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 cañon of Tenaya,
caring little about the quantity of bread I carried; for, I thought, a
fast and a storm and a difficult cañon 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
cañon.
[Illustration: TISSIACK FROM GLACIER POINT: TENAYA CAÑON ON THE LEFT]
This cañon 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 cañon 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 cañon, 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 cañon, 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 cañon, 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 cañon, formed in the
bottom of the wide-mouthed, smooth, and beveled main cañon. 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 cañon, 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 cañon, 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[4] 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 cañon, 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 cañon 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 Cañon, 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 Cañon, 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.