the john muir exhibit - writings - steep_trails - chapter 2
Chapter 2
A Geologist's Winter Walk
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After reaching Turlock, I sped afoot over the stubble fields and
through miles of brown hemizonia and purple erigeron, to Hopeton,
conscious of little more than that the town was behind and beneath me,
and the mountains above and before me; on through the oaks and
chaparral of the foothills to Coulterville; and then ascended the
first great mountain step upon which grows the sugar pine. Here I
slackened pace, for I drank the spicy, resiny wind, and beneath the
arms of this noble tree I felt that I was safely home. Never did pine
trees seem so dear. How sweet was their breath and their song, and
how grandly they winnowed the sky! I tingled my fingers among their
tassels, and rustled my feet among their brown needles and burrs, and
was exhilarated and joyful beyond all I can write.
When I reached Yosemite, all the rocks seemed talkative, and more
telling and lovable than ever. They are dear friends, and seemed to
have warm blood gushing through their granite flesh; and I love them
with a love intensified by long and close companionship. After I had
bathed in the bright river, sauntered over the meadows, conversed with
the domes, and played with the pines, I still felt blurred and weary,
as if tainted in some way with the sky of your streets. I determined,
therefore, to run out for a while to say my prayers in the higher
mountain temples. "The days are sunful," I said, "and, though now
winter, no great danger need be encountered, and no sudden storm will
block my return, if I am watchful."
The morning after this decision, I started up the canyon of Tenaya,
caring little about the quantity of bread I carried; for, I thought, a
fast and a storm and a difficult canyon were just the medicine I
needed. When I passed Mirror Lake, I scarcely noticed it, for I was
absorbed in the great Tissiack -- her crown a mile away in the hushed
azure; her purple granite drapery flowing in soft and graceful folds
down to my feet, embroidered gloriously around with deep, shadowy
forest. I have gazed on Tissiack a thousand times -- in days of solemn
storms, and when her form shone divine with the jewelry of winter, or
was veiled in living clouds; and I have heard her voice of winds, and
snowy, tuneful waters when floods were falling; yet never did her soul
reveal itself more impressively than now. I hung about her skirts,
lingering timidly, until the higher mountains and glaciers compelled
me to push up the canyon.
This canyon is accessible only to mountaineers, and I was anxious to
carry my barometer and clinometer through it, to obtain sections and
altitudes, so I chose it as the most attractive highway. After I had
passed the tall groves that stretch a mile above Mirror Lake, and
scrambled around the Tenaya Fall, which is just at the head of the
lake groves, I crept through the dense and spiny chaparral that
plushes the roots of the mountains here for miles in warm green, and
was ascending a precipitous rock front, smoothed by glacial action,
when I suddenly fell -- for the first time since I touched foot to
Sierra rocks. After several somersaults, I became insensible from the
shock, and when consciousness returned I found myself wedged among
short, stiff bushes, trembling as if cold, not injured in the
slightest.
Judging by the sun, I could not have been insensible very long;
probably not a minute, possibly an hour; and I could not remember what
made me fall, or where I had fallen from; but I saw that if I had
rolled a little further, my mountain climbing would have been
finished, for just beyond the bushes the canyon wall steepened and I
might have fallen to the bottom. "There," said I, addressing my feet,
to whose separate skill I had learned to trust night and day on any
mountain, "that is what you get by intercourse with stupid town
stairs, and dead pavements." I felt degraded and worthless. I had
not yet reached the most difficult portion of the canyon, but I
determined to guide my humbled body over the most nerve-trying places
I could find; for I was now awake, and felt confident that the last of
the town fog had been shaken from both head and feet.
I camped at the mouth of a narrow gorge which is cut into the bottom
of the main canyon, determined to take earnest exercise next day. No
plushy boughs did my ill-behaved bones enjoy that night, nor did my
bumped head get a spicy cedar plume pillow mixed with flowers. I
slept on a naked boulder, and when I awoke all my nervous trembling
was gone.
The gorged portion of the canyon, in which I spent all the next day,
is about a mile and a half in length; and I passed the time in tracing
the action of the forces that determined this peculiar bottom gorge,
which is an abrupt, ragged-walled, narrow-throated canyon, formed in
the bottom of the wide-mouthed, smooth, and beveled main canyon. I
will not stop now to tell you more; some day you may see it, like a
shadowy line, from Cloud's Rest. In high water, the stream occupies
all the bottom of the gorge, surging and chafing in glorious power
from wall to wall. But the sound of the grinding was low as I entered
the gorge, scarcely hoping to be able to pass through its entire
length. By cool efforts, along glassy, ice-worn slopes, I reached the
upper end in a little over a day, but was compelled to pass the second
night in the gorge, and in the moonlight I wrote you this short
pencil-letter in my notebook: --
The moon is looking down into the canyon, and how marvelously the
great rocks kindle to her light! Every dome, and brow, and
swelling boss touched by her white rays, glows as if lighted with
snow. I am now only a mile from last night's camp; and have been
climbing and sketching all day in this difficult but instructive
gorge. It is formed in the bottom of the main canyon, among the
roots of Cloud's Rest. It begins at the filled-up lake basin where
I camped last night, and ends a few hundred yards above, in another
basin of the same kind. The walls everywhere are craggy and
vertical, and in some places they overlean. It is only from twenty
to sixty feet wide, and not, though black and broken enough, the
thin, crooked mouth of some mysterious abyss; but it was eroded,
for in many places I saw its solid, seamless floor.
I am sitting on a big stone, against which the stream divides, and
goes brawling by in rapids on both sides; half of my rock is white
in the light, half in shadow. As I look from the opening jaws of
this shadowy gorge, South Dome is immediately in front -- high in the
stars, her face turned from the moon, with the rest of her body
gloriously muffled in waved folds of granite. On the left,
sculptured from the main Cloud's Rest ridge, are three magnificent
rocks, sisters of the great South Dome. On the right is the
massive, moonlit front of Mount Watkins, and between, low down in
the furthest distance, is Sentinel Dome, girdled and darkened with
forest. In the near foreground Tenaya Creek is singing against
boulders that are white with snow and moonbeams. Now look back
twenty yards, and you will see a waterfall fair as a spirit; the
moonlight just touches it, bringing it into relief against a dark
background of shadow. A little to the left, and a dozen steps this
side of the fall, a flickering light marks my camp -- and a precious
camp it is. A huge, glacier-polished slab, falling from the
smooth, glossy flank of Cloud's Rest, happened to settle on edge
against the wall of the gorge. I did not know that this slab was
glacier-polished until I lighted my fire. Judge of my delight. I
think it was sent here by an earthquake. It is about twelve feet square.
I wish I could take it home
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for a hearthstone.
Beneath this slab is the only place in this torrent-swept gorge
where I could find sand sufficient for a bed.
I expected to sleep on the boulders, for I spent most of the
afternoon on the slippery wall of the canyon, endeavoring to get
around this difficult part of the gorge, and was compelled to
hasten down here for water before dark. I shall sleep soundly on
this sand; half of it is mica. Here, wonderful to behold, are a
few green stems of prickly rubus, and a tiny grass. They are here
to meet us. Ay, even here in this darksome gorge, "frightened and
tormented" with raging torrents and choking avalanches of snow.
Can it be? As if rubus and the grass leaf were not enough of God's
tender prattle words of love, which we so much need in these mighty
temples of power, yonder in the "benmost bore" are two blessed
adiantums. Listen to them! How wholly infused with God is this
one big word of love that we call the world! Good-night. Do you
see the fire-glow on my ice-smoothed slab, and on my two ferns and
the rubus and grass panicles? And do you hear how sweet a sleep-
song the fall and cascades are singing?
The water-ground chips and knots that I found fastened between the
rocks kept my fire alive all through the night. Next morning I rose
nerved and ready for another day of sketching and noting, and any form
of climbing. I escaped from the gorge about noon, after accomplishing
some of the most delicate feats of mountaineering I ever attempted;
and here the canyon is all broadly open again -- the floor luxuriantly
forested with pine, and spruce, and silver fir, and brown-trunked
libocedrus. The walls rise in Yosemite forms, and Tenaya Creek comes
down seven hundred feet in a white brush of foam. This is a little
Yosemite valley. It is about two thousand feet above the level of the
main Yosemite, and about twenty-four hundred below Lake Tenaya.
I found the lake frozen, and the ice was so clear and unruffled that
the surrounding mountains and the groves that look down upon it were
reflected almost as perfectly as I ever beheld them in the calm
evening mirrors of summer. At a little distance, it was difficult to
believe the lake frozen at all; and when I walked out on it,
cautiously stamping at short intervals to test the strength of the
ice, I seemed to walk mysteriously, without adequate faith, on the
surface of the water. The ice was so transparent that I could see
through it the beautifully wave-rippled, sandy bottom, and the scales
of mica glinting back the down-pouring light. When I knelt down with
my face close to the ice, through which the sunbeams were pouring, I
was delighted to discover myriads of Tyndall's six-rayed water
flowers, magnificently colored.
A grand old mountain mansion is this Tenaya region! In the glacier
period it was a mer de glace, far grander than the mer de glace of
Switzerland, which is only about half a mile broad. The Tenaya mer de
glace was not less than two miles broad, late in the glacier epoch,
when all the principal dividing crests were bare; and its depth was
not less than fifteen hundred feet. Ice streams from Mounts Lyell and
Dana, and all the mountains between, and from the nearer Cathedral
Peak, flowed hither, welded into one, and worked together. After
eroding this Tanaya Lake basin, and all the splendidly sculptured
rocks and mountains that surround and adorn it, and the great Tenaya
Canyon, with its wealth of all that makes mountains sublime, they were
welded with the vast South, Lyell, and Illilouette glaciers on one
side, and with those of Hoffman on the other -- thus forming a portion
of a yet grander mer de glace in Yosemite Valley.
I reached the Tenaya Canyon, on my way home, by coming in from the
northeast, rambling down over the shoulders of Mount Watkins, touching
bottom a mile above Mirror Lake. From thence home was but a saunter
in the moonlight.
After resting one day, and the weather continuing calm, I ran up over
the left shoulder of South Dome and down in front of its grand split
face to make some measurements, completed my work, climbed to the
right shoulder, struck off along the ridge for Cloud's Rest, and
reached the topmost heave of her sunny wave in ample time to see the
sunset.
Cloud's Rest is a thousand feet higher than Tissiack. It is a
wavelike crest upon a ridge, which begins at Yosemite with Tissiack,
and runs continuously eastward to the thicket of peaks and crests
around Lake Tenaya. This lofty granite wall is bent this way and that
by the restless and weariless action of glaciers just as if it had
been made of dough. But the grand circumference of mountains and
forests are coming from far and near, densing into one close
assemblage; for the sun, their god and father, with love ineffable, is
glowing a sunset farewell. Not one of all the assembled rocks or
trees seemed remote. How impressively their faces shone with
responsive love!
I ran home in the moonlight with firm strides; for the sun-love made
me strong. Down through the junipers; down through the firs; now in
jet shadows, now in white light; over sandy moraines and bare,
clanking rocks; past the huge ghost of South Dome rising weird through
the firs; past the glorious fall of Nevada, the groves of Illilouette;
through the pines of the valley; beneath the bright crystal sky
blazing with stars. All of this mountain wealth in one day! -- one of
the rich ripe days that enlarge one's life; so much of the sun upon
one side of it, so much of the moon and stars on the other.
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