points of California.

For a couple of months my friends had made me the target of plenty of pleasant banter about my “highest land,” which they lost faith in as we climbed from Thomas’s Mill,—I, too, becoming a trifle anxious about it; but now that the truth had burst upon Brewer and Hoffman, they could not find words to describe the terribleness and grandeur of the deep cañon, or for picturing those huge crags towering in line at the east. Their peak, as indicated by the barometer, was in the region of thirteen thousand four hundred feet, and a level across to the farther range showed its crests to be at least fifteen hundred feet higher. They had spent hours upon the summit scanning the eastern horizon, and ranging downward into the labyrinth of gulfs below, and had come at last with reluctance to the belief that to cross this gorge and ascend the eastern wall of peaks was utterly impossible.

Brewer and Hoffman were old climbers, and their verdict of impossible oppressed me as I lay awake thinking of it; but early next morning I had made up my mind, and, taking Cotter aside, I asked him in an easy manner whether he would like to penetrate the Terra Incognita with me at the risk of our necks, provided Brewer should consent. In a frank, courageous tone he answered after his usual mode, “Why not?” Stout of limb, stronger yet in heart, of iron endurance, and a quiet, unexcited temperament, and, better yet, deeply devoted to me, I felt that Cotter was the one comrade I would choose to face death with, for I believed there was in his manhood no room for fear or shirk.

It was a trying moment for Brewer when we found him and volunteered to attempt a campaign for the top of California, because he felt a certain fatherly responsibility over our youth, a natural desire that we should not deposit our triturated remains in some undiscoverable hole among the feldspathic granites; but, like a true disciple of science, this was at last overbalanced by his intense desire to know more of the unexplored region. He freely confessed that he believed the plan madness, and Hoffman, too, told us we might as well attempt to get on a cloud as to try the peak. As Brewer gradually yielded his consent, I saw by his conversation that there was a possibility of success; so we spent the rest of the day in making preparations.

Our walking-shoes were in excellent condition, the hobnails firm and new. We laid out a barometer, a compass, a pocket-level, a set of wet and dry thermometers, note-books, with bread, cooked beans, and venison enough to last a week, rolled them all in blankets, making two knapsack-shaped packs strapped firmly together, with loops for the arms, which, by Brewer’s estimate, weighed forty pounds apiece.

Gardiner declared he would accompany us to the summit of the first range to look over into the gulf we were to cross, and at last Brewer and Hoffman also concluded to go up with us.

Quite too early for our profit we all betook ourselves to bed, vainly hoping to get a long, refreshing sleep from which we should arise ready for our tramp.

Never a man welcomed those first gray streaks in the east gladder than I did, unless it may be Cotter, who has in later years confessed that he did not go to sleep that night. Long before sunrise we had finished our breakfast and were under way, Hoffman kindly bearing my pack, and Brewer Cotter’s.

Our way led due east up the amphitheatre and toward Mount Brewer, as we had named the great pyramidal peak.

Awhile after leaving camp, slant sunlight streamed in among gilded pinnacles along the slope of Mount Brewer, touching here and there, in broad dashes of yellow, the gray walls, which rose sweeping up on either hand like the sides of a ship.

Our way along the valley’s middle ascended over a number of huge steps, rounded and abrupt, at whose bases were pools of transparent snow-water, edged with rude piles of erratic glacier blocks, scattered companies of alpine firs, of red bark and having cypress-like darkness of foliage, with fields of snow under sheltering cliffs, and bits of softest velvet meadow clouded with minute blue and white flowers.

As we climbed, the gorge grew narrow and sharp, both sides wilder; and the spurs which projected from them, nearly overhanging the middle of the valley, towered above us with more and more severe sculpture. We frequently crossed deep fields of snow, and at last reached the level of the highest pines, where long slopes of débris swept down from either cliff, meeting in the middle. Over and among these immense blocks, often twenty and thirty feet high, we were obliged to climb, hearing far below us the subterranean gurgle of streams.

Interlocking spurs nearly closed the gorge behind us; our last view was out a granite gateway formed of two nearly vertical precipices, sharp-edged, jutting buttress-like, and plunging down into a field of angular bowlders which fill the valley-bottom.

The eye ranged out from this open gateway overlooking the great King’s Cañon with its moraine-terraced walls, the domes of granite upon Big Meadows, and the undulating stretch of forest which descends to the plain.

The gorge turning southward, we rounded a sort of mountain promontory, which, closing the view behind us, shut us up in the bottom of a perfect basin. In front lay a placid lake reflecting the intense black-blue of the sky. Granite, stained with purple and red, sank into it upon one side, and a broad, spotless field of snow came down to its margin upon the other.

From a pile of large granite blocks, forty or fifty feet above the lake-margin, we could look down fully a hundred feet through the transparent water to where bowlders and pebbles were strewn upon the stone bottom. We had now reached the base of Mount Brewer, and were skirting its southern spurs in a wide, open corridor surrounded in all directions by lofty granite crags from two to four thousand feet high; above the limits of vegetation, rocks, lakes of deep, heavenly blue, and white, trackless snows were grouped closely about us. Two sounds—a sharp, little cry of martens and occasional heavy crashes of falling rock—saluted us.

Climbing became exceedingly difficult, light air—for we had already reached twelve thousand five hundred feet—beginning to tell upon our lungs to such an extent that my friend, who had taken turns with me in carrying my pack, was unable to do so any longer, and I adjusted it to my own shoulders for the rest of the day.

After four hours of slow, laborious work, we made the base of the débris slope which rose about a thousand feet to a saddle-pass in the western mountain-wall, that range upon which Mount Brewer is so prominent a point. We were nearly an hour in toiling up this slope, over an uncertain footing which gave way at almost every step. At last, when almost at the top, we paused to take breath, and then all walked out upon the crest, laid off our packs, and sat down together upon the summit of the ridge, and for a few moments not a word was spoken.

The Sierras are here two parallel summit ranges. We were upon the crest of the western ridge, and looked down into a gulf five thousand feet deep, sinking from our feet in abrupt cliffs nearly or quite two thousand feet, whose base plunged into a broad field of snow lying steep and smooth for a great distance, but broken near its foot by craggy steps often a thousand feet high.

Vague blue haze obscured the lost depths, hiding details, giving a bottomless distance, out of which, like the breath of wind, floated up a faint tremble, vibrating upon the senses, yet never clearly heard.

Rising on the other side, cliff above cliff, precipice piled upon precipice, rock over rock, up against sky, towered the most gigantic mountain-wall in America, culminating in a noble pile of Gothic-finished granite and enamel-like snow. How grand and inviting looked its white form, its untrodden, unknown crest, so high and pure in the clear, strong blue! I looked at it as one contemplating the purpose of his life; and for just one moment I would have rather liked to dodge that purpose, or to have waited, or have found some excellent reason why I might not go; but all this quickly vanished, leaving a cheerful resolve to go ahead.

From the two opposing mountain-walls singular, thin, knife-blade ridges of stone jutted out, dividing the sides of the gulf into a series of amphitheatres, each one a labyrinth of ice and rock. Piercing thick beds of snow, sprang up knobs and straight, isolated spires of rock, mere obelisks curiously carved by frost, their rigid, slender forms casting a blue, sharp shadow upon the snow. Embosomed in depressions of ice, or resting on broken ledges, were azure lakes, deeper in tone than the sky, which at this altitude, even at midday, has a violet duskiness.

To the south, not more than eight miles, a wall of peaks stood across the gulf, dividing the King’s, which flowed north at our feet, from the Kern River, that flowed down the trough in the opposite direction.

I did not wonder that Brewer and Hoffman pronounced our undertaking impossible; but when I looked at Cotter there was such complete bravery in his eye that I asked him if he was ready to start. His old answer, “Why not?” left the initiative with me; so I told Professor Brewer that we would bid him good-by. Our friends helped us on with our packs in silence, and as we shook hands there was not a dry eye in the party. Before he let go of my hand Professor Brewer asked me for my plan, and I had to own that I had but one, which was to reach the highest peak in the range.

After looking in every direction I was obliged to confess that I saw as yet no practicable way. We bade them a “good-by,” receiving their “God bless you” in return, and started southward along the range to look for some possible cliff to descend. Brewer, Gardiner, and Hoffman turned north to push upward to the summit of Mount Brewer, and complete their observations. We saw them whenever we halted, until at last, on the very summit, their microscopic forms were for the last time discernible. With very great difficulty we climbed a peak which surmounted our wall just to the south of the pass, and, looking over the eastern brink, found that the precipice was still sheer and unbroken. In one place, where the snow lay against it to the very top, we went to its edge and contemplated the slide. About three thousand feet of unbroken white, at a fearfully steep angle, lay below us. We threw a stone over and watched it bound until it was lost in the distance; after fearful leaps we could only detect it by the flashings of snow where it struck, and as these were, in some instances, three hundred feet apart, we decided not to launch our own valuable bodies, and the still more precious barometer, after it.

There seemed but one possible way to reach our goal: that was to make our way along the summit of the cross ridge which projected between the two ranges. This divide sprang out from our Mount Brewer wall, about four miles to the south of us. To reach it we must climb up and down over the indented edge of the Mount Brewer wall. In attempting to do this we had a rather lively time scaling a sharp granite needle, where we found our course completely stopped by precipices four and five hundred feet in height. Ahead of us the summit continued to be broken into fantastic pinnacles, leaving us no hope of making our way along it; so we sought the most broken part of the eastern descent, and began to climb down. The heavy knapsacks, besides wearing our shoulders gradually into a black-and-blue state, overbalanced us terribly, and kept us in constant danger of pitching headlong. At last, taking them off, Cotter climbed down until he had found a resting-place upon a cleft of rock, then I lowered them to him with our lasso, afterward descending cautiously to his side, taking my turn in pioneering downward, receiving the freight of knapsacks by lasso as before. In this manner we consumed more than half the afternoon in descending a thousand feet of broken, precipitous slope; and it was almost sunset when we found ourselves upon the fields of level snow which lay white and thick over the whole interior slope of the amphitheatre.

The gorge below us seemed utterly impassable. At our backs the Mount Brewer wall rose either in sheer cliffs or in broken, rugged stairway, such as had offered us our descent. From this cruel dilemma the cross divide furnished the only hope, and the sole chance of scaling that was at its junction with the Mount Brewer wall. Toward this point we directed our course, marching wearily over stretches of dense, frozen snow, and regions of débris, reaching about sunset the last alcove of the amphitheatre, just at the foot of the Mount Brewer wall.

It was evidently impossible for us to attempt to climb it that evening, and we looked about the desolate recesses for a sheltered camping-spot. A high granite wall surrounded us upon three sides, recurring to the southward in long, elliptical curves; no part of the summit being less than two thousand feet above us, the higher crags not infrequently reaching three thousand feet. A single field of snow swept around the base of the rock, and covered the whole amphitheatre, except where a few spikes and rounded masses of granite rose through it, and where two frozen lakes, with their blue ice-disks, broke the monotonous surface. Through the white snow-gate of our amphitheatre, as through a frame, we looked eastward upon the summit group; not a tree, not a vestige of vegetation in sight,—sky, snow, and granite the only elements in this wild picture.

After searching for a shelter we at last found a granite crevice near the margin of one of the frozen lakes,—a sort of shelf just large enough for Cotter and me,—where we hastened to make our bed, having first filled the canteen from a small stream that trickled over the ice, knowing that in a few moments the rapid chill would freeze it. We ate our supper of cold venison and bread, and whittled from the sides of the wooden barometer-case shavings enough to warm water for a cup of miserably tepid tea, and then, packing our provisions and instruments away at the head of the shelf, rolled ourselves in our blankets and lay down to enjoy the view.

After such fatiguing exercises the mind has an almost abnormal clearness: whether this is wholly from within, or due to the intensely vitalizing mountain air, I am not sure; probably both contribute to the state of exaltation in which all alpine climbers find themselves. The solid granite gave me a luxurious repose, and I lay on the edge of our little rock niche and watched the strange yet brilliant scene.

All the snow of our recess lay in the shadow of the high granite wall to the west, but the Kern divide which curved around us from the southeast was in full light; its broken sky line, battlemented and adorned with innumerable rough-hewn spires and pinnacles, was a mass of glowing orange intensely defined against the deep violet sky. At the open end of our horseshoe amphitheatre, to the east, its floor of snow rounded over in a smooth brink, overhanging precipices which sank two thousand feet into the King’s Cañon. Across the gulf rose the whole procession of summit peaks, their lower halves rooted in a deep, sombre shadow cast by the western wall, the heights bathed in a warm purple haze, in which the irregular marbling of snow burned with a pure crimson light. A few fleecy clouds, dyed fiery orange, drifted slowly eastward across the narrow zone of sky which stretched from summit to summit like a roof. At times the sound of waterfalls, faint and mingled with echoes, floated up through the still air. The snow near by lay in cold, ghastly shade, warmed here and there in strange flashes by light reflected downward from drifting clouds. The sombre waste about us; the deep violet vault overhead; those far summits, glowing with reflected rose; the deep, impenetrable gloom which filled the gorge, and slowly and with vapor-like stealth climbed the mountain wall, extinguishing the red light, combined to produce an effect which may not be described; nor can I more than hint at the contrast between the brilliancy of the scene under full light, and the cold, death-like repose which followed when the wan cliffs and pallid snow were all overshadowed with ghostly gray.

A sudden chill enveloped us. Stars in a moment crowded through the dark heaven, flashing with a frosty splendor. The snow congealed, the brooks ceased to flow, and, under the powerful sudden leverage of frost, immense blocks were dislodged all along the mountain summits and came thundering down the slopes, booming upon the ice, dashing wildly upon rocks. Under the lee of our shelf we felt quite safe, but neither Cotter nor I could help being startled, and jumping just a little, as these missiles, weighing often many tons, struck the ledge over our heads and whizzed down the gorge, their stroke resounding fainter and fainter, until at last only a confused echo reached us.

The thermometer at nine o’clock marked twenty degrees above zero. We set the “minimum” and rolled ourselves together for the night. The longer I lay the less I liked that shelf of granite; it grew hard in time, and cold also, my bones seeming to approach actual contact with the chilled rock; moreover, I found that even so vigorous a circulation as mine was not enough to warm up the ledge to anything like a comfortable temperature. A single thickness of blanket is a better mattress than none, but the larger crystals of orthoclase, protruding plentifully, punched my back and caused me to revolve on a horizontal axis with precision and frequency. How I loved Cotter! How I hugged him and got warm, while our backs gradually petrified, till we whirled over and thawed them out together! The slant of that bed was diagonal and excessive; down it we slid till the ice chilled us awake, and we crawled back and chocked ourselves up with bits of granite inserted under my ribs and shoulders. In this pleasant position we got dozing again, and there stole over me a most comfortable ease. The granite softened perceptibly. I was delightfully warm, and sank into an industrious slumber which lasted with great soundness till four, when we rose and ate our breakfast of frozen venison.

The thermometer stood at two above zero; everything was frozen tight except the canteen, which we had prudently kept between us all night. Stars still blazed brightly, and the moon, hidden from us by western cliffs, shone in pale reflection upon the rocky heights to the east, which rose, dimly white, up from the impenetrable shadows of the cañon. Silence,—cold, ghastly dimness, in which loomed huge forms,—the biting frostiness of the air, wrought upon our feelings as we shouldered our packs and started with slow pace to climb toward the “divide.”

Soon, to our dismay, we found the straps had so chafed our shoulders that the weight gave us great pain, and obliged us to pad them with our handkerchiefs and extra socks, which remedy did not wholly relieve us from the constant wearing pain of the heavy load.

Directing our steps southward toward a niche in the wall which bounded us only half a mile distant, we travelled over a continuous snow-field frozen so densely as scarcely to yield at all to our tread, at the same time compressing enough to make that crisp, frosty sound which we all used to enjoy even before we knew from the books that it had something to do with the severe name of regulation.

As we advanced, the snow sloped more and more steeply up toward the crags, till by and by it became quite dangerous, causing us to cut steps with Cotter’s large bowie-knife,—a slow, tedious operation, requiring patience of a pretty permanent kind. In this way we spent a quiet social hour or so. The sun had not yet reached us, being shut out by the high amphitheatre wall; but its cheerful light reflected downward from a number of higher crags, filling the recess with the brightness of day, and putting out of existence those shadows which so sombrely darkened the earlier hours. To look back when we stopped to rest was to realize our danger,—that smooth, swift slope of ice carrying the eye down a thousand feet to the margin of a frozen mirror of ice; ribs and needles of rock piercing up through the snow, so closely grouped that, had we fallen, a miracle only might save us from being dashed. This led to rather deeper steps, and greater care that our burdens should be held more nearly over the centre of gravity, and a pleasant relief when we got to the top of the snow and sat down on a block of granite to breathe and look up in search of a way up the thousand-foot cliff of broken surface, among the lines of fracture and the galleries winding along the face.

It would have disheartened us to gaze up the hard, sheer front of precipices, and search among splintered projections, crevices, shelves, and snow-patches for an inviting route, had we not been animated by a faith that the mountains could not defy us.

Choosing what looked like the least impossible way, we started; but, finding it unsafe to work with packs on, resumed the yesterday’s plan,—Cotter taking the lead, climbing about fifty feet ahead, and hoisting up the knapsacks and barometer as I tied them to the end of the lasso. Constantly closing up in hopeless difficulty before us, the way opened again and again to our gymnastics, until we stood together upon a mere shelf, not more than two feet wide, which led diagonally up the smooth cliff. Edging along in careful steps, our backs flattened upon the granite, we moved slowly to a broad platform, where we stopped for breath.

There was no foothold above us. Looking down over the course we had come, it seemed, and I really believe it was, an impossible descent; for one can climb upward with safety where he cannot downward. To turn back was to give up in defeat; and we sat at least half an hour, suggesting all possible routes to the summit, accepting none, and feeling disheartened. About thirty feet directly over our heads was another shelf, which, if we could reach, seemed to offer at least a temporary way upward. On its edge were two or three spikes of granite; whether firmly connected with the cliff, or merely blocks of débris, we could not tell from below. I said to Cotter, I thought of but one possible plan: it was to lasso one of these blocks, and to climb, sailor-fashion, hand over hand, up the rope. In the lasso I had perfect confidence, for I had seen more than one Spanish bull throw his whole weight against it without parting a strand. The shelf was so narrow that throwing the coil of rope was a very difficult undertaking. I tried three times, and Cotter spent five minutes vainly whirling the loop up at the granite spikes. At last I made a lucky throw, and it tightened upon one of the smaller protuberances. I drew the noose close, and very gradually threw my hundred and fifty pounds upon the rope; then Cotter joined me, and for a moment we both hung our united weight upon it. Whether the rock moved slightly, or whether the lasso stretched a little, we were unable to decide; but the trial must be made, and I began to climb slowly. The smooth precipice-face against which my body swung offered no foothold, and the whole climb had therefore to be done by the arms, an effort requiring all one’s determination. When about half way up I was obliged to rest, and curling my feet in the rope managed to relieve my arms for a moment. In this position I could not resist the fascinating temptation of a survey downward.

Straight down, nearly a thousand feet below, at the foot of the rocks, began the snow, whose steep, roof-like slope, exaggerated into an almost vertical angle, curved down in a long, white field, broken far away by rocks and polished, round lakes of ice.

Cotter looked up cheerfully, and asked how I was making it; to which I answered that I had plenty of wind left. At that moment, when hanging between heaven and earth, it was a deep satisfaction to look down at the wild gulf of desolation beneath, and up to unknown dangers ahead, and feel my nerves cool and unshaken.

A few pulls hand over hand brought me to the edge of the shelf, when, throwing an arm around the granite spike, I swung my body upon the shelf, and lay down to rest, shouting to Cotter that I was all right, and that the prospects upward were capital. After a few moments’ breathing I looked over the brink, and directed my comrade to tie the barometer to the lower end of the lasso, which he did, and that precious instrument was hoisted to my station, and the lasso sent down twice for knapsacks, after which Cotter came up the rope in his very muscular way, without once stopping to rest. We took our loads in our hands, swinging the barometer over my shoulder, and climbed up a shelf which led in a zigzag direction upward and to the south, bringing us out at last upon the thin blade of a ridge which connected a short distance above with the summit. It was formed of huge blocks, shattered, and ready, at a touch, to fall.

So narrow and sharp was the upper slope that we dared not walk, but got astride, and worked slowly along with our hands, pushing the knapsacks in advance, now and then holding our breath when loose masses rocked under our weight.

Once upon the summit, a grand view burst upon us. Hastening to step upon the crest of the divide, which was never more than ten feet wide, frequently sharpened to a mere blade, we looked down the other side, and were astonished to find we had ascended the gentler slope, and that the rocks fell from our feet in almost vertical precipices for a thousand feet or more. A glance along the summit toward the highest group showed us that any advance in that direction was impossible, for the thin ridge was gashed down in notches three or four hundred feet deep, forming a procession of pillars, obelisks, and blocks piled upon each other, and looking terribly insecure.

We then deposited our knapsacks in a safe place, and, finding that it was already noon, determined to rest a little while and take a lunch, at over thirteen thousand feet above the sea.

West of us stretched the Mount Brewer wall, with its succession of smooth precipices and amphitheatre ridges. To the north the great gorge of the King’s River yawned down five thousand feet. To the south the valley of the Kern, opening in the opposite direction, was broader, less deep, but more filled with broken masses of granite. Clustered about the foot of the divide were a dozen alpine lakes; the higher ones blue sheets of ice, the lowest completely melted. Still lower in the depths of the two cañons we could see groups of forest trees; but they were so dim and so distant as never to relieve the prevalent masses of rock and snow. Our divide cast its shadow for a mile down King’s Cañon, in dark blue profile upon the broad sheets of sunny snow, from whose brightness the hard, splintered cliffs caught reflections and wore an aspect of joy. Thousands of rills poured from the melting snow, filling the air with a musical tinkle as of many accordant bells. The Kern Valley opened below us with its smooth, oval outline, the work of extinct glaciers, whose form and extent were evident from worn cliff-surface and rounded wall; snow-fields, relics of the former névé, hung in white tapestries around its ancient birthplace; and as far as we could see, the broad, corrugated valley, for a breadth of fully ten miles, shone with burnishings wherever its granite surface was not covered with lakelets or thickets of alpine vegetation.

Through a deep cut in the Mount Brewer wall we gained our first view to the westward, and saw in the distance the wall of the South King’s Cañon, and the granite point which Cotter and I had climbed a fortnight before. But for the haze we might have seen the plain; for above its farther limit were several points of the Coast Ranges, isolated like islands in the sea.

The view was so grand, the mountain colors so brilliant, immense snow-fields and blue alpine lakes so charming, that we almost forgot we were ever to move, and it was only after a swift hour of this delight that we began to consider our future course.

The King’s Cañon, which headed against our wall, seemed untraversable—no human being could climb along the divide; we had, then, but one hope of reaching the peak, and our greatest difficulty lay at the start. If we could climb down to the Kern side of the divide, and succeed in reaching the base of the precipices which fell from our feet, it really looked as if we might travel without difficulty among the roches moutonnées to the other side of the Kern Valley, and make our attempt upon the southward flank of the great peak. One look at the sublime white giant decided us. We looked down over the precipice, and at first could see no method of descent. Then we went back and looked at the road we had come up, to see if that were not possibly as bad; but the broken surface of the rocks was evidently much better climbing-ground than anything ahead of us. Cotter, with danger, edged his way along the wall to the east and I to the west, to see if there might not be some favorable point; but we both returned with the belief that the precipice in front of us was as passable as any of it. Down it we must.

After lying on our faces, looking over the brink, ten or twenty minutes, I suggested that by lowering ourselves on the rope we might climb from crevice to crevice; but we saw no shelf large enough for ourselves and the knapsacks too. However, we were not going to give it up without a trial; and I made the rope fast around my breast, and, looping the noose over a firm point of rock, let myself slide gradually down to a notch forty feet below. There was only room beside me for Cotter, so I made him send down the knapsacks first. I then tied these together by the straps with my silk handkerchiefs, and hung them off as far to the left as I could reach without losing my balance, looping the handkerchiefs over a point of rock. Cotter then slid down the rope, and, with considerable difficulty, we whipped the noose off its resting-place above, and cut off our connection with the upper world.

“We’re in for it now, King,” remarked my comrade, as he looked aloft, and then down; but our blood was up, and danger added only an exhilarating thrill to the nerves.

The shelf was hardly more than two feet wide, and the granite so smooth that we could find no place to fasten the lasso for the next descent; so I determined to try the climb with only as little aid as possible. Tying it around my breast again, I gave the other end into Cotter’s hands, and he, bracing his back against the cliff, found for himself as firm a foothold as he could, and promised to give me all the help in his power. I made up my mind to bear no weight unless it was absolutely necessary; and for the first ten feet I found cracks and protuberances enough to support me, making every square inch of surface do friction duty, and hugging myself against the rocks as tightly as I could. When within about eight feet of the next shelf, I twisted myself round upon the face, hanging by two rough blocks of protruding feldspar, and looked vainly for some further hand-hold; but the rock, besides being perfectly smooth, overhung slightly, and my legs dangled in the air. I saw that the next cleft was over three feet broad, and I thought possibly I might, by a quick slide, reach it in safety without endangering Cotter. I shouted to him to be very careful and let go in case I fell, loosened my hold upon the rope and slid quickly down. My shoulder struck against the rock and threw me out of balance; for an instant I reeled over upon the verge, in danger of falling, but, in the excitement, I thrust out my hand and seized a small alpine gooseberry-bush, the first piece of vegetation we had seen. Its roots were so firmly fixed in the crevice that it held my weight and saved me.

I could no longer see Cotter, but I talked to him, and heard the two knapsacks come bumping along till they slid over the eaves above me, and swung down to my station, when I seized the lasso’s end and braced myself as well as possible, intending, if he slipped, to haul in slack and help him as best I might. As he came slowly down from crack to crack, I heard his hobnailed shoes grating on the granite; presently they appeared dangling from the eaves above my head. I had gathered in the rope until it was taut, and then hurriedly told him to drop. He hesitated a moment, and let go. Before he struck the rock I had him by the shoulder, and whirled him down upon his side, thus preventing his rolling overboard, which friendly action he took quite coolly.

The third descent was not a difficult one, nor the fourth; but when we had climbed down about two hundred and fifty feet, the rocks were so glacially polished and water-worn that it seemed impossible to get any farther. To our right was a crack penetrating the rock, perhaps a foot deep, widening at the surface to three or four inches, which proved to be the only possible ladder. As the chances seemed rather desperate, we concluded to tie ourselves together, in order to share a common fate; and with a slack of thirty feet between us, and our knapsacks upon our backs, we climbed into the crevice, and began descending with our faces to the cliff. This had to be done with unusual caution, for the foothold was about as good as none, and our fingers slipped annoyingly on the smooth stone; besides, the knapsacks and instruments kept a steady backward pull, tending to overbalance us. But we took pains to descend one at a time, and rest wherever the niches gave our feet a safe support. In this way we got down about eighty feet of smooth, nearly vertical wall, reaching the top of a rude granite stairway, which led to the snow; and here we sat down to rest, and found to our astonishment that we had been three hours from the summit.

After breathing a half-minute we continued down, jumping from rock to rock, and having, by practice, become very expert in balancing ourselves, sprang on, never resting long enough to lose the aplomb; and in this manner made a quick descent over rugged débris to the crest of a snow-field, which, for seven or eight hundred feet more, swept down in a smooth, even slope, of very high angle, to the borders of a frozen lake.

Without untying the lasso which bound us together, we sprang upon the snow with a shout, and glissaded down splendidly, turning now and then a somersault, and shooting out like cannon-balls almost to the middle of the frozen lake; I upon my back, and Cotter feet first, in a swimming position. The ice cracked in all directions. It was only a thin, transparent film, through which we could see deep into the lake. Untying ourselves, we hurried ashore in different directions, lest our combined weight should be too great a strain upon any point.

With curiosity and wonder we scanned every shelf and niche of the last descent. It seemed quite impossible we could have come down there, and now it actually was beyond human power to get back again. But what cared we? “Sufficient unto the day—” We were bound for that still distant, though gradually nearing, summit; and we had come from a cold, shadowed cliff into deliciously warm sunshine, and were jolly, shouting, singing songs, and calling out the companionship of a hundred echoes. Six miles away, with no grave danger, no great difficulty, between us, lay the base of our grand mountain. Upon its skirts we saw a little grove of pines, an ideal bivouac, and toward this we bent our course.

After the continued climbing of the day walking was a delicious rest, and forward we pressed with considerable speed, our hobnails giving us firm footing on the glittering, glacial surface. Every fluting of the great valley was in itself a considerable cañon, into which we descended, climbing down the scored rocks, and swinging from block to block, until we reached the level of the pines. Here, sheltered among roches moutonnées, began to appear little fields of alpine grass, pale yet sunny, soft under our feet, fragrantly jewelled with flowers of fairy delicacy, holding up amid thickly clustered blades chalices of turquoise and amethyst, white stars, and fiery little globes of red. Lakelets, small but innumerable, were held in glacial basins, the striæ and grooves of that old dragon’s track ornamenting their smooth bottoms.

One of these, a sheet of pure beryl hue, gave us much pleasure from its lovely transparency, and because we lay down in the necklace of grass about it and smelled flowers, while tired muscles relaxed upon warm beds of verdure, and the pain in our burdened shoulders went away, leaving us delightfully comfortable.

After the stern grandeur of granite and ice, and with the peaks and walls still in view, it was relief to find ourselves again in the region of life. I never felt for trees and flowers such a sense of intimate relationship and sympathy. When we had no longer excuse for resting, I invented the palpable subterfuge of measuring the altitude of the spot, since the few clumps of low, wide-boughed pines near by were the highest living trees. So we lay longer with less and less will to rise, and when resolution called us to our feet, the getting-up was sorely like Rip Van Winkle’s in the third act.

The deep, glacial cañon-flutings across which our march then lay proved to be great consumers of time: indeed, it was sunset when we reached the eastern ascent, and began to toil up through scattered pines, and over trains of moraine rocks, toward the great peak. Stars were already flashing brilliantly in the sky, and the low, glowing arch in the west had almost vanished when we came to the upper trees, and threw down our knapsacks to camp. The forest grew on a sort of plateau-shelf with a precipitous front to the west,—a level surface which stretched eastward and back to the foot of our mountain, whose lower spurs reached within a mile of camp. Within the shelter lay a huge, fallen log, like all these alpine woods one mass of resin, which flared up when we applied a match, illuminating the whole grove. By contrast with the darkness outside, we seemed to be in a vast, many-pillared hall. The stream close by afforded water for our blessed teapot; venison frizzled with mild, appetizing sound upon the ends of pine sticks; matchless beans allowed themselves to become seductively crisp upon our tin plates. That supper seemed to me then the quintessence of gastronomy, and I am sure Cotter and I must have said some very good après-dîner things, though I long ago forgot them all. Within the ring of warmth, on elastic beds of pine-needles; we curled up, and fell swiftly into a sound sleep.

I woke up once in the night to look at my watch, and observed that the sky was overcast with a thin film of cirrus cloud to which the reflected moonlight lent the appearance of a glimmering tent, stretched from mountain to mountain over cañons filled with impenetrable darkness, only the vaguely lighted peaks and white snow-fields distinctly seen. I closed my eyes and slept soundly until Cotter woke me at half-past three, when we arose, breakfasted by the light of our fire, which still blazed brilliantly, and, leaving our knapsacks, started for the mountain with only instruments, canteens, and luncheon.

In the indistinct moonlight climbing was very difficult at first, for we had to thread our way along a plain which was literally covered with glacier bowlders, and the innumerable brooks which we crossed were frozen solid. However, our march brought us to the base of the great mountain, which, rising high against the east, shut out the coming daylight, and kept us in profound shadow. From base to summit rose a series of broken crags, lifting themselves from a general slope of débris. Toward the left the angle seemed to be rather gentler, and the surface less ragged; and we hoped, by a long détour round the base, to make an easy climb up this gentler face. So we toiled on for an hour over the rocks, reaching at last the bottom of the north slope. Here our work began in good earnest. The blocks were of enormous size, and in every stage of unstable equilibrium, frequently rolling over as we jumped upon them, making it necessary for us to take a second leap and land where we best could. To our relief we soon surmounted the largest blocks, reaching a smaller size, which served us as a sort of stairway.

The advancing daylight revealed to us a very long, comparatively even snow-slope, whose surface was pierced by many knobs and granite heads, giving it the aspect of an ice-roofing fastened on with bolts of stone. It stretched in far perspective to the summit, where already the rose of sunrise reflected gloriously, kindling a fresh enthusiasm within us.

Immense bowlders were partly embedded in the ice just above us, whose constant melting left them trembling on the edge of a fall. It communicated no very pleasant sensation to see above you these immense missiles hanging by a mere band, knowing that, as soon as the sun rose, you would be exposed to a constant cannonade.

The east side of the peak, which we could now partially see, was too precipitous to think of climbing. The slope toward our camp was too much broken into pinnacles and crags to offer us any hope, or to divert us from the single way, dead ahead, up slopes of ice and among fragments of granite. The sun rose upon us while we were climbing the lower part of this snow, and in less than half an hour, melting, began to liberate huge blocks, which thundered down past us, gathering and growing into small avalanches below.

We did not dare climb one above another, according to our ordinary mode, but kept about an equal level, hundred feet apart, lest, dislodging the blocks, one should hurl them down upon the other.

We climbed up smooth faces of granite, clinging simply by the cracks and protruding crystals of feldspar, and then hewed steps up fearfully steep slopes of ice, zigzagging to the right and left, to avoid the flying bowlders. When midway up this slope we reached a place where the granite rose in perfectly smooth bluffs on either side of a gorge,—a narrow cut or walled way leading up to the flat summit of the cliff. This we scaled by cutting ice steps, only to find ourselves fronted again by a still higher wall. Ice sloped from its front at too steep an angle for us to follow, but had melted in contact with it, leaving a space three feet wide between the ice and the rock. We entered this crevice and climbed along its bottom, with a wall of rock rising a hundred feet above us on one side, and a thirty-foot face of ice on the other, through which light of an intense cobalt-blue penetrated.

Reaching the upper end, we had to cut our footsteps upon the ice again, and, having braced our backs against the granite, climbed up to the surface. We were now in a dangerous position: to fall into the crevice upon one side was to be wedged to death between rock and ice; to make a slip was to be shot down five hundred feet, and then hurled over the brink of a precipice. In the friendly seat which this wedge gave me, I stopped to take wet and dry observations with the thermometer,—this being an absolute preventive of a scare,—and to enjoy the view.

The wall of our mountain sank abruptly to the left, opening for the first time an outlook to the eastward. Deep—it seemed almost vertically—beneath us we could see the blue water of Owen’s Lake, ten thousand feet down. The summit peaks to the north were piled in Titanic confusion, their ridges overhanging the eastern slope with terrible abruptness. Clustered upon the shelves and plateaus below were several frozen lakes, and in all directions swept magnificent fields of snow. The summit was now not over five hundred feet distant, and we started on again with the exhilarating hope of success. But if nature had intended to secure the summit from all assailants, she could not have planned her defences better; for the smooth granite wall which rose above the snow-slope continued, apparently, quite around the peak, and we looked in great anxiety to see if there was not one place where it might be climbed. It was all blank except in one spot; quite near us the snow bridged across the crevice and rose in a long point to the summit of the wall,—a great icicle-column frozen in a niche of the bluff,—its base about ten feet wide, narrowing to two feet at the top. We climbed to the base of this spire of ice, and, with the utmost care, began to cut our stairway. The material was an exceedingly compacted snow, passing into clear ice as it neared the rock. We climbed the first half of it with comparative ease; after that it was almost vertical, and so thin that we did not dare to cut the footsteps deep enough to make them absolutely safe. There was a constant dread lest our ladder should break off, and we be thrown either down the snow-slope or into the bottom of the crevasse. At last, in order to prevent myself from falling over backward, I was obliged to thrust my hand into the crack between the ice and the wall, and the spire became so narrow that I could do this on both sides, so that the climb was made as upon a tree, cutting mere toe-holes and embracing the whole column of ice in my arms. At last I reached the top, and, with the greatest caution, wormed my body over the brink, and, rolling out upon the smooth surface of the granite, looked over and watched Cotter make his climb. He came steadily up, with no sense of nervousness, until he got to the narrow part of the ice, and here he stopped and looked up with a forlorn face to me; but as he climbed up over the edge the broad smile came back to his face, and he asked me if it had occurred to me that we had, by and by, to go down again.

We had now an easy slope to the summit, and hurried up over rocks and ice, reaching the crest at exactly twelve o’clock. I rang my hammer upon the topmost rock; we grasped hands, and I reverently named the grand peak Mount Tyndall.

IV
THE DESCENT OF MOUNT TYNDALL
1864

To our surprise, upon sweeping the horizon with my level, there appeared two peaks equal in height with us, and two rising even higher. That which looked highest of all was a cleanly cut helmet of granite upon the same ridge with Mount Tyndall, lying about six miles south, and fronting the desert with a bold, square bluff which rises to the crest of the peak, where a white fold of snow trims it gracefully. Mount Whitney, as we afterward called it, in honor of our chief, is probably the highest land within the United States. Its summit looked glorious, but inaccessible.

The general topography overlooked by us may be thus simply outlined. Two parallel chains, enclosing an intermediate trough, face each other. Across this deep, enclosed gulf, from wall to wall, juts the thin but lofty and craggy ridge, or “divide,” before described, which forms an important water-shed, sending those streams which enter the chasm north of it into King’s River, those south forming the most important sources of the Kern, whose straight, rapidly deepening valley stretches south, carved profoundly in granite, while the King’s, after flowing longitudinally in the opposite course for eight or ten miles, turns abruptly west round the base of Mount Brewer, cuts across the western ridge, opening a gate of its own, and carves a rock channel transversely down the Sierra to the California plain.

Fronting us stood the west chain, a great mural ridge watched over by two dominant heights, Kaweah Peak and Mount Brewer, its wonderful profile defining against the western sky a multitude of peaks and spires. Bold buttresses jut out through fields of ice, and reach down stone arms among snow and débris. North and south of us the higher, or eastern, summit stretched on in miles and miles of snow peaks, the farthest horizon still crowded with their white points. East the whole range fell in sharp, hurrying abruptness to the desert, where, ten thousand feet below, lay a vast expanse of arid plain intersected by low, parallel ranges, traced from north to south. Upon the one side, a thousand sculptures of stone, hard, sharp, shattered by cold into infiniteness of fractures and rift, springing up, mutely severe, into the dark, austere blue of heaven; scarred and marked, except where snow or ice, spiked down by ragged granite bolts, shields with its pale armor these rough mountain shoulders; storm-tinted at summit, and dark where, swooping down from ragged cliff, the rocks plunge over cañon-walls into blue, silent gulfs.

Upon the other hand, reaching out to horizons faint and remote, lay plains clouded with the ashen hues of death; stark, wind-swept floors of white, and hill-ranges, rigidly formal, monotonously low, all lying under an unfeeling brilliance of light, which, for all its strange, unclouded clearness, has yet a vague half-darkness, a suggestion of black and shade more truly pathetic than fading twilight. No greenness soothes, no shadow cools the glare. Owen’s Lake, an oval of acrid water, lies dense blue upon the brown sage-plain, looking like a plate of hot metal. Traced in ancient beach-lines, here and there upon hill and plain, relics of ancient lake-shore outline the memory of a cooler past—a period of life and verdure when the stony chains were green islands among basins of wide, watery expanse.

The two halves of this view, both in sight at once, express the highest, the most acute, aspects of desolation—inanimate forms out of which something living has gone forever. From the desert have been dried up and blown away its seas. Their shores and white, salt-strewn bottoms lie there in the eloquence of death. Sharp, white light glances from all the mountain-walls, where in marks and polishings has been written the epitaph of glaciers now melted and vanished into air. Vacant cañons lie open to the sun, bare, treeless, half shrouded with snow, cumbered with loads of broken débris, still as graves, except when flights of rocks rush down some chasm’s throat, startling the mountains with harsh, dry rattle, their fainter echoes from below followed too quickly by dense silence.

The serene sky is grave with nocturnal darkness. The earth blinds you with its light. That fair contrast we love in lower lands, between bright heavens and dark, cool earth, here reverses itself with terrible energy. You look up into an infinite vault, unveiled by clouds, empty and dark, from which no brightness seems to ray, an expanse with no graded perspective, no tremble, no vapory mobility, only the vast yawning of hollow space.

With an aspect of endless remoteness burns the small, white sun, yet its light seems to pass invisibly through the sky, blazing out with intensity upon mountain and plain, flooding rock details with painfully bright reflections, and lighting up the burnt sand and stone of the desert with a strange, blinding glare. There is no sentiment of beauty in the whole scene; no suggestion, however far remote, of sheltered landscape; not even the air of virgin hospitality that greets us explorers in so many uninhabited spots which by their fertility and loveliness of grove or meadow seem to offer man a home, or us nomads a pleasant camp-ground. Silence and desolation are the themes which nature has wrought out under this eternally serious sky.

A faint suggestion of life clings about the middle altitudes of the eastern slope, where black companies of pine, stunted from breathing the hot desert air, group themselves just beneath the bottom of perpetual snow, or grow in patches of cloudy darkness over the moraines, those piles of wreck crowded from their pathway by glaciers long dead. Something there is pathetic in the very emptiness of these old glacier valleys, these imperishable tracks of unseen engines. One’s eye ranges up their broad, open channel to the shrunken white fields surrounding hollow amphitheatres which were once crowded with deep burdens of snow,—the birthplace of rivers of ice now wholly melted; the dry, clear heavens overhead blank of any promise of ever rebuilding them. I have never seen Nature when she seemed so little “Mother Nature” as in this place of rocks and snow, echoes and emptiness. It impresses me as the ruins of some bygone geological period, and no part of the present order, like a specimen of chaos which has defied the finishing hand of Time.

Of course I see its bearings upon climate, and could read a lesson quite glibly as to its usefulness as a condenser, and tell you gravely how much California has for which she may thank these heights, and how little Nevada; but looking from this summit with all desire to see everything, the one overmastering feeling is desolation, desolation!

Next to this, and more pleasing to notice, is the interest and richness of the granite forms; for the whole region, from plain to plain, is built of this dense, solid rock, and is sculptured under chisel of cold in shapes of great variety, yet all having a common spirit, which is purely Gothic.

In the much discussed origin of this order of building I never remember to have seen, though it can hardly have escaped mention, any suggestion of the possibility of the Gothic having been inspired by granite forms. Yet, as I sat on Mount Tyndall, the whole mountains shaped themselves like the ruins of cathedrals,—sharp roof-ridges, pinnacled and statued; buttresses more spired and ornamented than Milan’s; receding doorways with pointed arches carved into black façades of granite, doors never to be opened, innumerable jutting points, with here and there a single cruciform peak, its frozen roof and granite spires so strikingly Gothic I cannot doubt that the Alps furnished the models for early cathedrals of that order.

I thoroughly enjoyed the silence, which, gratefully contrasting with the surrounding tumult of form, conveyed to me a new sentiment. I have lain and listened through the heavy calm of a tropical voyage, hour after hour, longing for a sound; and in desert nights the dead stillness has many a time awakened me from sleep. For moments, too, in my forest life, the groves made absolutely no breath of movement; but there is around these summits the soundlessness of a vacuum. The sea stillness is that of sleep; the desert, of death—this silence is like the waveless calm of space.

All the while I made my instrumental observations the fascination of the view so held me that I felt no surprise at seeing water boiling over our little faggot blaze at a temperature of one hundred and ninety-two degrees F., nor in observing the barometrical column stand at 17.99 inches; and it was not till a week or so after that I realized we had felt none of the conventional sensations of nausea, headache, and I don’t know what all, that people are supposed to suffer at extreme altitudes; but these things go with guides and porters, I believe, and with coming down to one’s hotel at evening there to scold one’s picturesque aubergiste in a French which strikes upon his ear as a foreign tongue; possibly all that will come to us with advancing time, and what is known as “doing America.” They are already shooting our buffaloes; it cannot be long before they will cause themselves to be honorably dragged up and down our Sierras, with perennial yellow gaiter, and ostentation of bath-tub.

Having completed our observations, we packed up the instruments, glanced once again round the whole field of view, and descended to the top of our icicle ladder. Upon looking over, I saw to my consternation that during the day the upper half had broken off. Scars traced down upon the snow-field below it indicated the manner of its fall, and far below, upon the shattered débris, were strewn its white relics. I saw that nothing but the sudden gift of wings could possibly take us down to the snow-ridge. We held council, and concluded to climb quite round the peak in search of the best mode of descent.

As we crept about the east face, we could look straight down upon Owen’s Valley, and into the vast glacier gorges, and over piles of moraines and fluted rocks, and the frozen lakes of the eastern slope. When we reached the southwest front of the mountain we found that its general form was that of an immense horseshoe, the great eastern ridge forming one side, and the spur which descended to our camp the other, we having climbed up the outer part of the toe. Within the curve of the horseshoe was a gorge, cut almost perpendicularly down two thousand feet, its side rough-hewn walls of rocks and snow, its narrow bottom almost a continuous chain of deep blue lakes with loads of ice and débris piles. The stream which flowed through them joined the waters from our home grove, a couple of miles below the camp. If we could reach the level of the lakes, I believed we might easily climb round them and out of the upper end of the horseshoe, and walk upon the Kern plateau round to our bivouac.

It required a couple of hours of very painstaking, deliberate climbing to get down the first descent, which we did, however, without hurting our barometer, and fortunately without the fatiguing use of the lasso; reaching finally the uppermost lake, a granite bowlful of cobalt-blue water, transparent and unrippled. So high and enclosing were the tall walls about us, so narrow and shut in the cañon, so flattened seemed the cover of sky, we felt oppressed after the expanse and freedom of our hours on the summit.

The snow-field we followed, descending farther, was irregularly honeycombed in deep pits, circular or irregular in form, and melted to a greater or less depth, holding each a large stone embedded in the bottom. It seems they must have fallen from the overhanging heights with sufficient force to plunge into the snow.

Brilliant light and strong color met our eyes at every glance—the rocks of a deep purple-red tint, the pure alpine lakes of a cheerful sapphire blue, the snow glitteringly white. The walls on either side for half their height were planed and polished by glaciers, and from the smoothly glazed sides the sun was reflected as from a mirror.

Mile after mile we walked cautiously over the snow and climbed round the margins of lakes, and over piles of débris which marked the ancient terminal moraines. At length we reached the end of the horseshoe, where the walls contracted to a gateway, rising on either side in immense, vertical pillars a thousand feet high. Through this gateway we could look down the valley of the Kern, and beyond to the gentler ridges where a smooth growth of forest darkened the rolling plateau. Passing the last snow, we walked through this gateway and turned westward round the spur toward our camp. The three miles which closed our walk were alternately through groves of Pinus flexilis and upon plains of granite.

The glacier sculpture and planing are here very beautiful, the large crystals of orthoclase with which the granite is studded being cut down to the common level, their rosy tint making with the white base a beautiful, burnished porphyry.

The sun was still an hour high when we reached camp, and with a feeling of relaxation and repose we threw ourselves down to rest by the log, which still continued blazing. We had accomplished our purpose.

During the last hour or two of our tramp Cotter had complained of his shoes, which were rapidly going to pieces. Upon examination we found to our dismay that there was not over half a day’s wear left in them, a calamity which gave to our difficult homeward climb a new element of danger. The last nail had been worn from my own shoes, and the soles were scratched to the quick, but I believed them stout enough to hold together till we should reach the main camp.

We planned a pair of moccasins for Cotter, and then spent a pleasant evening by the camp-fire, rehearsing our climb to the detail, sleep finally overtaking us and holding us fast bound until broad daylight next morning, when we woke with a sense of having slept for a week, quite bright and perfectly refreshed for our homeward journey.

After a frugal breakfast, in which we limited ourselves to a few cubic inches of venison, and a couple of stingy slices of bread, with a single meagre cup of diluted tea, we shouldered our knapsacks, which now sat lightly upon toughened shoulders, and marched out upon the granite plateau.

We had concluded that it was impossible to retrace our former way, knowing well that the precipitous divide could not be climbed from this side; then, too, we had gained such confidence in our climbing powers, from constant victory, that we concluded to attempt the passage of the great King’s Cañon, mainly because this was the only mode of reaching camp, and since the geological section of the granite it exposed would afford us an exceedingly instructive study.

The broad granite plateau which forms the upper region of the Kern Valley slopes in general inclination up to the great divide. This remarkably pinnacled ridge, where it approaches the Mount Tyndall wall, breaks down into a broad depression where the Kern Valley sweeps northward, until it suddenly breaks off in precipices three thousand feet down into the King’s Cañon.

The morning was wholly consumed in walking up this gently inclined plane of granite, our way leading over the glacier-polished foldings and along graded undulations among labyrinths of alpine garden and wildernesses of erratic bowlders, little lake-basins, and scattered clusters of dwarfed and sombre pine.

About noon we came suddenly upon the brink of a precipice which sank sharply from our feet into the gulf of the King’s Cañon. Directly opposite us rose Mount Brewer, and up out of the depths of those vast sheets of frozen snow swept spiry buttress-ridges, dividing the upper heights into those amphitheatres over which we had struggled on our outward journey. Straight across from our point of view was the chamber of rock and ice where we had camped on the first night. The wall at our feet fell sharp and rugged, its lower two-thirds hidden from our view by the projections of a thousand feet of crags. Here and there as we looked down, small patches of ice, held in rough hollows, rested upon the steep surface, but it was too abrupt for any great fields of snow. I dislodged a bowlder upon the edge and watched it bound down the rocky precipice, dash over eaves a thousand feet below us, and disappear, the crash of its fall coming up to us from the unseen depths fainter and fainter, until the air only trembled with confused echoes.

A long look at the pass to the south of Mount Brewer, where we had parted from our friends, animated us with courage to begin the descent, which we did with utmost care, for the rocks, becoming more and more glacier-smoothed, afforded us hardly any firm footholds. When down about eight hundred feet we again rolled rocks ahead of us, and saw them disappear over the eaves, and only heard the sound of their stroke after many seconds, which convinced us that directly below lay a great precipice.

At this juncture the soles came entirely off Cotter’s shoes, and we stopped upon a little cliff of granite to make him moccasins of our provision bags and slips of blanket, tying them on as firmly as we could with the extra straps and buckskin thongs. Climbing with these proved so insecure that I made Cotter go behind me, knowing that under ordinary circumstances I could stop him if he fell.

Here and there in the clefts of the rocks grew stunted pine bushes, their roots twisted so firmly into the crevices that we laid hold of them with the utmost confidence whenever they came within our reach. In this way we descended to within fifty feet of the brink, having as yet no knowledge of the cliffs below, except our general memory of their aspect from the Mount Brewer wall.

The rock was so steep that we descended in a sitting posture, clinging with our hands and heels. I heard Cotter say, “I think I must take off these moccasins and try it barefooted, for I don’t believe I can make it.” These words were instantly followed by a startled cry, and I looked round to see him slide quickly toward me, struggling and clutching at the smooth granite. As he slid by I made a grab for him with my right hand, catching him by the shirt, and, throwing myself as far in the other direction as I could, seized with my left hand a little pine tuft, which held us. I asked Cotter to edge along a little to the left, where he could get a brace with his feet and relieve me of his weight, which he cautiously did. I then threw a couple of turns with the lasso round the roots of the pine bush, and we were safe, though hardly more than twenty feet from the brink. The pressure of curiosity to get a look over that edge was so strong within me that I lengthened out sufficient lasso to reach the end, and slid slowly to the edge, where, leaning over, I looked down, getting a full view of the wall for miles. Directly beneath, a sheer cliff of three or four hundred feet stretched down to a pile of débris which rose to unequal heights along its face, reaching the very crest not more than a hundred feet south of us. From that point to the bottom of the cañon, broken rocks, ridges rising through vast sweeps of débris, tufts of pine and frozen bodies of ice covered the further slope.

I returned to Cotter, and, having loosened ourselves from the pine bush, inch by inch we crept along the granite until we supposed ourselves to be just over the top of the débris pile, where I found a firm brace for my feet, and lowered Cotter to the edge. He sang out, “All right!” and climbed over on the uppermost débris, his head only remaining in sight of me; when I lay down upon my back, making knapsack and body do friction duty, and, letting myself move, followed Cotter and reached his side.

From that point the descent required two hours of severe, constant labor, which was monotonous of itself, and would have proved excessively tiresome but for the constant interest of glacial geology beneath us. When at last we reached the bottom and found ourselves upon a velvety green meadow, beneath the shadow of wide-armed pines, we realized the amount of muscular force we had used up, and threw ourselves down for a rest of half an hour, when we rose, not quite renewed, but fresh enough to finish the day’s climb.

In a few minutes we stood upon the rocks just above King’s River,—a broad, white torrent fretting its way along the bottom of an impassable gorge. Looking down the stream, we saw that our right bank was a continued precipice, affording, so far as we could see, no possible descent to the river’s margin, and indeed, had we gotten down, the torrent rushed with such fury that we could not possibly have crossed it. To the south of us, a little way up stream, the river flowed out from a broad, oval lake, three quarters of a mile in length, which occupied the bottom of the granite basin. Unable to cross the torrent, we must either swim the lake or climb round its head. Upon our side the walls of the basin curved to the head of the lake in sharp, smooth precipices, or broken slopes of débris, while on the opposite side its margin was a beautiful shore of emerald meadow, edged with a continuous grove of coniferous trees. Once upon this other side, we should have completed the severe part of our journey, crossed the gulf, and have left all danger behind us; for the long slope of granite and ice which rose upon the west side of the cañon and the Mount Brewer wall opposed to us no trials save those of simple fatigue.

Around the head of the lake were crags and precipices in singularly forbidding arrangement. As we turned thither we saw no possible way of overcoming them. At its head the lake lay in an angle of the vertical wall, sharp and straight like the corner of a room; about three hundred feet in height, and for two hundred and fifty feet of this a pyramidal pile of blue ice rose from the lake, rested against the corner, and reached within forty feet of the top. Looking into the deep blue water of the lake, I concluded that in our exhausted state it was madness to attempt to swim it. The only alternative was to scale that slender pyramid of ice and find some way to climb the forty feet of smooth wall above it; a plan we chose perforce, and started at once to put into execution, determined that if we were unsuccessful we would fire a dead log which lay near, warm ourselves thoroughly, and attempt the swim. At its base the ice mass overhung the lake like a roof, under which the water had melted its way for a distance of not less than a hundred feet, a thin eave overhanging the water. To the very edge of this I cautiously went, and, looking down into the lake, saw through its beryl depths the white granite blocks strewn upon the bottom at least one hundred feet below me. It was exceedingly transparent, and, under ordinary circumstances, would have been a most tempting place for a dive; but at the end of our long fatigue, and with the still unknown tasks ahead, I shrank from a swim in such a chilly temperature.

We found the ice-angle difficultly steep, but made our way successfully along its edge, clambering up the crevices melted between its body and the smooth granite to a point not far from the top, where the ice had considerably narrowed, and rocks overhanging it encroached so closely that we were obliged to change our course and make our way with cut steps out upon its front. Streams of water, dropping from the overhanging rock-eaves at many points, had worn circular shafts into the ice, three feet in diameter and twenty feet in depth. Their edges offered us our only foothold, and we climbed from one to another, equally careful of slipping upon the slope itself, or falling into the wells. Upon the top of the ice we found a narrow, level platform, upon which we stood together, resting our backs in the granite corner, and looked down the awful pathway of King’s Cañon, until the rest nerved us up enough to turn our eyes upward at the forty feet of smooth granite which lay between us and safety. Here and there were small projections from its surface, little, protruding knobs of feldspar, and crevices riven into its face for a few inches.

As we tied ourselves together, I told Cotter to hold himself in readiness to jump down into one of these in case I fell, and started to climb up the wall, succeeding quite well for about twenty feet. About two feet above my hands was a crack, which, if my arms had been long enough to reach, would probably have led me to the very top; but I judged it beyond my powers, and, with great care, descended to the side of Cotter, who believed that his superior length of arm would enable him to make the reach.

I planted myself against the rock, and he started cautiously up the wall. Looking down the glare front of ice, it was not pleasant to consider at what velocity a slip would send me to the bottom, or at what angle, and to what probable depth, I should be projected into the ice-water. Indeed, the idea of such a sudden bath was so annoying that I lifted my eyes toward my companion. He reached my farthest point without great difficulty, and made a bold spring for the crack, reaching it without an inch to spare, and holding on wholly by his fingers. He thus worked himself slowly along the crack toward the top, at last getting his arms over the brink, and gradually drawing his body up and out of sight. It was the most splendid piece of slow gymnastics I ever witnessed. For a moment he said nothing; but when I asked if he was all right, cheerfully repeated, “All right.”

It was only a moment’s work to send up the two knapsacks and barometer, and receive again my end of the lasso. As I tied it round my breast, Cotter said to me, in an easy, confident tone, “Don’t be afraid to bear your weight.” I made up my mind, however, to make that climb without his aid, and husbanded my strength as I climbed from crack to crack. I got up without difficulty to my former point, rested there a moment, hanging solely by my hands, gathered every pound of strength and atom of will for the reach, then jerked myself upward with a swing, just getting the tips of my fingers into the crack. In an instant I had grasped it with my right hand also. I felt the sinews of my fingers relax a little, but the picture of the slope of ice and the blue lake affected me so strongly that I redoubled my grip, and climbed slowly along the crack until I reached the angle and got one arm over the edge, as Cotter had done. As I rested my body upon the edge and looked up at Cotter, I saw that, instead of a level top, he was sitting upon a smooth, roof-like slope, where the least pull would have dragged him over the brink. He had no brace for his feet, nor hold for his hands, but had seated himself calmly, with the rope tied around his breast, knowing that my only safety lay in being able to make the climb entirely unaided; certain that the least waver in his tone would have disheartened me, and perhaps made it impossible. The shock I received on seeing this affected me for a moment, but not enough to throw me off my guard, and I climbed quickly over the edge. When we had walked back out of danger we sat down upon the granite for a rest.

In all my experience of mountaineering I have never known an act of such real, profound courage as this of Cotter’s. It is one thing, in a moment of excitement, to make a gallant leap, or hold one’s nerves in the iron grasp of will, but to coolly seat one’s self in the door of death, and silently listen for the fatal summons, and this all for a friend,—for he might easily have cast loose the lasso and saved himself,—requires as sublime a type of courage as I know.

But a few steps back we found a thicket of pine overlooking our lake, by which there flowed a clear rill of snow-water. Here, in the bottom of the great gulf, we made our bivouac; for we were already in the deep evening shadows, although the mountain-tops to the east of us still burned in the reflected light. It was the luxury of repose which kept me awake half an hour or so, in spite of my vain attempts at sleep. To listen for the pulsating sound of waterfalls and arrowy rushing of the brook by our beds was too deep a pleasure to quickly yield up.

Under the later moonlight I rose and went out upon the open rocks, allowing myself to be deeply impressed by the weird Dantesque surroundings—darkness, out of which to the sky towered stern, shaggy bodies of rock; snow, uncertainly moonlit with cold pallor; and at my feet the basin of the lake, still, black, and gemmed with reflected stars, like the void into which Dante looked through the bottomless gulf of Dis. A little way off there appeared upon the brink of a projecting granite cornice two dimly seen forms; pines I knew them to be, yet their motionless figures seemed bent forward, gazing down the cañon; and I allowed myself to name them Mantuan and Florentine, thinking at the same time how grand and spacious the scenery, how powerful their attitude, and how infinitely more profound the mystery of light and shade, than any of those hard, theatrical conceptions with which Doré has sought to shut in our imagination. That artist, as I believe, has reached a conspicuous failure from an overbalancing love of solid, impenetrable darkness. There is in all his Inferno landscape a certain sharp boundary between the real and unreal, and never the infinite suggestiveness of great regions of half-light, in which everything may be seen, nothing recognized. Without waking Cotter, I crept back to my blankets, and to sleep.

The morning of our fifth and last day’s tramp must have dawned cheerfully; at least, so I suppose from its aspect when we first came back to consciousness, surprised to find the sun risen from the eastern mountain-wall, and the whole gorge flooded with its direct light. Rising as good as new from our mattress of pine twigs, we hastened to take breakfast, and started up the long, broken slope of the Mount Brewer wall. To reach the pass where we had parted from our friends required seven hours of slow, laborious climbing, in which we took advantage of every outcropping spine of granite and every level expanse of ice to hasten at the top of our speed. Cotter’s feet were severely cut; his tracks upon the snow were marked by stains of blood, yet he kept on with undiminished spirit, never once complaining. The perfect success of our journey so inspired us with happiness that we forgot danger and fatigue, and chatted in liveliest strain.

It was about two o’clock when we reached the summit, and rested a moment to look back over our new Alps, which were hard and distinct under direct, unpoetic light; yet with all their dense gray and white reality, their long, sculptured ranks, and cold, still summits, we gave them a lingering, farewell look, which was not without its deep fulness of emotion, then turned our backs and hurried down the débris slope into the rocky amphitheatre at the foot of Mount Brewer, and by five o’clock had reached our old camp-ground. We found here a note pinned to a tree, informing us that the party had gone down into the lower cañon, five miles below, that they might camp in better pasturage.

The wind had scattered the ashes of our old camp-fire, and banished from it the last sentiment of home. We hurried on, climbing among the rocks which reached down to the crest of the great lateral moraine, and then on in rapid stride along its smooth crest, riveting our eyes upon the valley below, where we knew the party must be camped.

At last, faintly curling above the sea of green tree-tops, a few faint clouds of smoke wafted upward into the air. We saw them with a burst of strong emotion, and ran down the steep flank of the moraine at the top of our speed. Our shouts were instantly answered by the three voices of our friends, who welcomed us to their camp-fire with tremendous hugs.

After we had outlined for them the experience of our days, and as we lay outstretched at our ease, warm in the blaze of the glorious camp-fire, Brewer said to me: “King, you have relieved me of a dreadful task. For the last three days I have been composing a letter to your family, but somehow I did not get beyond, ‘It becomes my painful duty to inform you.’”

V
THE NEWTYS OF PIKE
1864

Our return from Mount Tyndall to such civilization as flourishes around the Kaweah outposts was signalized by us chiefly as to our cuisine, which offered now such bounties as the potato, and once a salad, in which some middle-aged lettuce became the vehicle for a hollow mockery of dressing. Two or three days, during which we dined at brief intervals, served to completely rest us, and put in excellent trim for further campaigning all except Professor Brewer, upon whom a constant toothache wore painfully,—my bullet-mould failing even upon the third trial to extract the unruly member.

It was determined we should ride together to Visalia, seventy miles away, and the farther we went the more impatient became my friend, till we agreed to push ahead through day and night, and reached the village at about sunrise in a state of reeling sleepiness quite indescribably funny.

At evening, when it became time to start back for our mountain-camp, my friend at last yielded consent to my project of climbing the Kern Sierras to attempt Mount Whitney; so I parted from him, and, remaining at Visalia, outfitted myself with a pack-horse, two mounted men, and provisions enough for a two weeks’ trip.

I purposely avoid telling by what route I entered the Sierras, because there lingers in my breast a desire to see once more that lovely region, and failing, as I do, to confide in the people, I fear lest, if the camp I am going to describe should be recognized, I might, upon revisiting the scene, suffer harm, or even come to an untimely end. I refrain, then, from telling by what road I found myself entering the region of the pines one lovely twilight evening, two days after leaving Visalia. Pines, growing closer and closer, from sentinels gathered to groups, then stately groves, and at last, as the evening wore on, assembled in regular forest, through whose open tops the stars shone cheerfully.

I came upon an open meadow, hearing in front the rush of a large brook, and directly reached two camp-fires, where were a number of persons. My two hirelings caught and unloaded the pack-horse, and set about their duties, looking to supper and the animals, while I prospected the two camps. That just below me, on the same side of the brook, I found to be the bivouac of a company of hunters, who, in the ten minutes of my call, made free with me, hospitably offering a jug of whiskey, and then went on in their old, eternal way of making bear-stories out of whole cloth.

I left them with a belief that my protoplasm and theirs must be different, in spite of Mr. Huxley, and passed across the brook to the other camp. Under noble groups of pines smouldered a generous heap of coals, the ruins of a mighty log. A little way from this lay a confused pile of bedclothes, partly old and half-bald buffalo-robes, but in the main, thick strata of what is known to irony as comforters, upon which, outstretched in wretched awkwardness of position, was a family, all with their feet to the fire, looking as if they had been blown over in one direction, or knocked down by a single bombshell. On the extremities of this common bed, with the air of having gotten as far from each other as possible, the mother and father of the Pike family reclined; between them were two small children—a girl and a boy—and a huge girl, who, next the old man, lay flat upon her back, her mind absorbed in the simple amusement of waving one foot (a cow-hide eleven) slowly across the fire, squinting, with half-shut eye, first at the vast shoe and thence at the fire, alternately hiding bright places and darting the foot quickly in the direction of any new display of heightening flame. The mother was a bony sister, in the yellow, shrunken, of sharp visage, in which were prominent two cold eyes and a positively poisonous mouth; her hair, the color of faded hay, tangled in a jungle around her head. She rocked jerkily to and fro, removing at intervals a clay pipe from her mouth in order to pucker her thin lips up to one side, and spit with precision upon a certain spot in the fire, which she seemed resolved to prevent from attaining beyond a certain faint glow.

I have rarely felt more in difficulty for an overture to conversation, and was long before venturing to propose, “You seem to have a pleasant camp-spot here.”

The old woman sharply, and in almost a tone of affront, answered, “They’s wus, and then again they’s better.”

“Doos well for our hogs,” inserted the old man. “We’ve a band of pork that make out to find feed.”

“Oh! how many have you?” I asked.

“Nigh three thousand.”

“Won’t you set?” asked Madame; then, turning, “You, Susan, can’t you try for to set up, and not spread so? Hain’t you no manners, say?”