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- Herausgeber: Vertebrate Digital
- Kategorie: Wissenschaft und neue Technologien
- Serie: John Muir: The Eight Wilderness-Discovery Books
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2018
'How glorious a greeting the sun gives the mountains! To behold this alone is worth the pains of any excursion a thousand times over.'John Muir is known internationally for his dedication to protecting the environment and for founding The Sierra Club in 1892. His first book, as Muir authority Terry Gifford writes in the foreword, 'became the bible of the fledgling Sierra Club, which is now a major national environmental activists' organisation with branches in every corner of America'.The Mountains of California not only details Muir's visits to the magnificent mountains along the Sierra Nevada Range, which he affectionately calls 'The Range of Light', but also the stunning glaciers, forests and landscapes that he encounters: 'Climbing higher, I saw for the first time the gradual dwarfing of the pines in compliance with climate … patches of the dwarf vaccinium with its round flowers sprinkled in the grass like purple hail; while in every direction the landscape stretched sublimely away in fresh wildness: a manuscript written by the hand of nature alone.'Throughout the book, Muir's philosophy of nature's ability to soothe and amaze is evident. He heart-warmingly discusses at length how his encounters with animals, such as the Douglas squirrel, cheered him so. This is a truly beautiful read; Muir's writing, embedded with emotion, wit, and at times, humour, will never fail to speak to his reader.The enthusiasm contained within these pages is infectious, and as well as making a powerful read, Muir will inspire you, too, to 'come and see' the innumerable delights that nature can offer:'The best words only hint at [California's] charms. Come to the mountains and see.'
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The Mountains of California
A love affair with the Sierra Nevada Range
John Muir
Contents
Series introduction by Terry Gifford
We have never needed nature more than now. At a time when our relationship with our home planet is under stress, the positive words of John Muir (1838–1914) can help us to reconnect, retune, and readjust what it is that we should value for the survival of our species. In 1901 John Muir opened his book Our National Parks with words that might resonate for readers today: ‘Thousands of tired, nerve-shaken, over-civilised people are beginning to find that going to the mountains is going home’. This Scot, transplanted to the USA at the age of eleven by his family to help carve a farm out of the wilds of Wisconsin, came to invent the modern notion of a national park for the ‘recreation’ of future generations. His initial inspiration was Yosemite Valley, deep in the Sierra Nevada mountains of California, where he was sought out by the US President, Theodore Roosevelt, who was persuaded on a characteristic Muir camping trip that such an uplifting place and its rich ecology should be preserved in perpetuity for the nation.
Anticipating the modern concept of ‘biophilia’ – our need for regular contact between our inner nature with the outer nature around us – Muir’s opening sentence continued with the idea ‘that wildness is a necessity; and that mountain parks and reservations are useful not only as fountains of timber and irrigating rivers, but as fountains of life’. Muir’s suggestion that the fountains of our own lives need to be in contact with the self-renewing cycles of life in wild landscapes led him to be recognised as the founder of the American conservation movement. His establishment of the Sierra Club – still to this day a vigorous local and national conservation organisation in the US – arose because Muir understood the importance of local people holding government to account through membership of a national environmental movement. Muir knew that national policies would be needed if the balance between the economic ‘usefulness’ of timber and rivers was to be controlled. By the end of Our National Parks Muir’s tone had changed. ‘Any fool can destroy trees’, he declared in full preaching mode. ‘God has cared for these trees … but he cannot save them from fools – only Uncle Sam can do that’.
Actually, it was Muir’s ecological knowledge, gained by close observation, by scientific experiment and by always reflecting upon the larger forces at work in nature, that resulted in insights ahead of their time, like the idea that unregulated clear cutting of timber reduced the usefulness of those irrigating rivers as ‘fountains of life’. At a time just before the notion of ‘Oekology’ was being proposed, Muir wrote that, ‘When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe’. And it is in such unassuming, seductively approachable prose that Muir explored his vision of nature and our relationship with it. It was as a popular writer of newspaper and journal articles that Muir gained his following as a writer. Late in life he began crafting these little lyrical discoveries into the inspirational books that speak so clearly to our heightened environmental awareness today.
Foreword by Terry Gifford
It is hard to believe that The Mountains of California was John Muir’s first book. One might have thought that the enthusiasm of the discoveries in the journals of My First Summer in the Sierra would have made a more attractive option, or that the radical reflections of youthful independence in the journals of The Thousand Mile Walk to the Gulf would have made an easier first book. For the fact of the matter is that Muir dreaded having to sit down to write a book. The vibrant essay had become the mode by which he had made his name and had exerted his influence, and this book was really a collection of earlier essays with only two new chapters. But at the age of fifty-five he had to confront the ‘moraines’ of papers and notebooks on the floor of the ‘scribble den’ of his home in Martinez, California, to make his first book. ‘In it I have ventured to drop in to the poetry that I like, but have taken good care to place it between bluffs and buttresses of bald, glacial, geological facts’, he wrote to his publisher in the East, Robert Underwood Johnson. Indeed, it was the combination of information and anecdote that brought such admiring reviews from the most significant scientists and conservationists of the time, on both sides of the Atlantic.
Actually, there was an urgent need for a book of this title because Muir had formed, with others, the Sierra Club in June 1892, which had two purposes. First, to bring supporters into the new Yosemite National Park (established two years earlier) in its ‘outings’ that were led by Muir, and second, to provide an alert interest group to monitor the protection supposedly brought about by the new designation. Thus, The Mountains of California, published in 1894, became the bible of the fledgling Sierra Club, which is now a major national environmental activists’ organisation with branches in every corner of America. But this book was also, as Muir’s biographer Donald Worster says, ‘an enduring classic of American nature writing’. There are several reasons for this. One is the authority of Muir’s quarter of a century of experience in seeking scientific discoveries in the Sierras in a broad range of disciplines – from botany to glaciation – combined with the lightness of touch in his exhilarated and inspirational prose.
After an introductory chapter, Muir hits the reader with his major discovery: ‘The Glaciers’. Whilst the professionals of the California State Geological Survey at the time Muir first entered the mountains of California, Josiah Whitney and his deputy Clarence King, believed that Yosemite Valley was caused by a single collapse of the valley floor along a fault line, Muir not only observed the striations of glaciation, but found glaciers high in the mountains that he proved to be still at work by painstakingly measuring their movement at an inch a day. Whitney dismissed Muir’s claims as those of a ‘sheep herder’ and King as those of ‘an ambitious amateur’. They had to eat their words. In this chapter, Muir tells the story of his discovery and how, ‘pushing my explorations summer after summer’ he found active glaciers all over the range. In his final sentence he reveals that even Mount Whitney bore clear signs of ‘the action of its ancient glaciers’, despite the views of the leading state geologist after whom it was named.
At the same time as making new information available to the public in a personalised and immensely readable way, Muir is keen to encourage them to visit the mountains. Not only is this based on his democratic instincts as himself an immigrant to America, this but was always a part of his political strategy for recruiting voters for landscape conservation. But perhaps deeper than this is Muir’s belief that quality of life – physical health and spiritual health – can be enhanced by direct contact with nature. If this sounds rather sombre, Muir’s tongue-in-cheek way of expressing it is evidence of his lightness of touch. The mountain passes, he admits, might seem forbidding ‘gloomy gashes’ to a lowlander, but ‘none are safer’, and in any case, ‘these mountain mansions are decent, delightful, even divine, places to die in, compared with the doleful chambers of civilisation’. And he goes further: ‘Even the sick should try these so-called dangerous passes, because for every unfortunate they kill, they cure a thousand’. How could a reader resist being tempted into the mountains of California with such a writer as a guide?
But Muir is also prepared to admit to being severely scared himself on one occasion when he ventured out a little too far onto a rock face on Mount Ritter. Despite being now recognised as probably the best mountaineer in America in the 1870s, his solo climbing explorations nearly came to a premature end, as vividly described in the much anthologised chapter ‘A Near View of the High Sierra’. In places the rock was glazed with ice which he had to chip off with stones. ‘After gaining a point about half-way to the top, I was suddenly brought to a dead stop, with arms outspread, clinging close to the face of the rock, unable to move hand or foot either up or down. My doom appeared fixed. I must fall.’ In the shaky hands of such a writer, who would not want to read on?
Those who do so will find Muir up a tree in the chapter ‘A Wind-Storm in the Forests’: ‘We all travel the milky way together, trees and men; but it never occurred to me until this storm-day, while swinging in the wind, that trees are travellers, in the ordinary sense’. Actually it was Muir’s chapter on ‘The Forests’ that made the most significant impact upon the landscapes of the whole of America. Muir made a link between forests and water supply – ‘cut off the tress, and the streams will vanish’ – and he understood the long-term effects of the uncontrolled logging of his day. When he wrote that this urgently needed ‘the most watchful attention of government’, he was promptly brought on to a government survey of the nation’s forests which led to the designation of the forest reserves that Muir called for in this book.
Despite observant chapters on ‘The Bee-Pastures’, ‘The Wild Sheep’, ‘The Douglas Squirrel’ and even ‘The Water-Ouzel’ (the Dipper), The Mountains of California is actually so much more than ‘nature writing: It is a love story written to change lives.
– CHAPTER 1 –
The Sierra Nevada
Go where you may within the bounds of California, mountains are ever in sight, charming and glorifying every landscape. Yet so simple and massive is the topography of the state in general views, that the main central portion displays only one valley, and two chains of mountains which seem almost perfectly regular in trend and height: the Coast Range on the west side, the Sierra Nevada on the east. These two ranges coming together in curves on the north and south enclose a magnificent basin, with a level floor more than 400 miles long, and from thirty-five to sixty miles wide. This is the grand Central Valley of California, the waters of which have only one outlet to the sea through the Golden Gate. But with this general simplicity of features there is great complexity of hidden detail. The Coast Range, rising as a grand green barrier against the ocean, from 2,000 to 8,000 feet high is composed of innumerable forest-crowned spurs, ridges, and rolling hill-waves which enclose a multitude of smaller valleys; some looking out through long, forest-lined vistas to the sea; others, with but few trees, to the Central Valley; while a thousand others yet smaller are embosomed and concealed in mild, round-browed hills, each with its own climate, soil, and productions.
Making your way through the mazes of the Coast Range to the summit of any of the inner peaks or passes opposite San Francisco, in the clear springtime, the grandest and most telling of all California landscapes is outspread before you. At your feet lies the great Central Valley glowing golden in the sunshine, extending north and south farther than the eye can reach, one smooth, flowery, lake-like bed of fertile soil. Along its eastern margin rises the mighty Sierra, miles in height, reposing like a smooth cumulous cloud in the sunny sky, and so gloriously coloured, and so luminous, it seems to be not clothed with light, but wholly composed of it, like the wall of some celestial city. Along the top, and extending a good way down, you see a pale, pearl-grey belt of snow; and below it a belt of blue and dark purple, marking the extension of the forests; and along the base of the range a broad belt of rose-purple and yellow, where lie the miner’s gold-fields and the foot-hill gardens. All these coloured belts blending smoothly make a wall of light ineffably fine, and as beautiful as a rainbow, yet firm as adamant.
When I first enjoyed this superb view, one glowing April day, from the summit of the Pacheco Pass, the Central Valley, but little trampled or ploughed as yet, was one furred, rich sheet of golden compositae, and the luminous wall of the mountains shone in all its glory. Then it seemed to me the Sierra should be called not the Nevada, or Snowy Range, but the Range of Light. And after ten years spent in the heart of it, rejoicing and wondering, bathing in its glorious floods of light, seeing the sunbursts of morning among the icy peaks, the noonday radiance on the trees and rocks and snow, the flush of the alpenglow, and a thousand dashing waterfalls with their marvellous abundance of irised spray, it still seems to be above all others the Range of Light: the most divinely beautiful of all the mountain-chains I have ever seen.
The Sierra is about 500 miles long, seventy miles wide, and from 7,000 to nearly 15,000 feet high. In general views no mark of man is visible on it, nor anything to suggest the richness of the life it cherishes, or the depth and grandeur of its sculpture. None of its magnificent forest-crowned ridges rises much above the general level to publish its wealth. No great valley or lake is seen, or river, or group of well-marked features of any kind, standing out in distinct pictures. Even the summit-peaks, so clear and high in the sky, seem comparatively smooth and featureless. Nevertheless, glaciers are still at work in the shadows of the peaks, and thousands of lakes and meadows shine and bloom beneath them, and the whole range is furrowed with canyons to a depth of from 2,000 to 5,000 feet, in which once flowed majestic glaciers, and in which now flow and sing a band of beautiful rivers.
Though of such stupendous depth, these famous canyons are not raw, gloomy, jagged-walled gorges, savage and inaccessible. With rough passages here and there they still make delightful pathways for the mountaineer, conducting from the fertile lowlands to the highest icy fountains as a series of mountain streets, full of charming life and light, graded and sculptured by the ancient glaciers, and presenting, throughout all their courses, a rich variety of novel and attractive scenery, the most attractive that has yet been discovered in the mountain-ranges of the world.
In many places, especially in the middle region of the western flank of the range, the main canyons widen into spacious valleys or parks, diversified like artificial landscape-gardens, with charming groves and meadows, and thickets of blooming bushes, while the lofty, retiring walls, infinitely varied in form and sculpture, are fringed with ferns, flowering-plants of many species, oaks, and evergreens, which find anchorage on a thousand narrow steps and benches; while the whole is enlivened and made glorious with rejoicing streams that come dancing and foaming over the sunny brows of the cliffs to join the shining river that flows in tranquil beauty down the middle of each one of them.
The walls of these park valleys of the Yosemite kind are made up of rocks mountains in size, partly separated from each other by narrow gorges and side-canyons; and they are so sheer in front, and so compactly built together on a level floor, that, comprehensively seen, the parks they enclose look like immense halls of temples lighted from above. Every rock seems to glow with life. Some lean back in majestic repose; others, absolutely sheer, or nearly so, for thousands of feet, advance their brows in thoughtful attitudes beyond their companions, giving welcome to storms and calms alike, seemingly conscious yet heedless of everything going on about them, awful in stern majesty, types of permanence, yet associated with beauty of the frailest and most fleeting forms; their feet set in pine-groves and gay emerald meadows, their brows in the sky; bathed in light, bathed in floods of singing water, while snow-clouds, avalanches, and the winds shine and surge and wreathe about them as the years go by, as if into these mountain mansions nature had taken pains to gather her choicest treasures to draw her lovers into close and confiding communion with her.
Here, too, in the middle region of deepest canyons are the grandest forest-trees, the Sequoia, king of conifers, the noble sugar and yellow pines, Douglas spruce, libocedrus, and the silver firs, each a giant of its kind, assembled together in one and the same forest, surpassing all other coniferous forests in the world, both in the number of its species and in the size and beauty of its trees. The winds flow in melody through their colossal spires, and they are vocal everywhere with the songs of birds and running water. Miles of fragrant ceanothus and manzanita bushes bloom beneath them, and lily gardens and meadows, and damp, ferny glens in endless variety of fragrance and colour, compelling the admiration of every observer. Sweeping on over ridge and valley, these noble trees extend a continuous belt from end to end of the range, only slightly interrupted by sheer-walled canyons at intervals of about fifteen and twenty miles. Here the great burly brown bears delight to roam, harmonizing with the brown boles of the trees beneath which they feed. Deer also dwell here, and find food and shelter in ceanothus tangles, with a multitude of smaller people. Above this region of giants, the trees grow smaller until the utmost limit of the timber line is reached on the stormy mountain-slopes at a height of from ten to twelve thousand feet above the sea, where the dwarf pine is so lowly and hard beset by storms and heavy snow, it is pressed into flat tangles, over the tops of which we may easily walk. Below the main forest belt the trees likewise diminish in size, frost and burning drouth repressing and blasting alike.
The rose-purple zone along the base of the range comprehends nearly all the famous gold region of California. And here it was that miners from every country under the sun assembled in a wild, torrent-like rush to seek their fortunes. On the banks of every river, ravine, and gully they have left their marks. Every gravel- and boulder-bed has been desperately riddled over and over again. But in this region the pick and shovel, once wielded with savage enthusiasm, have been laid away, and only quartz-mining is now being carried on to any considerable extent. The zone in general is made up of low, tawny, waving foot-hills, roughened here and there with brush and trees, and outcropping masses of slate, coloured grey and red with lichens. The smaller masses of slate, rising abruptly from the dry, grassy sod in leaning slabs, look like ancient tombstones in a deserted burying-ground. In early spring, say from February to April, the whole of this foot-hill belt is a paradise of bees and flowers. Refreshing rains then fall freely, birds are busy building their nests, and the sunshine is balmy and delightful. But by the end of May the soil, plants, and sky seem to have been baked in an oven. Most of the plants crumble to dust beneath the foot, and the ground is full of cracks; while the thirsty traveller gazes with eager longing through the burning glare to the snowy summits looming like hazy clouds in the distance.
The trees, mostly Quercus douglasii and Pinus sabiniana, thirty to forty feet high, with thin, pale-green foliage, stand far apart and cast but little shade. Lizards glide about on the rocks enjoying a constitution that no drouth can dry, and ants in amazing numbers, whose tiny sparks of life seem to burn the brighter with the increasing heat, ramble industriously in long trains in search of food. Crows, ravens, magpies – friends in distress – gather on the ground beneath the best shade-trees, panting with drooping wings and bills wide open, scarce a note from any of them during the midday hours. Quails, too, seek the shade during the heat of the day about tepid pools in the channels of the larger mid-river streams. Rabbits scurry from thicket to thicket among the ceanothus bushes, and occasionally a long-eared hare is seen cantering gracefully across the wider openings. The nights are calm and dewless during the summer, and a thousand voices proclaim the abundance of life, notwithstanding the desolating effect of dry sunshine on the plants and larger animals. The hylas make a delightfully pure and tranquil music after sunset; and coyotes, the little, despised dogs of the wilderness, brave, hardy fellows, looking like withered wisps of hay, bark in chorus for hours. Mining towns, most of them dead, and a few living ones with bright bits of cultivation about them, occur at long intervals along the belt, and cottages covered with climbing roses, in the midst of orange and peach orchards, and sweet-scented hay-fields in fertile flats where water for irrigation may be had. But they are mostly far apart, and make scarce any mark in general views.
Every winter the High Sierra and the middle forest region get snow in glorious abundance, and even the foothills are at times whitened. Then all the range looks like a vast bevelled wall of purest marble. The rough places are then made smooth, the death and decay of the year is covered gently and kindly, and the ground seems as clean as the sky. And though silent in its flight from the clouds, and when it is taking its place on rock, or tree, or grassy meadow, how soon the gentle snow finds a voice! Slipping from the heights, gathering in avalanches, it booms and roars like thunder, and makes a glorious show as it sweeps down the mountain-side, arrayed in long, silken streamers and wreathing, swirling films of crystal dust.
The north half of the range is mostly covered with floods of lava, and dotted with volcanoes and craters, some of them recent and perfect in form, others in various stages of decay. The south half is composed of granite nearly from base to summit, while a considerable number of peaks, in the middle of the range, are capped with metamorphic slates, among which are Mounts Dana and Gibbs to the east of Yosemite Valley. Mount Whitney, the culminating point of the range near its southern extremity, lifts its helmet-shaped crest to a height of nearly 14,700 feet. Mount Shasta, a colossal volcanic cone, rises to a height of 14,440 feet at the northern extremity, and forms a noble landmark for all the surrounding region within a radius of a hundred miles. Residual masses of volcanic rocks occur throughout most of the granitic southern portion also, and a considerable number of old volcanoes on the flanks, especially along the eastern base of the range near Mono Lake and southward. But it is only to the northward that the entire range, from base to summit, is covered with lava.
From the summit of Mount Whitney only granite is seen. Innumerable peaks and spires but little lower than its own storm-beaten crags rise in groups like forest-trees, in full view, segregated by canyons of tremendous depth and ruggedness. On Shasta nearly every feature in the vast view speaks of the old volcanic fires. Far to the northward, in Oregon, the icy volcanoes of Mount Pitt and the Three Sisters rise above the dark evergreen woods. Southward innumerable smaller craters and cones are distributed along the axis of the range and on each flank. Of these, Lassen’s Butte is the highest, being nearly 11,000 feet above sea level. Miles of its flanks are reeking and bubbling with hot springs, many of them so boisterous and sulphurous they seem ever ready to become spouting geysers like those of the Yellowstone.
The Cinder Cone near marks the most recent volcanic eruption in the Sierra. It is a symmetrical truncated cone about 700 feet high, covered with grey cinders and ashes, and has a regular unchanged crater on its summit, in which a few small two-leaved pines are growing. These show that the age of the cone is no less than eighty years old. It stands between two lakes, which a short time ago were one. Before the cone was built, a flood of rough vesicular lava was poured into the lake, cutting it in two, and, overflowing its banks, the fiery flood advanced into the pine-woods, overwhelming the trees in its way, the charred ends of some of which may still be seen projecting from beneath the snout of the lava-stream where it came to rest. Later still there was an eruption of ashes and loose obsidian cinders, probably from the same vent, which, besides forming the Cinder Cone, scattered a heavy shower over the surrounding woods for miles to a depth of from six inches to several feet.
The history of this last Sierra eruption is also preserved in the traditions of the Pitt River Indians. They tell of a fearful time of darkness, when the sky was black with ashes and smoke that threatened every living thing with death, and when at length the sun appeared once more it was red like blood.
Less recent craters in great numbers roughen the adjacent region; some of them with lakes in their throats, others overgrown with trees and flowers, nature in these old hearths and firesides having literally given beauty for ashes. On the northwest side of Mount Shasta there is a subordinate cone about 3,000 feet below the summit, which has been active subsequent to the breaking up of the main ice-cap that once covered the mountain, as is shown by its comparatively unwasted crater and the streams of unglaciated lava radiating from it. The main summit is about a mile and a half in diameter, bounded by small crumbling peaks and ridges, among which we seek in vain for the outlines of the ancient crater.
These ruinous masses, and the deep glacial grooves that flute the sides of the mountain, show that it has been considerably lowered and wasted by ice; how much we have no sure means of knowing. Just below the extreme summit hot sulphurous gases and vapour issue from irregular fissures, mixed with spray derived from melting snow, the last feeble expression of the mighty force that built the mountain. Not in one great convulsion was Shasta given birth. The crags of the summit and the sections exposed by the glaciers down the sides display enough of its internal framework to prove that comparatively long periods of quiescence intervened between many distinct eruptions, during which the cooling lavas ceased to flow, and became permanent additions to the bulk of the growing mountain. With alternate haste and deliberation eruption succeeded eruption till the old volcano surpassed even its present sublime height.
Standing on the icy top of this, the grandest of all the fire-mountains of the Sierra, we can hardly fail to look forward to its next eruption. Gardens, vineyards, homes have been planted confidingly on the flanks of volcanoes which, after remaining steadfast for ages, have suddenly blazed into violent action, and poured forth overwhelming floods of fire. It is known that more than a thousand years of cool calm have intervened between violent eruptions. Like gigantic geysers spouting molten rock instead of water, volcanoes work and rest, and we have no sure means of knowing whether they are dead when still, or only sleeping.
Along the western base of the range, a telling series of sedimentary rocks containing the early history of the Sierra are now being studied. But leaving for the present these first chapters, we see that only a very short geological time ago, just before the coming on of that winter of winters called the glacial period, a vast deluge of molten rocks poured from many a chasm and crater on the flanks and summit of the range, filling lake basins and river channels, and obliterating nearly every existing feature on the northern portion. At length these all-destroying floods ceased to flow. But while the great volcanic cones built up along the axis still burned and smoked, the whole Sierra passed under the domain of ice and snow. Then over the bald, featureless, fire-blackened mountains, glaciers began to crawl, covering them from the summits to the sea with a mantle of ice; and then with infinite deliberation the work went on of sculpturing the range anew. These mighty agents of erosion, halting never through unnumbered centuries, crushed and ground the flinty lavas and granites beneath their crystal folds, wasting and building until in the fullness of time the Sierra was born again, brought to light nearly as we behold it today, with glaciers and snow-crushed pines at the top of the range and wheat-fields and orange-groves at the foot of it.
This change from icy darkness and death to life and beauty was slow, as we count time, and is still going on, north and south, all over the world wherever glaciers exist, whether in the form of distinct rivers, as in Switzerland, Norway, the mountains of Asia, and the Pacific Coast; or in continuous mantling folds, as in portions of Alaska, Greenland, Franz-Joseph-Land, Nova Zembla, Spitsbergen, and the lands about the South Pole. But in no country, as far as I know, may these majestic changes be studied to better advantage than in the plains and mountains of California.
Toward the close of the glacial period, when the snow-clouds became less fertile and the melting waste of sunshine became greater, the lower folds of the ice-sheet in California, discharging fleets of icebergs into the sea, began to shallow and recede from the lowlands, and then move slowly up the flanks of the Sierra in compliance with the changes of climate. The great white mantle on the mountains broke up into a series of glaciers more or less distinct and river-like, with many tributaries, and these again were melted and divided into still smaller glaciers, until now only a few of the smallest residual topmost branches of the grand system exist on the cool slopes of the summit peaks.
Plants and animals, biding their time, closely followed the retiring ice, bestowing quick and joyous animation on the newborn landscapes. Pine-trees marched up the sun-warmed moraines in long, hopeful files, taking the ground and establishing themselves as soon as it was ready for them; brown-spiked sedges fringed the shores of the new-born lakes; young rivers roared in the abandoned channels of the glaciers; flowers bloomed around the feet of the great burnished domes – while with quick fertility, mellow beds of soil, settling and warming, offered food to multitudes of nature’s waiting children, great and small, animals as well as plants; mice, squirrels, marmots, deer, bears, elephants, etc. The ground burst into bloom with magical rapidity, and the young forests into bird-song: life in every form warming and sweetening and growing richer as the years passed away over the mighty Sierra so lately suggestive of death and consummate desolation only.
It is hard without long and loving study to realize the magnitude of the work done on these mountains during the last glacial period by glaciers, which are only streams of closely compacted snow-crystals. Careful study of the phenomena presented goes to show that the pre-glacial condition of the range was comparatively simple: one vast wave of stone in which a thousand mountains, domes, canyons, ridges, etc., lay concealed. And in the development of these nature chose for a tool not the earthquake or lightning to rend and split asunder, not the stormy torrent or eroding rain, but the tender snow-flowers noiselessly falling through unnumbered centuries, the offspring of the sun and sea. Labouring harmoniously in united strength they crushed and ground and wore away the rocks in their march, making vast beds of soil, and at the same time developed and fashioned the landscapes into the delightful variety of hill and dale and lordly mountain that mortals call beauty. Perhaps more than a mile in average depth has the range been thus degraded during the last glacial period – a quantity of mechanical work almost inconceivably great. And our admiration must be excited again and again as we toil and study and learn that this vast job of rockwork, so far-reaching in its influences, was done by agents so fragile and small as are these flowers of the mountain clouds. Strong only by force of numbers, they carried away entire mountains, particle by particle, block by block, and cast them into the sea: sculptured, fashioned, modelled all the range, and developed its predestined beauty. All these new Sierra landscapes were evidently predestined, for the physical structure of the rocks on which the features of the scenery depend was acquired while they lay at least a mile deep below the pre-glacial surface. And it was while these features were taking form in the depths of the range, the particles of the rocks marching to their appointed places in the dark with reference to the coming beauty, that the particles of icy vapour in the sky marching to the same music assembled to bring them to the light. Then, after their grand task was done, these bands of snow-flowers, these mighty glaciers, were melted and removed as if of no more importance than dew destined to last but an hour. Few, however, of nature’s agents have left monuments so noble and enduring as they. The great granite domes a mile high, the canyons as deep, the noble peaks, the Yosemite valleys, these, and indeed nearly all other features of the Sierra scenery, are glacier monuments.
Contemplating the works of these flowers of the sky, one may easily fancy them endowed with life: messengers sent down to work in the mountain mines on errands of divine love. Silently flying through the darkened air, swirling, glinting, to their appointed places, they seem to have taken counsel together, saying, ‘Come, we are feeble; let us help one another. We are many, and together we will be strong. Marching in close, deep ranks, let us roll away the stones from these mountain sepulchres, and set the landscapes free. Let us uncover these clustering domes. Here let us carve a lake basin; there, a Yosemite Valley; here, a channel for a river with fluted steps and brows for the plunge of songful cataracts. Yonder let us spread broad sheets of soil, that man and beast may be fed; and here pile trains of boulders for pines and giant Sequoias. Here make ground for a meadow; there, for a garden and grove, making it smooth and fine for small daisies and violets and beds of heathy bryanthus, spicing it well with crystals, garnet feldspar, and zircon.’ Thus and so on, it has oftentimes seemed to me sang and planned and laboured the hearty snow-flower crusaders; and nothing that I can write can possibly exaggerate the grandeur and beauty of their work. Like morning mist they have vanished in sunshine, all save the few small companies that still linger on the coolest mountainsides, and, as residual glaciers, are still busily at work completing the last of the lake basins, the last beds of soil, and the sculpture of some of the highest peaks.
– CHAPTER 2 –
The Glaciers
Of the small residual glaciers mentioned in the preceding chapter, I have found sixty-five in that portion of the range lying between latitude thirty-six degrees 30’ and thirty-nine degrees They occur singly or in small groups on the north sides of the peaks of the High Sierra, sheltered beneath broad frosty shadows, in amphitheatres of their own making, where the snow, shooting down from the surrounding heights in avalanches, is most abundant. Over two thirds of the entire number lie between latitude thirty-seven degrees and thirty-eight degrees and form the highest fountains of the San Joaquin, Merced, Tuolumne, and Owen’s rivers.
The glaciers of Switzerland, like those of the Sierra, are mere wasting remnants of mighty ice-floods that once filled the great valleys and poured into the sea. So, also, are those of Norway, Asia, and South America. Even the grand continuous mantles of ice that still cover Greenland, Spitsbergen, Nova Zembla, Franz-Joseph-Land, parts of Alaska, and the south polar region are shallowing and shrinking. Every glacier in the world is smaller than it once was. All the world is growing warmer, or the crop of snow-flowers is diminishing. But in contemplating the condition of the glaciers of the world, we must bear in mind while trying to account for the changes going on that the same sunshine that wastes them builds them. Every glacier records the expenditure of an enormous amount of sun-heat in lifting the vapour for the snow of which it is made from the ocean to the mountains, as Tyndall strikingly shows.
The numbers of glaciers in the Alps, according to the Schlagintweit brothers, is 1,100, of which 100 may be regarded as primary, and the total area of ice, snow, and névé is estimated at 1,177 square miles, or an average for each glacier of little more than one square mile. On the same authority, the average height above sea level at which they melt is about 7,414 feet. The Grindelweld glacier descends below 4,000 feet, and one of the Mont Blanc glaciers reaches nearly as low a point. One of the largest of the Himalaya glaciers on the head waters of the Ganges does not, according to Captain Hodgson, descend below 12,914 feet. The largest of the Sierra glaciers on Mount Shasta descends to within 9,500 feet. of the level of the sea, which, as far as I have observed, is the lowest point reached by any glacier within the bounds of California, the average height of all being not far from 11,000 feet.
The changes that have taken place in the glacial conditions of the Sierra from the time of greatest extension is well illustrated by the series of glaciers of every size and form extending along the mountains of the coast to Alaska. A general exploration of this instructive region shows that to the north of California, through Oregon and Washington, groups of active glaciers still exist on all the high volcanic cones of the Cascade Range – Mount Pitt, the Three Sisters, mounts Jefferson, Hood, St Helens, Adams, Rainier, Baker, and others – some of them of considerable size, though none of them approach the sea. Of these mountains Rainier, in Washington, is the highest and iciest. Its dome-like summit, between 14,000 and 15,000 feet high, is capped with ice, and eight glaciers, seven to twelve miles long, radiate from it as a centre, and form the sources of the principal streams of the State. The lowest-descending of this fine group flows through beautiful forests to within 3,500 feet of the sea level, and sends forth a river laden with glacier mud and sand. On through British Colombia and south-eastern Alaska the broad, sustained mountain-chain, extending along the coast, is generally glacier-bearing. The upper branches of nearly all the main canyons and fiords are occupied by glaciers, which gradually increase in size, and descend lower until the high region between Mount Fairweather and Mount St Elias is reached, where a considerable number discharge into the waters of the ocean. This is pre-eminently the ice-land of Alaska and of the entire Pacific Coast.
Northward from here the glaciers gradually diminish in size and thickness, and melt at higher levels. In Prince William Sound and Cook’s Inlet many fine glaciers are displayed, pouring from the surrounding mountains; but to the north of latitude sixty-two degrees few, if any, glaciers remain, the ground being mostly low and the snowfall light. Between latitude fifty-six degrees and sixty degrees there are probably more than 5,000 glaciers, not counting the smallest. Hundreds of the largest size descend through the forests to the level of the sea, or near it, though as far as my own observations have reached, after a pretty thorough examination of the region, not more than twenty-five discharge icebergs into the sea. All the long high-walled fiords into which these great glaciers of the first class flow are of course crowded with icebergs of every conceivable form, which are detached with thundering noise at intervals of a few minutes from an imposing ice-wall that is thrust forward into deep water. But these Pacific Coast icebergs are small as compared with those of Greenland and the Antarctic region, and only a few of them escape from the intricate system of channels, with which this portion of the coast is fringed, into the open sea. Nearly all of them are swashed and drifted by wind and tide back and forth in the fiords until finally melted by the ocean water, the sunshine, the warm winds, and the copious rains of summer. Only one glacier on the coast, observed by Professor Russell, discharges its bergs directly into the open sea, at Icy Cape, opposite Mount St Elias. The southernmost of the glaciers that reach the sea occupies a narrow, picturesque fiord about twenty miles to the northwest of the mouth of the Stikeen River, in latitude fifty-six degrees 50’. The fiord is called by the natives ‘Hutli’, or Thunder Bay, from the noise made by the discharge of the icebergs. About one degree farther north there are four of these complete glaciers, discharging at the heads of the long arms of Holkam Bay. At the head of the Tahkoo Inlet, still farther north, there is one; and at the head and around the sides of Glacier Bay, trending in a general northerly direction from Cross Sound in latitude fifty-eight degrees to fifty-nine degrees, there are seven of these complete glaciers pouring bergs into the bay and its branches, and keeping up an eternal thundering. The largest of this group, the Muir, has upward of 200 tributaries, and a width below the confluence of the main tributaries of about twenty-five miles. Between the west side of this icy bay and the ocean all the ground, high and low, excepting the peaks of the Fairweather Range, is covered with a mantle of ice from 1,000 to probably 3,000-feet thick, which discharges by many distinct mouths.
This fragmentary ice-sheet, and the immense glaciers about Mount St Elias, together with the multitude of separate river-like glaciers that load the slopes of the coast mountains, evidently once formed part of a continuous ice-sheet that flowed over all the region hereabouts, and only a comparatively short time ago extended as far southward as the mouth of the Strait of Juan de Fuca, probably farther. All the islands of the Alexander Archipelago, as well as the headlands and promontories of the mainland, display telling traces of this great mantle that are still fresh and unmistakable. They all have the forms of the greatest strength with reference to the action of a vast rigid press of oversweeping ice from the north and north-west, and their surfaces have a smooth, rounded, overrubbed appearance, generally free from angles. The intricate labyrinth of canals, channels, straits, passages, sounds, narrows, etc., between the islands, and extending into the mainland, of course manifest in their forms and trends and general characteristics the same subordination to the grinding action of universal glaciation as to their origin, and differ from the islands and banks of the fiords only in being portions of the pre-glacial margin of the continent more deeply eroded, and therefore covered by the ocean waters which flowed into them as the ice was melted out of them. The formation and extension of fiords in this manner is still going on, and may be witnessed in many places in Glacier Bay, Yakutat Bay, and adjacent regions. That the domain of the sea is being extended over the land by the wearing away of its shores, is well known, but in these icy regions of Alaska, and even as far south as Vancouver Island, the coast rocks have been so short a time exposed to wave-action they are but little wasted as yet. In these regions the extension of the sea effected by its own action in post-glacial time is scarcely appreciable as compared with that effected by ice-action.
Traces of the vanished glaciers made during the period of greater extension abound on the Sierra as far south as latitude thirty-six degrees. Even the polished rock surfaces, the most evanescent of glacial records, are still found in a wonderfully perfect state of preservation on the upper half of the middle portion of the range, and form the most striking of all the glacial phenomena. They occur in large irregular patches in the summit and middle regions, and though they have been subjected to the action of the weather with its corroding storms for thousands of years, their mechanical excellence is such that they still reflect the sunbeams like glass, and attract the attention of every observer. The attention of the mountaineer is seldom arrested by moraines, however regular and high they may be, or by canyons, however deep, or by rocks, however noble in form and sculpture; but he stoops and rubs his hands admiringly on the shining surfaces and tries hard to account for their mysterious smoothness. He has seen the snow descending in avalanches, but concludes this cannot be the work of snow, for he finds it where no avalanches occur. Nor can water have done it, for he sees this smoothness glowing on the sides and tops of the highest domes. Only the winds of all the agents he knows seem capable of flowing in the directions indicated by the scoring. Indians, usually so little curious about geological phenomena, have come to me occasionally and asked me, ‘What makeum the ground so smooth at Lake Tenaya?’ Even horses and dogs gaze wonderingly at the strange brightness of the ground, and smell the polished spaces and place their feet cautiously on them when they come to them for the first time, as if afraid of sinking. The most perfect of the polished pavements and walls lie at an elevation of from 7,000 to 9,000 feet above the sea, where the rock is compact silicious granite. Small dim patches may be found as low as 3,000 feet on the driest and most enduring portions of sheer walls with a southern exposure, and on compact swelling bosses partially protected from rain by a covering of large boulders. On the north half of the range the striated and polished surfaces are less common, not only because this part of the chain is lower, but because the surface rocks are chiefly porous lavas subject to comparatively rapid waste. The ancient moraines also, though well preserved on most of the south half of the range, are nearly obliterated to the northward, but their material is found scattered and disintegrated.
A similar blurred condition of the superficial records of glacial action obtains throughout most of Oregon, Washington, British Columbia, and Alaska, due in great part to the action of excessive moisture. Even in south-eastern Alaska, where the most extensive glaciers on the continent are, the more evanescent of the traces of their former greater extension, though comparatively recent, are more obscure than those of the ancient California glaciers where the climate is drier and the rocks more resisting.
These general views of the glaciers of the Pacific Coast will enable my readers to see something of the changes that have taken place in California, and will throw light on the residual glaciers of the High Sierra.
Prior to the autumn of 1871, the glaciers of the Sierra were unknown. In October of that year I discovered the Black Mountain Glacier in a shadowy amphitheatre between Black and Red Mountains, two of the peaks of the Merced group. This group is the highest portion of a spur that straggles out from the main axis of the range in the direction of Yosemite Valley. At the time of this interesting discovery I was exploring the névé amphitheatres of the group, and tracing the courses of the ancient glaciers that once poured from its ample fountains through the Illilouette Basin and the Yosemite Valley, not expecting to find any active glaciers so far south in the land of sunshine.
Beginning on the north-western extremity of the group, I explored the chief tributary basins in succession, their moraines, roches moutonnees, and splendid glacier pavements, taking them in regular succession without any reference to the time consumed in their study. The monuments of the tributary that poured its ice from between Red and Black Mountains I found to be the most interesting of them all, and when I saw its magnificent moraines extending in majestic curves from the spacious amphitheatre between the mountains, I was exhilarated with the work that lay before me. It was one of the golden days of the Sierra Indian summer, when the rich sunshine glorifies every landscape however rocky and cold, and suggests anything rather than glaciers. The path of the vanished glacier was warm now, and shone in many places as if washed with silver. The tall pines growing on the moraines stood transfigured in the glowing light, the poplar groves on the levels of the basin were masses of orange-yellow, and the late-blooming goldenrods added gold to gold. Pushing on over my rosy glacial highway, I passed lake after lake set in solid basins of granite, and many a thicket and meadow watered by a stream that issues from the amphitheatre and links the lakes together; now wading through plushy bogs knee-deep in yellow and purple sphagnum; now passing over bare rock. The main lateral moraines that bounded the view on either hand are from 100 to nearly 200-feet high, and about as regular as artificial embankments, and covered with a superb growth of Silver Fir and Pine. But this garden and forest luxuriance was speedily left behind. The trees were dwarfed as I ascended; patches of the alpine bryanthus and cassiope began to appear, and arctic willows pressed into flat carpets by the winter snow. The lakelets, which a few miles down the valley were so richly embroidered with flowery meadows, had here, at an elevation of 10,000 feet, only small brown mats of carex, leaving bare rocks around more than half their shores. Yet, amid this alpine suppression, the mountain pine bravely tossed his storm-beaten branches on the ledges and buttresses of Red Mountain, some specimens being over 100-feet high, and twenty-four feet in circumference, seemingly as fresh and vigorous as the giants of the lower zones.
Evening came on just as I got fairly within the portal of the main amphitheatre. It is about a mile wide, and a little less than two miles long. The crumbling spurs and battlements of Red Mountain bound it on the north, the sombre, rudely sculptured precipices of Black Mountain on the south, and a hacked, splintery col, curving around from mountain to mountain, shuts it in on the east.
I chose a camping-ground on the brink of one of the lakes where a thicket of hemlock spruce sheltered me from the night wind. Then, after making a tin-cupful of tea, I sat by my campfire reflecting on the grandeur and significance of the glacial records I had seen. As the night advanced the mighty rock walls of my mountain mansion seemed to come nearer, while the starry sky in glorious brightness stretched across like a ceiling from wall to wall, and fitted closely down into all the spiky irregularities of the summits. Then, after a long fireside rest and a glance at my notebook, I cut a few leafy branches for a bed, and fell into the clear, death-like sleep of the tired mountaineer.
Early the next morning I set out to trace the grand old glacier that had done so much for the beauty of the Yosemite region back to its farthest fountains, enjoying the charm that every explorer feels in nature’s untrodden wildernesses. The voices of the mountains were still asleep. The wind scarce stirred the pine-needles. The sun was up, but it was yet too cold for the birds and the few burrowing animals that dwell here. Only the stream, cascading from pool to pool, seemed to be wholly awake. Yet the spirit of the opening day called to action. The sunbeams came streaming gloriously through the jagged openings of the col, glancing on the burnished pavements and lighting the silvery lakes, while every sun-touched rock burned white on its edges like melting iron in a furnace. Passing round the north shore of my camp lake I followed the central stream past many cascades from lakelet to lakelet. The scenery became more rigidly arctic, the dwarf pines and hemlocks disappeared, and the stream was bordered with icicles. As the sun rose higher, rocks were loosened on shattered portions of the cliffs, and came down in rattling avalanches, echoing wildly from crag to crag.
