The proper vehicle for mountain study is not yet available. A great mountain range is like a great public character, there is much more to it than is presented to the observation, and it is not open to familiarity. But if one could fly high and wide over its cloud-lifting summits, one might learn something of its private relations.
From such a vantage it would instantly appear how distinct are the Nevadas (nieve, snowy) among the Sierras of California. A very Bonaparte of mountains, new-born and lording it over the ancient ranges, not content with its vast empery but swinging north into the unpre-empted icy regions. San Bernardino and San Jacinto are as far from it as the Faubourg St. Germain from an island in the sea. Sierra Madre is of the Coast [150] Range; Shasta a fire-hole, a revolutionist; the true Sierra is the midriff of a continent. From its northern extremity1 one sees the sun in a circle and the Northern Lights; that portion of it we know as Sierra Nevada swings into the state above Honey Lake, and ends southward in a tumble of blunt peaks below Kern River. This is quite enough, however, for Californians to make free with, and more than they can appreciate.
Geographically2 the range begins on the south at Tehachapi, but at Walker's Pass, a day's journey to the north, is the first appearance of its most salient characteristic, the great Sierra Fault. In its youth the range suffered incredible cataclysms3. For two hundred miles the great eastern plain dropped; weighted as it was with its withered4 aristocracy of hills—how weazened and old you can see to this day—it tore sharply downward, and the depth of that fall from the heaven-affronting peak of Whitney to the desert valley of Inyo is a matter of two miles of sheer descent.
The whole Sierra along the line of faultage has the contour of a wave about to break. It swings up in long water-shaped lines from the valley of the San Joaquin, and rears its jagged [151] crest6 above the abrupt7 desert shore. Seen from close under, some of these two- and three-thousand-foot precipices8 have the pitch of toppling waters. As they rose new-riven from the earth their proportions must have been more than terrifying.
Later the Ice Age bore downward from the north, and through immeasurable years carved the fractured granite9 into shapes of enduring beauty. It rounded the great jutting10 fronts, it insured them against the tooth of time with the keen icy polish with which they shine still against the morning. It gouged11 narrow wall-sided cañons, cut the course of rivers, and sinking like a graver's tool into the heart of the range, scooped12 out deep wells of pleasantness. Afterward13, when the ice was old, it must have moved more slowly, for the lines it left, retreating northward14, are more flowing, the hill-crowns rounder. And then the mountain was besieged15 with trees. They stormed it, scaled its free precipices; you can see by the thick mould of the valleys what ranks and ranks of them went down, and along the snow-line how by the persistence16 of assault they are bent17 and contorted.
This is the whole effect of the sombre swathes of pine that mask the Sierra slopes. They march [152] along the water-courses, they climb up sheer precipices in staggering files, trooping in the passes; across the smooth meadow spaces they lock arms, they await the word of command. By a very little observation they are seen to be ranged in orderly companies. Here a warm current of air travelling steadily18 from the superheated valleys carries the life zone higher, there a defiant19 bony ridge20 drops it a few thousand feet, but the relative arrangement of species does not greatly vary. The broad oaks, like reverend grandsires, from the foothills see the procession go by, they follow as far as the gates of the mountain, crutched21 and bowed. All the lower cañons are full of a rabble22 of deciduous23 trees, chinquapins, scrub oak, madroño, full of gay camp-followers, lilac, dogwood, azaleas, strumpet penstemons, flaunting24 lupins, monk's-hood, columbine.
The grey nut pine, wide-branched, unwarlike but serviceable, opens the ranks of conifers. Then the long-leaved pines begin, ponderoso, Coulteri, and the slender, arrowy, fire-resisting attenuata. On the western slope, increasing as they go northward, the redwood holds all the open country, but it is no climber like monticola, the largest of all true pines, the captain of the Sierra forests. The [153] firs usurp25 the water-borders and the low moraines; clannish26, incommunicable, they seem not to find it worth while to grow unless they grow stately. Above all these range the thin-barked pines, the lodgepole, Douglas spruce, librocedrus, and hardy27 junipers in windy passes. About the meadows and lake-borders the quaking asps push like children between the knees along the line; and highest, most persistent28, the creeping-limbed, wind-depressed white-barked pine, under whose matted boughs30 the wild sheep bed.
The trees have each their own voice—a degree of flexibility31 or length of needles upon which the wind harps32 to produce its characteristic note. The traveller in the dark of mountain nights knows his way among them as by the street cries of his own city. The creaking of the firs, the sough of the long-leaved pines, the whispering whistle of the lodgepole pine, the delicate frou-frou of the redwoods in a wind, these come out for him in the darkness with the night scent5 of moth-haunted flowers. But there is one tree that for the footer of the mountain trails is voiceless; it speaks no doubt, but it speaks only to the austere33 mountain-heads, to the mindful winds and the watching stars. It speaks as men speak to one another and are not [154] heard by the little ants crawling over their boots. This is the "big tree," the sequoia34. In something less than a score of forest patches about the rim35 of the Twin Valleys, the sequoia abides36, out of some possible preglacial period, out of some past of which nothing is left to us but the fading memory of the "giants in those days." The age of individual big trees can be computed37 in terms of human history. There are evidences written in the rings of these that they endured the drouth which made the famine in the days of Ahab the king, against which Elijah prayed. These are growing trees whose seeds are fertile.
One might make a very dramatic collocation of the rise and fall of empires against the life period of a single sequoia, and that would be easier than to transcribe38 by mere39 phrases the impression of one of these green towers of silence on the sense. Single and deeply corrugated40 as a Corinthian column, with only a lightly-branched crown for a capital, they spire41 for five thousand years or so, and then the leaf-crown becomes rounded to a dome42 in which the winds breed. Warm days of Spring, their young nestling zephyrs43 come fluttering down the deep wells of shade to shake the saplings of a hundred years. In Summer the fine-leafed [155] foliage44 catches the sun like spray, diffusing45 vaporous blueness; but the majesty46 of their gigantic trunks is incommunicable. After a while the stifling47 sense of awe48 breaks before it, and you go on with your small affairs as children will go on playing even in the royal presence.
The name Sequoia is one of the few cheering notes among our habitual49 botanical stupidities—an attempt to express quality as it is humanly measured in a name. There was once an American Cadmus, Sequoyah, a Cherokee who invented an Indian alphabet and taught his tribe to read. Seeing them outnumbered in their own territory, he started west with the idea of founding a great Indian empire. He was last seen trailing north across the desert and was heard of no more. Tradition has it that he reached the forest of the upper Kern River and gave the trees his name. At least no botanist50 with his nose in a book has usurped51 it.
Forests are for cover. They mask not only the naked rock, but the paths of deer and bear and bighorn. Under the spire-pointed ranks of conifers that look so black from above, verging52 to blueness, a world of furtive53 folk goes on. A world of birds is in its branches, squirrels nimble as [156] sparrows, but scarcely anything of this is visible to the watcher on the heights. Rabbits playing on your lawn would be more noticeable in proportion than the seldom-seen bighorn leading his light-footed young from ledge54 to rocky ledge. The jealous trees cover the trails and obscure the passes.
As you come up through them you observe the flat, soddy spaces of old lake basins, green as jewels, and the hanging meadows gay with cascades55 of flowers, the stream tangles56, the new-made moraines bright with bindweed and sulphur-flower. But from the heights all this lovely detail is hidden by the overlapping57 tents of boughs. Here and there a stream leaps forth58 at the falls like a sword from a green scabbard, or higher up, may be traced as the silver wire on which are strung unrippled lakes as blue as cobalt. Great chains of such lakes lead down from the snow-line to the foothill borders, encroached upon by the silent ranks of trees. As they go down they show soddy borders, they tend to fill and to grow meadows where presently deep-rooting trees assume their stations. This is the strategic rule for the taking of a granite mountain. First the grinding ice and the disintegrating60 water; what the [157] streams wash down collects in the glacier61-ploughed basins. It makes lake borders by which the grass comes in—the small grass that is mightier62 than mountains, that eats them for its food. Lakes at the lower levels become meadows, then trees arrive; they overrun the soddy ground, the snow-manured moraines. The trees themselves take centuries to fruition. At a later stage men dispossess the forest and build cities, but this has not yet come to the Sierras. There is something indomitable in the will of the trees to spread and climb. In the floor of Yosemite and Hetch Hetchy there are hundred-year-old oaks of full form and generous growth, and on the slopes above them the same oaks and of almost the same age are so dwarfed63 by drouth and altitude that they are not knee-high to a man, but they keep the due proportions of their type. A white bark pine will climb where the weight of the winter drifts is so heavy that it is never able to lift its decumbent trunk from the ground, clinging like ivy64 to the wall in which it roots.
In the Spring the rich florescence of the conifers sheds pollen65 in drifts that, carried down the melting water, warn the sheep-herder and the orchardist66 a hundred miles away of the advancing season. [158] A pine forest in flower is one of the things worth seeing which is most seldom seen, for at its best the high passes are still choked by snow, the lakes ice-locked, the trails dangerous. And then the blossoms, yellow and crimson67 tassels68 and rosy69 spathes, are carried on the leafy crowns high over the heads of the most adventurous70 foresters. What one finds, as late as the end of June when the trails are open, is a stain of pollen on the lingering snow, and great clouds of it flying wherever a bough29 is brushed by a light wing. In the autumn the whole wood is full of the click and glint of the winged seeds. Storms of them, like clouds of locusts71, are carried past on the wind, to be dropped in the nearest clearing or to find a chance lodging72 in a moss73-lined crevice74 of the weathered headlands.
But from the heights, all feeling for the process of the forest is lost in the sense of its irresistible75 march—it creeps and winds, it waits darkly for the word. Above the tree-line no sound ascends76 but a faint vibration77, the body of sound making itself felt in the silence. On windless days the forest lies black like weed at the bottom of a lake of air as clear as a vacuum. When the great wind rivers pour about the peaks, it can be seen lashing78 [159] like weed in the currents, but still almost soundlessly—the roar of it passes down the cañons, and is heard in the cities of the plain. But if the peaks cannot hear what the trees are plotting about, it is not so with the voices of the water. These are sharper, more definitive79; they rise re-echoing from the rocky walls and are recognisable each by its distinctive80 note at incredible heights of the sheer, glassy, granite frontlets.
In the glacial valleys, such as Yosemite, Tehipite, and Hetch Hetchy, where young rivers drop from the headlands in long streaming falls, the noise of them contending with the wind makes mimic81 thunder. Immense curtains of falling water are tossed this way and that, they are caught up and suspended in mid-air, and let fall crashing to the lower levels. When the wind blows straight up the cañon they will rear against it, and leap out a shining arc, shattering in mid-air like bursting bombs of spray. But later in the season, when the streams are heavy with the melting snows, the wind itself is shattered by the weight of falling water—it exhausts itself in obscuring clouds of silver dust. When from Whitney or Williamson or King's Mountain you can see half-a-hundred such young [160] rivers roaring to the morning, it is as beautiful and as terrifying as the sight of youth to timorous82 age. They go leaping with their shining shields, and their shouting shakes the rocks. Neither you nor they believe that the most and the best they will come to is an irrigating83 canal between sober rows of prunes84 and barley85.
Higher than the forests, or the waters rising out of them, is the Py-weack, the Land of Shining Rocks. They shine with glacier polish; horses on the high trails sniff86 suspiciously at their glittering surfaces. Time can lay slight hold on them by thunder, by frost, and the little grey moss; it has not yet subdued87 the front of Oppapago. Here between snowless ribs88 and buttresses89 are the shrunken glaciers91 that feed the streams, little toy models of the ancient rivers of ice. The snowfields of the Sierras are not so inconsiderable as they seem: they are dwarfed by the precipices among which they hide. Inaccessible92 to ordinary mountain travel, they make their best showing from the surrounding plains, where, lifted in the middle air, they glow with ethereal whiteness. Close by they display a bewildering waste of broken ice, boulders93, and crevasses94, made bleaker96 by the cobalt shadows.
North the line of peaks stretches, broken by the passes that give access to the west. Between them, above the source of streams, in the ice-gouged hollows, lie unfathomable waters that take all their life from the sky. Or perhaps they are reservoirs from which the sky is made, fluid jade97 and azulite and hyacinth and chrysoprase, as if the skies of many days had run their colours in those bleak95 bowls. For at this altitude ............