the john muir exhibit - writings - steep_trails - chapter 5
Chapter 5
Shasta Rambles and Modoc Memories
Arctic beauty and desolation, with their blessings and dangers, all
may be found here, to test the endurance and skill of adventurous
climbers; but far better than climbing the mountain is going around
its warm, fertile base, enjoying its bounties like a bee circling
around a bank of flowers. The distance is about a hundred miles, and
will take some of the time we hear so much about -- a week or two -- but
the benefits will compensate for any number of weeks. Perhaps the
profession of doing good may be full, but every body should be kind at
least to himself. Take a course of good water and air, and in the
eternal youth of Nature you may renew your own. Go quietly, alone; no
harm will befall you. Some have strange, morbid fears as soon as they
find themselves with Nature, even in the kindest and wildest of her
solitudes, like very sick children afraid of their mother -- as if God
were dead and the devil were king.
One may make the trip on horseback, or in a carriage, even; for a good
level road may be found all the way round, by Shasta Valley, Sheep
Rock, Elk Flat, Huckleberry Valley, Squaw Valley, following for a
considerable portion of the way the old Emigrant Road, which lies
along the east disk of the mountain, and is deeply worn by the wagons
of the early gold-seekers, many of whom chose this northern route as
perhaps being safer and easier, the pass here being only about six
thousand feet above sea level. But it is far better to go afoot.
Then you are free to make wide waverings and zigzags away from the
roads to visit the great fountain streams of the rivers, the glaciers
also, and the wildest retreats in the primeval forests, where the best
plants and animals dwell, and where many a flower-bell will ring
against your knees, and friendly trees will reach out their fronded
branches and touch you as you pass. One blanket will be enough to
carry, or you may forego the pleasure and burden altogether, as wood
for fires is everywhere abundant. Only a little food will be
required. Berries and plums abound in season, and quail and grouse
and deer -- the magnificent shaggy mule deer as well as the common
species.
As you sweep around so grand a center, the mountain itself seems to
turn, displaying its riches like the revolving pyramids in jewelers'
windows. One glacier after another comes into view, and the outlines
of the mountain are ever changing, though all the way around, from
whatever point of view, the form is maintained of a grand, simple cone
with a gently sloping base and rugged, crumbling ridges separating the
glaciers and the snowfields more or less completely. The play of
colors, from the first touches of the morning sun on the summit, down
the snowfields and the ice and lava until the forests are aglow, is a
never-ending delight, the rosy lava and the fine flushings of the snow
being ineffably lovely. Thus one saunters on and on in the glorious
radiance in utter peace and forgetfulness of time.
Yet, strange to say, there are days even here somewhat dull-looking,
when the mountain seem uncommunicative, sending out no appreciable
invitation, as if not at home. At such time its height seems much
less, as if, crouching and weary, it were taking rest. But Shasta is
always at home to those who love her, and is ever in a thrill of
enthusiastic activity -- burning fires within, grinding glaciers
without, and fountains ever flowing. Every crystal dances responsive
to the touches of the sun, and currents of sap in the growing cells of
all the vegetation are ever in a vital whirl and rush, and though many
feet and wings are folded, how many are astir! And the wandering
winds, how busy they are, and what a breadth of sound and motion they
make, glinting and bubbling about the crags of the summit, sifting
through the woods, feeling their way from grove to grove, ruffling the
loose hair on the shoulders of the bears, fanning and rocking young
birds in their cradles, making a trumpet of every corolla, and
carrying their fragrance around the world.
In unsettled weather, when storms are growing, the mountain looms
immensely higher, and its miles of height become apparent to all,
especially in the gloom of the gathering clouds, or when the storm is
done and they are rolling away, torn on the edges and melting while in
the sunshine. Slight rainstorms are likely to be encountered in a
trip round the mountain, but one may easily find shelter beneath
well-thatched trees that shed the rain like a roof.
Then the shining of the wet leaves is delightful,
and the steamy fragrance, and the burst
of bird song from a multitude of thrushes and finches and warblers
that have nests in the chaparral.
The nights, too, are delightful, watching with Shasta beneath the
great starry done. A thousand thousand voices are heard, but so
finely blended they seem a part of the night itself, and make a deeper
silence. And how grandly do the great logs and branches of your
campfire give forth the heat and light that during their long century-lives
they have so slowly gathered from the sun, storing it away in
beautiful dotted cells and beads of amber gum! The neighboring trees
look into the charmed circle as if the noon of another day had come,
familiar flowers and grasses that chance to be near seem far more
beautiful and impressive than by day, and as the dead trees give forth
their light all the other riches of their lives seem to be set free
and with the rejoicing flames rise again to the sky. In setting out
from Strawberry Valley, by bearing off to the northwestward a few
miles you may see
"...beneath dim aisles, in odorous beds,
The slight Linnaea hang its twin-born heads,
And [bless] the monument of the man of flowers,
Which breathes his sweet fame through the northern bowers."
This is one of the few places in California where the charming linnaea
is found, though it is common to the northward through Oregon and
Washington. Here, too, you may find the curious but unlovable
darlingtonia, a carnivorous plant that devours bumblebees,
grasshoppers, ants, moths, and other insects, with insatiable
appetite. In approaching it, its suspicious-looking yellow-spotted
hood and watchful attitude will be likely to make you go cautiously
through the bog where it stands, as if you were approaching a
dangerous snake. It also occurs in a bog near Sothern's Station on
the stage road, where I first saw it, and in other similar bogs
throughout the mountains hereabouts.
The "Big Spring" of the Sacramento is about a mile and a half above
Sisson's, issuing from the base of a drift-covered hill. It is lined
with emerald algae and mosses, and shaded with alder, willow, and
thorn bushes, which give it a fine setting. Its waters, apparently
unaffected by flood or drouth, heat or cold, fall at once into white
rapids with a rush and dash, as if glad to escape from the darkness to
begin their wild course down the canyon to the plain.
Muir's Peak, a few miles to the north of the spring, rises about three
thousand feet above the plain on which it stands, and is easily
climbed. The view is very fine and well repays the slight walk to its
summit, from which much of your way about the mountain may be studied
and chosen. The view obtained of the Whitney Glacier should tempt you
to visit it, since it is the largest of the Shasta glaciers and its
lower portion abounds in beautiful and interesting cascades and
crevasses. It is three or four miles long and terminates at an
elevation of about nine thousand five hundred feet above sea level, in
moraine-sprinkled ice cliffs sixty feet high. The long gray slopes
leading up to the glacier seem remarkably smooth and unbroken. They
are much interrupted, nevertheless, with abrupt, jagged precipitous
gorges, which though offering instructive sections of the lavas for
examination, would better be shunned by most people. This may be done
by keeping well down on the base until fronting the glacier before
beginning the ascent.
The gorge through which the glacier is drained is raw-looking, deep
and narrow, and indescribably jagged. The walls in many places
overhang; in others they are beveled, loose, and shifting where the
channel has been eroded by cinders, ashes, strata of firm lavas, and
glacial drift, telling of many a change from frost to fire and their
attendant floods of mud and water. Most of the drainage of the
glacier vanishes at once in the porous rocks to reappear in springs in
the distant valley, and it is only in time of flood that the channel
carries much water; then there are several fine falls in the gorge,
six hundred feet or more in height. Snow lies in it the year round at
an elevation of eight thousand five hundred feet, and in sheltered
spots a thousand feet lower. Tracing this wild changing channel-gorge, gully, or canyon, the sections will show Mount Shasta as a huge
palimpsest, containing the records, layer upon layer, of strangely
contrasted events in its fiery-icy history. But look well to your
footing, for the way will test the skill of the most cautious
mountaineers.
Regaining the low ground at the base of the mountain and holding on in
your grand orbit, you pass through a belt of juniper woods, called
"The Cedars," to Sheep Rock at the foot of the Shasta Pass. Here you
strike the old emigrant road, which leads over the low divide to the
eastern slopes of the mountain. In a north-northwesterly direction
from the foot of the pass you may chance to find Pluto's Cave, already
mentioned; but it is not easily found, since its several mouths are on
a level with the general surface of the ground, and have been made
simply by the falling-in of portions of the roof. Far the most
beautiful and richly furnished of the mountain caves of California
occur in a thick belt of metamorphic limestone that is pretty
generally developed along the western flank of the Sierra from the
McCloud River to the Kaweah, a distance of nearly four hundred miles.
These volcanic caves are not wanting in interest, and it is well to
light a pitch pine torch and take a walk in these dark ways of the
underworld whenever opportunity offers, if for no other reason to see
with new appreciation on returning to the sunshine the beauties that
lie so thick about us.
Sheep Rock is about twenty miles from Sisson's, and is one of the
principal winter pasture grounds of the wild sheep, from which it
takes its name. It is a mass of lava presenting to the gray sage
plain of Shasta Valley a bold craggy front two thousand feet high.
Its summit lies at an elevation of five thousand five hundred feet
above the sea, and has several square miles of comparatively level
surface, where bunchgrass grows and the snow does not lie deep, thus
allowing the hardy sheep to pick up a living through the winter months
when deep snows have driven them down from the lofty ridges of Shasta.
From here it might be well to leave the immediate base of the mountain
for a few days and visit the Lava Beds made famous by the Modoc War.
They lie about forty miles to the northeastward, on the south shore of
Rhett or Tule
7
Lake, at an elevation above sea level of about forty-five hundred feet.
They are a portion of a flow of dense black
vesicular lava, dipping northeastward at a low angle, but little
changed as yet by the weather, and about as destitute of soil as a
glacial pavement. The surface, though smooth in a general way as seen
from a distance, is dotted with hillocks and rough crater-like pits,
and traversed by a network of yawning fissures, forming a combination
of topographical conditions of very striking character. The way lies
by Mount Bremer, over stretches of gray sage plains, interrupted by
rough lava slopes timbered with juniper and yellow pine, and with here
and there a green meadow and a stream.
This is a famous game region, and you will be likely to meet small
bands of antelope, mule deer, and wild sheep. Mount Bremer is the
most noted stronghold of the sheep in the whole Shasta region. Large
flocks dwell here from year to year, winter and summer, descending
occasionally into the adjacent sage plains and lava beds to feed, but
ever ready to take refuge in the jagged crags of their mountain at
every alarm. While traveling with a company of hunters I saw about
fifty in one flock.
The Van Bremer brothers, after whom the mountain is named, told me
that they once climbed the mountain with their rifles and hounds on a
grand hunt; but, after keeping up the pursuit for a week, their boots
and clothing gave way, and the hounds were lamed and worn out without
having run down a single sheep, notwithstanding they ran night and
day. On smooth spots, level or ascending, the hounds gained on the
sheep, but on descending ground, and over rough masses of angular
rocks they fell hopelessly behind. Only half a dozen sheep were shot
as they passed the hunters stationed near their paths circling round
the rugged summit. The full-grown bucks weigh nearly three hundred
and fifty pounds.
The mule deer are nearly as heavy. Their long, massive ears give them
a very striking appearance. One large buck that I measured stood
three feet and seven inches high at the shoulders, and when the ears
were extended horizontally the distance across from tip to tip was two
feet and one inch.
From the Van Bremer ranch the way to the Lava Beds leads down the
Bremer Meadows past many a smooth grassy knoll and jutting cliff,
along the shore of Lower Klamath Lake, and thence across a few miles
of sage plain to the brow of the wall-like bluff of lava four hundred
and fifty feet above Tule Lake. Here you are looking southeastward,
and the Modoc landscape, which at once takes possession of you, lies
revealed in front. It is composed of three principal parts; on your
left lies the bright expanse of Tule Lake, on your right an evergreen
forest, and between the two are the black Lava Beds.
When I first stood there, one bright day before sundown, the lake was
fairly blooming in purple light, and was so responsive to the sky in
both calmness and color it seemed itself a sky. No mountain shore
hides its loveliness. It lies wide open for many a mile, veiled in no
mystery but the mystery of light. The forest also was flooded with
sun-purple, not a spire moving, and Mount Shasta was seen towering
above it rejoicing in the ineffable beauty of the alpenglow. But
neither the glorified woods on the one hand, nor the lake on the
other, could at first hold the eye. That dark mysterious lava plain
between them compelled attention. Here you trace yawning fissures,
there clusters of somber pits; now you mark where the lava is bent and
corrugated in swelling ridges and domes, again where it breaks into a
rough mass of loose blocks. Tufts of grass grow far apart here and
there and small bushes of hardy sage, but they have a singed
appearance and can do little to hide the blackness. Deserts are
charming to those who know how to see them -- all kinds of bogs,
barrens, and heathy moors; but the Modoc Lava Beds have for me an
uncanny look. As I gazed the purple deepened over all the landscape.
Then fell the gloaming, making everything still more forbidding and
mysterious. Then, darkness like death.
Next morning the crisp, sunshiny air made even the Modoc landscape
less hopeless, and we ventured down the bluff to the edge of the Lava
Beds. Just at the foot of the bluff we came to a square enclosed by a
stone wall. This is a graveyard where lie buried thirty soldiers,
most of whom met their fate out in the Lava Beds, as we learn by the
boards marking the graves -- a gloomy place to die in,
and deadly-looking even without Modocs.
The poor fellows that lie here deserve
far more pity than they have ever received. Picking our way over the
strange ridges and hollows of the beds, we soon came to a circular
flat about twenty yards in diameter, on the shore of the lake, where
the comparative smoothness of the lava and a few handfuls of soil have
caused the grass tufts to grow taller. This is where General Canby
was slain while seeking to make peace with the treacherous Modocs.
Two or three miles farther on is the main stronghold of the Modocs,
held by them so long and defiantly against all the soldiers that could
be brought to the attack. Indians usually choose to hide in tall
grass and bush and behind trees, where they can crouch and glide like
panthers, without casting up defenses that would betray their
positions; but the Modoc castle is in the rock. When the Yosemite
Indians made raids on the settlers of the lower Merced, they withdrew
with their spoils into Yosemite Valley; and the Modocs boasted that in
case of war they had a stone house into which no white man could come
as long as they cared to defend it. Yosemite was not held for a
single day against the pursuing troops; but the Modocs held their fort
for months, until, weary of being hemmed in, they chose to withdraw.
It consists of numerous redoubts formed by the unequal subsidence of
portions of the lava flow, and a complicated network of redans
abundantly supplied with salient and re-entering angles, being united
each to the other and to the redoubts by a labyrinth of open and
covered corridors, some of which expand at intervals into spacious
caverns, forming as a whole the most complete natural Gibraltar I ever
saw. Other castles scarcely less strong are connected with this by
subterranean passages known only to the Indians, while the unnatural
blackness of the rock out of which Nature has constructed these
defenses, and the weird, inhuman physiognomy of the whole region are
well calculated to inspire terror.
Deadly was the task of storming such a place. The breech-loading
rifles of the Indians thrust through chinks between the rocks were
ready to pick off every soldier who showed himself for a moment, while
the Indians lay utterly invisible. They were familiar with byways
both over and under ground, and could at any time sink suddenly out of
sight like squirrels among the loose boulders. Our bewildered
soldiers heard them shooting, now before, now behind them, as they
glided from place to place through fissures and subterranean passes,
all the while as invisible as Gyges wearing his magic ring. To judge
from the few I have seen, Modocs are not very amiable-looking people
at best. When, therefore, they were crawling stealthily in the gloomy
caverns, unkempt and begrimed and with the glare of war in their eyes,
they must have seemed very demons of the volcanic pit.
Captain Jack's cave is one of the many somber cells of the castle. It
measures twenty-five or thirty feet in diameter at the entrance, and
extends but a short distance in a horizontal direction. The floor is
littered with the bones of the animals slaughtered for food during the
war. Some eager archaeologist may hereafter discover this cabin and
startle his world by announcing another of the Stone Age caves. The
sun shines freely into its mouth, and graceful bunches of grass and
eriogonums and sage grow about it, doing what they can toward its
redemption from degrading associations and making it beautiful.
Where the lava meets the lake there are some fine curving bays,
beautifully embroidered with rushes and polygonums, a favorite resort
of waterfowl. On our return, keeping close along shore, we caused a
noisy plashing and beating of wings among cranes and geese. The
ducks, less wary, kept their places, merely swimming in and out
through openings in the rushes, rippling the glassy water, and raising
spangles in their wake. The countenance of the lava beds became less
and less forbidding. Tufts of pale grasses, relieved on the jet
rocks, looked like ornaments on a mantel, thick-furred mats of emerald
mosses appeared in damp spots next the shore, and I noticed one tuft
of small ferns. From year to year in the kindly weather the beds are
thus gathering beauty -- beauty for ashes.
Returning to Sheep Rock and following the old emigrant road, one is
soon back again beneath the snows and shadows of Shasta, and the Ash
Creek and McCloud Glaciers come into view on the east side of the
mountain. They are broad, rugged, crevassed cloudlike masses of
down-grinding ice, pouring forth streams of muddy water as measures of the
work they are doing in sculpturing the rocks beneath them; very unlike
the long, majestic glaciers of Alaska that riverlike go winding down
the valleys through the forests to the sea. These, with a few others
as yet nameless, are lingering remnants of once great glaciers that
occupied the canyons now taken by the rivers, and in a few centuries
will, under present conditions, vanish altogether.
The rivers of the granite south half of the Sierra are outspread on
the peaks in a shining network of small branches, that divide again
and again into small dribbling, purling, oozing threads drawing their
sources from the snow and ice of the surface. They seldom sink out of
sight, save here and there in the moraines or glaciers, or, early in
the season, beneath the banks and bridges of snow, soon to issue
again. But in the north half, laden with rent and porous lava, small
tributary streams are rare, and the rivers, flowing for a time beneath
the sky of rock, at length burst forth into the light in generous
volume from seams and caverns, filtered, cool, and sparkling, as if
their bondage in darkness, safe from the vicissitudes of the weather
in their youth, were only a blessing.
Only a very small portion of the water derived from the melting ice
and snow of Shasta flows down its flanks on the surface. Probably
ninety-nine per cent of it is at once absorbed and drained away
beneath the porous lava-folds of the mountain to gush forth, filtered
and pure, in the form of immense springs, so large, some of them, that
they give birth to rivers that start on their journey beneath the sun,
full-grown and perfect without any childhood. Thus the Shasta River
issues from a large lake-like spring in Shasta Valley, and about two
thirds of the volume of the McCloud gushes forth in a grand spring on
the east side of the mountain, a few miles back from its immediate
base.
To find the big spring of the McCloud, or "Mud Glacier," which you
will know by its size (it being the largest on the east side), you
make your way through sunny, parklike woods of yellow pine, and a
shaggy growth of chaparral, and come in a few hours to the river
flowing in a gorge of moderate depth, cut abruptly down into the lava
plain. Should the volume of the stream where you strike it seem
small, then you will know that you are above the spring; if large,
nearly equal to its volume at its confluence with the Pitt River, then
you are below it; and in either case have only to follow the river up
or down until you come to it.
Under certain conditions you may hear the roar of the water rushing
from the rock at a distance of half a mile, or even more; or you may
not hear it until within a few rods. It comes in a grand, eager gush
from a horizontal seam in the face of the wall of the river gorge in
the form of a partially interrupted sheet nearly seventy-five yards in
width, and at a height above the riverbed of about forty feet, as
nearly as I could make out without the means of exact measurement.
For about fifty yards this flat current is in one unbroken sheet, and
flows in a lacework of plashing, upleaping spray over boulders that
are clad in green silky algae and water mosses to meet the smaller
part of the river, which takes its rise farther up. Joining the river
at right angles to its course, it at once swells its volume to three
times its size above the spring.
The vivid green of the boulders beneath the water is very striking,
and colors the entire stream with the exception of the portions broken
into foam. The color is chiefly due to a species of algae which seems
common in springs of this sort. That any kind of plant can hold on
and grow beneath the wear of so boisterous a current seems truly
wonderful, even after taking into consideration the freedom of the
water from cutting drift, and the constance of its volume and
temperature throughout the year. The temperature is about 45 degrees,
and the height of the river above the sea is here about three thousand
feet. Asplenium, epilobium, heuchera, hazel, dogwood, and alder make
a luxurious fringe and setting; and the forests of Douglas spruce
along the banks are the finest I have ever seen in the Sierra.
From the spring you may go with the river -- a fine traveling companion --
down to the sportsman's fishing station, where, if you are getting
hungry, you may replenish your stores; or, bearing off around the
mountain by Huckleberry Valley, complete your circuit without
interruption, emerging at length from beneath the outspread arms of
the sugar pine at Strawberry Valley, with all the new wealth and
health gathered in your walk; not tired in the least, and only eager
to repeat the round.
Tracing rivers to their fountains makes the most charming of travels.
As the life-blood of the landscapes, the best of the wilderness comes
to their banks, and not one dull passage is found in all their
eventful histories. Tracing the McCloud to its highest springs, and
over the divide to the fountains of Fall River, near Fort Crook,
thence down that river to its confluence with the Pitt, on from there
to the volcanic region about Lassen's Butte, through the Big Meadows
among the sources of the Feather River, and down through forests of
sugar pine to the fertile plains of Chico -- this is a glorious saunter
and imposes no hardship. Food may be had at moderate intervals, and
the whole circuit forms one ever-deepening, broadening stream of
enjoyment.
Fall River is a very remarkable stream. It is only about ten miles
long, and is composed of springs, rapids, and falls -- springs
beautifully shaded at one end of it, a showy fall one hundred and
eighty feet high at the other, and a rush of crystal rapids between.
The banks are fringed with rubus, rose, plum cherry, spiraea, azalea,
honeysuckle, hawthorn, ash, alder, elder, aster, goldenrod, beautiful
grasses, sedges, rushes, mosses, and ferns with fronds as large as the
leaves of palms -- all in the midst of a richly forested landscape.
Nowhere within the limits of California are the forests of yellow pine
so extensive and exclusive as on the headwaters of the Pitt. They
cover the mountains and all the lower slopes that border the wide,
open valleys which abound there, pressing forward in imposing ranks,
seemingly the hardiest and most firmly established of all the northern
coniferae.
The volcanic region about Lassen's Butte I have already in part
described. Miles of its flanks are dotted with hot springs, many of
them so sulphurous and boisterous and noisy in their boiling that they
seem inclined to become geysers like those of the Yellowstone.
The ascent of Lassen's Butte is an easy walk, and the views from the
summit are extremely telling. Innumerable lakes and craters surround
the base; forests of the charming Williamson spruce fringe lake and
crater alike; the sunbeaten plains to east and west make a striking
show, and the wilderness of peaks and ridges stretch indefinitely away
on either hand. The lofty, icy Shasta, towering high above all, seems
but an hour's walk from you, though the distance in an air-line is
about sixty miles.
The "Big Meadows" lie near the foot of Lassen's Butte, a beautiful
spacious basin set in the heart of the richly forested mountains,
scarcely surpassed in the grandeur of its surroundings by Tahoe.
During the Glacial Period it was a mer de glace, then a lake, and now
a level meadow shining with bountiful springs and streams. In the
number and size of its big spring fountains it excels even Shasta.
One of the largest that I measured forms a lakelet nearly a hundred
yards in diameter, and, in the generous flood it sends forth offers
one of the most telling symbols of Nature's affluence to be found in
the mountains.
The great wilds of our country, once held to be boundless and
inexhaustible, are being rapidly invaded and overrun in every
direction, and everything destructible in them is being destroyed.
How far destruction may go it is not easy to guess. Every landscape,
low and high, seems doomed to be trampled and harried. Even the sky
is not safe from scath -- blurred and blackened whole summers together
with the smoke of fires that devour the woods.
The Shasta region is still a fresh unspoiled wilderness, accessible
and available for travelers of every kind and degree. Would it not
then be a fine thing to set it apart like the Yellowstone and Yosemite
as a National Park for the welfare and benefit of all mankind,
preserving its fountains and forests and all its glad life in primeval
beauty? Very little of the region can ever be more valuable for any
other use -- certainly not for gold nor for grain. No private right or
interest need suffer, and thousands yet unborn would come from far and
near and bless the country for its wise and benevolent forethought.
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