Mount Shasta rises in solitary grandeur from the edge of a
comparatively low and lightly sculptured lava plain near the northern
extremity of the Sierra, and maintains a far more impressive and
commanding individuality than any other mountain within the limits of
California. Go where you may, within a radius of from fifty to a
hundred miles or more, there stands before you the colossal cone of
Shasta, clad in ice and snow, the one grand unmistakable landmark—the
pole star of the landscape. Far to the southward Mount Whitney lifts
its granite summit four or five hundred feet higher than Shasta, but it
is nearly snowless during the late summer, and is so feebly
individualized that the traveler may search for it in vain among the
many rival peaks crowded along the axis of the range to north and south
of it, which all alike are crumbling residual masses brought into
relief in the degradation of the general mass of the range. The highest
point on Mount Shasta, as determined by the State Geological Survey, is
14,440 feet above mean tide. That of Whitney, computed from fewer
observations, is about 14,900 feet. But inasmuch as the average
elevation of the plain out of which Shasta rises is only about four
thousand feet above the sea, while the actual base of the peak of Mount
Whitney lies at an elevation of eleven thousand feet, the individual
height of the former is about two and a half times as great as that of
the latter.
Approaching Shasta from the south, one obtains glimpses of its snowy
cone here and there through the trees from the tops of hills and
ridges; but it is not until Strawberry Valley is reached, where there
is a grand out-opening of the forests, that Shasta is seen in all its
glory. From base to crown clearly revealed with its wealth of woods and
waters and fountain snow, rejoicing in the bright mountain sky, and
radiating beauty on all the subject landscape like a sun. Standing in a
fringing thicket of purple spiraea in the immediate foreground is a
smooth expanse of green meadow with its meandering stream, one of the
smaller affluents of the Sacramento; then a zone of dark, close forest,
its countless spires of pine and fir rising above one another on the
swelling base of the mountain in glorious array; and, over all, the
great white cone sweeping far into the thin, keen sky—meadow, forest,
and grand icy summit harmoniously blending and making one sublime
picture evenly balanced.
[Illustration: MOUNT SHASTA AFTER A SNOWSTORM]
The main lines of the landscape are immensely bold and simple, and so
regular that it needs all its shaggy wealth of woods and chaparral and
its finely tinted ice and snow and brown jutting crags to keep it from
looking conventional. In general views of the mountain three distinct
zones may be readily defined. The first, which may be called the
Chaparral Zone, extends around the base in a magnificent sweep nearly a
hundred miles in length on its lower edge, and with a breadth of about
seven miles. It is a dense growth of chaparral from three to six or
eight feet high, composed chiefly of manzanita, cherry, chincapin, and
several species of ceanothus, called deerbrush by the hunters, forming,
when in full bloom, one of the most glorious flowerbeds conceivable.
The continuity of this flowery zone is interrupted here and there,
especially on the south side of the mountain, by wide swaths of
coniferous trees, chiefly the sugar and yellow pines, Douglas spruce,
silver fir, and incense cedar, many specimens of which are two hundred
feet high and five to seven feet in diameter. Goldenrods, asters,
gilias, lilies, and lupines, with many other less conspicuous plants,
occur in warm sheltered openings in these lower woods, making charming
gardens of wildness where bees and butterflies are at home and many a
shy bird and squirrel.
The next higher is the Fir Zone, made up almost exclusively of two
species of silver fir. It is from two to three miles wide, has an
average elevation above the sea of some six thousand feet on its lower
edge and eight thousand on its upper, and is the most regular and best
defined of the three.
The Alpine Zone has a rugged, straggling growth of storm-beaten dwarf
pines (_Pinus albicaulis_), which forms the upper edge of the
timberline. This species reaches an elevation of about nine thousand
feet, but at this height the tops of the trees rise only a few feet
into the thin frosty air, and are closely pressed and shorn by wind and
snow; yet they hold on bravely and put forth an abundance of beautiful
purple flowers and produce cones and seeds. Down towards the edge of
the fir belt they stand erect, forming small, well-formed trunks, and
are associated with the taller two-leafed and mountain pines and the
beautiful Williamson spruce. Bryanthus, a beautiful flowering
heathwort, flourishes a few hundred feet above the timberline,
accompanied with kalmia and spiraea. Lichens enliven the faces of the
cliffs with their bright colors, and in some of the warmer nooks of the
rocks, up to a height of eleven thousand feet, there are a few tufts of
dwarf daisies, wallflowers, and penstemons; but, notwithstanding these
bloom freely, they make no appreciable show at a distance, and the
stretches of rough brown lava beyond the storm-beaten trees seem as
bare of vegetation as the great snow fields and glaciers of the summit.
Shasta is a fire-mountain, an old volcano gradually accumulated and
built up into the blue deep of the sky by successive eruptions of ashes
and molten lava which, shot high in the air and falling in darkening
showers, and flowing from chasms and craters, grew outward and upward
like the trunk of a knotty, bulging tree. Not in one grand convulsion
was Shasta given birth, nor in any one special period of volcanic storm
and stress, though mountains more than a thousand feet in height have
been cast up like molehills in a night—quick contributions to the
wealth of the landscapes, and most emphatic statements, on the part of
Nature, of the gigantic character of the power that dwells beneath the
dull, dead-looking surface of the earth. But sections cut by the
glaciers, displaying some of the internal framework of Shasta, show
that comparatively long periods of quiescence intervened between many
distinct eruptions, during which the cooling lavas ceased to flow, and
took their places as permanent additions to the bulk of the growing
mountain. Thus with alternate haste and deliberation eruption succeeded
eruption, until Mount Shasta surpassed even its present sublime height.
Then followed a strange contrast. The glacial winter came on. The sky
that so often had been darkened with storms of cinders and ashes and
lighted by the glare of volcanic fires was filled with crystal
snow-flowers, which, loading the cooling mountain, gave birth to
glaciers that, uniting edge to edge, at length formed one grand conical
glacier—a down-crawling mantle of ice upon a fountain of smouldering
fire, crushing and grinding its brown, flinty lavas, and thus degrading
and remodeling the entire mountain from summit to base. How much
denudation and degradation has been effected we have no means of
determining, the porous, crumbling rocks being ill adapted for the
reception and preservation of glacial inscriptions.
The summit is now a mass of ruins, and all the finer striations have
been effaced from the flanks by post-glacial weathering, while the
irregularity of its lavas as regards susceptibility to erosion, and the
disturbance caused by inter- and post-glacial eruptions, have obscured
or obliterated those heavier characters of the glacial record found so
clearly inscribed upon the granite pages of the high Sierra between
latitude 36 degrees 30 minutes and 39 degrees. This much, however, is
plain: that the summit of the mountain was considerably lowered, and
the sides were deeply grooved and fluted while it was a center of
dispersal for the glaciers of the circumjacent region. And when at
length the glacial period began to draw near its close, the ice mantle
was gradually melted off around the base of the mountain, and in
receding and breaking up into its present fragmentary condition the
irregular heaps and rings of moraine matter were stored upon its flanks
on which the forests are growing. The glacial erosion of most of the
Shasta lavas gives rise to detritus composed of rough subangular
boulders of moderate size and porous gravel and sand, which yields
freely to the transporting power of running water. Several centuries
ago immense quantities of this lighter material were washed down from
the higher slopes by a flood of extraordinary magnitude, caused
probably by the sudden melting of the ice and snow during an eruption,
giving rise to the deposition of conspicuous delta-like beds around the
base. And it is upon these flood-beds of moraine soil, thus suddenly
and simultaneously laid down and joined edge to edge, that the flowery
chaparral is growing.
Thus, by forces seemingly antagonistic and destructive, Nature
accomplishes her beneficent designs—now a flood of fire, now a flood of
ice, now a flood of water; and again in the fullness of time an
outburst of organic life—forest and garden, with all their wealth of
fruit and flowers, the air stirred into one universal hum with
rejoicing insects, a milky way of wings and petals, girdling the
newborn mountain like a cloud, as if the vivifying sunbeams beating
against its sides had broken into a foam of plant-bloom and bees.
But with such grand displays as Nature is making here, how grand are
her reservations, bestowed only upon those who devotedly seek them!
Beneath the smooth and snowy surface the fountain fires are still
aglow, to blaze forth afresh at their appointed times. The glaciers,
looking so still and small at a distance, represented by the artist
with a patch of white paint laid on by a single stroke of his brush,
are still flowing onward, unhalting, with deep crystal currents,
sculpturing the mountain with stern, resistless energy. How many caves
and fountains that no eye has yet seen lie with all their fine
furniture deep down in the darkness, and how many shy wild creatures
are at home beneath the grateful lights and shadows of the woods,
rejoicing in their fullness of perfect life!
Standing on the edge of the Strawberry Meadows in the sun-days of
summer, not a foot or feather or leaf seems to stir; and the grand,
towering mountain with all its inhabitants appears in rest, calm as a
star. Yet how profound is the energy ever in action, and how great is
the multitude of claws and teeth, wings and eyes, wide awake and at
work and shining! Going into the blessed wilderness, the blood of the
plants throbbing beneath the life-giving sunshine seems to be heard and
felt; plant growth goes on before our eyes, and every tree and bush and
flower is seen as a hive of restless industry. The deeps of the sky are
mottled with singing wings of every color and tone—clouds of brilliant
chrysididae dancing and swirling in joyous rhythm, golden-barred
vespidae, butterflies, grating cicadas and jolly rattling
grasshoppers—fairly enameling the light, and shaking all the air into
music. Happy fellows they are, every one of them, blowing tiny pipe and
trumpet, plodding and prancing, at work or at play.
Though winter holds the summit, Shasta in summer is mostly a massy,
bossy mound of flowers colored like the alpenglow that flushes the
snow. There are miles of wild roses, pink bells of huckleberry and
sweet manzanita, every bell a honey-cup, plants that tell of the north
and of the south; tall nodding lilies, the crimson sarcodes,
rhododendron, cassiope, and blessed linnaea; phlox, calycanthus, plum,
cherry, crataegus, spiraea, mints, and clovers in endless variety;
ivesia, larkspur, and columbine; golden aplopappus, linosyris[5],
bahia, wyethia, arnica, brodiaea, etc.,—making sheets and beds of light
edgings of bloom in lavish abundance for the myriads of the air
dependent on their bounty.
The common honeybees, gone wild in this sweet wilderness, gather tons
of honey into the hollows of the trees and rocks, clambering eagerly
through bramble and hucklebloom, shaking the clustered bells of the
generous manzanita, now humming aloft among polleny willows and firs,
now down on the ashy ground among small gilias and buttercups, and anon
plunging into banks of snowy cherry and buckthorn. They consider the
lilies and roll into them, pushing their blunt polleny faces against
them like babies on their mother’s bosom; and fondly, too, with eternal
love does Mother Nature clasp her small bee-babies and suckle them,
multitudes at once, on her warm Shasta breast. Besides the common
honeybee there are many others here, fine, burly, mossy fellows, such
as were nourished on the mountains many a flowery century before the
advent of the domestic species—bumblebees, mason-bees, carpenter-bees,
and leaf-cutters. Butterflies, too, and moths of every size and
pattern; some wide-winged like bats, flapping slowly and sailing in
easy curves; others like small flying violets shaking about loosely in
short zigzag flights close to the flowers, feasting in plenty night and
day.
Deer in great abundance come to Shasta from the warmer foothills every
spring to feed in the rich, cool pastures, and bring forth their young
in the ceanothus tangles of the chaparral zone, retiring again before
the snowstorms of winter, mostly to the southward and westward of the
mountain. In like manner the wild sheep of the adjacent region seek the
lofty inaccessible crags of the summit as the snow melts, and are
driven down to the lower spurs and ridges where there is but little
snow, to the north and east of Shasta.
Bears, too, roam this foodful wilderness, feeding on grass, clover,
berries, nuts, ant eggs, fish, flesh, or fowl,—whatever comes in their
way,—with but little troublesome discrimination. Sugar and honey they
seem to like best of all, and they seek far to find the sweets; but
when hard pushed by hunger they make out to gnaw a living from the bark
of trees and rotten logs, and might almost live on clean lava alone.
Notwithstanding the California bears have had as yet but little
experience with honeybees, they sometimes succeed in reaching the
bountiful stores of these industrious gatherers and enjoy the feast
with majestic relish. But most honeybees in search of a home are wise
enough to make choice of a hollow in a living tree far from the ground,
whenever such can be found. There they are pretty secure, for though
the smaller brown and black bears climb well, they are unable to gnaw
their way into strong hives, while compelled to exert themselves to
keep from falling and at the same time endure the stings of the bees
about the nose and eyes, without having their paws free to brush them
off. But woe to the unfortunates who dwell in some prostrate trunk, and
to the black bumblebees discovered in their mossy, mouselike nests in
the ground. With powerful teeth and claws these are speedily laid bare,
and almost before time is given for a general buzz the bees, old and
young, larvae, honey, stings, nest, and all, are devoured in one
ravishing revel.
The antelope may still be found in considerable numbers to the
northeastward of Shasta, but the elk, once abundant, have almost
entirely gone from the region. The smaller animals, such as the wolf,
the various foxes, wildcats, coon, squirrels, and the curious wood rat
that builds large brush huts, abound in all the wilder places; and the
beaver, otter, mink, etc., may still be found along the sources of the
rivers. The blue grouse and mountain quail are plentiful in the woods
and the sage-hen on the plains about the northern base of the mountain,
while innumerable smaller birds enliven and sweeten every thicket and
grove.
There are at least five classes of human inhabitants about the Shasta
region: the Indians, now scattered, few in numbers and miserably
demoralized, though still offering some rare specimens of savage
manhood; miners and prospectors, found mostly to the north and west of
the mountain, since the region about its base is overflowed with lava;
cattle-raisers, mostly on the open plains to the northeastward and
around the Klamath Lakes; hunters and trappers, where the woods and
waters are wildest; and farmers, in Shasta Valley on the north side of
the mountain, wheat, apples, melons, berries, all the best production
of farm and garden growing and ripening there at the foot of the great
white cone, which seems at times during changing storms ready to fall
upon them—the most sublime farm scenery imaginable.
The Indians of the McCloud River that have come under my observation
differ considerably in habits and features from the Diggers and other
tribes of the foothills and plains, and also from the Pah Utes and
Modocs. They live chiefly on salmon. They seem to be closely related to
the Tlingits of Alaska, Washington, and Oregon, and may readily have
found their way here by passing from stream to stream in which salmon
abound. They have much better features than the Indians of the plains,
and are rather wide awake, speculative and ambitious in their way, and
garrulous, like the natives of the northern coast.
Before the Modoc War they lived in dread of the Modocs, a tribe living
about the Klamath Lake and the Lava Beds, who were in the habit of
crossing the low Sierra divide past the base of Shasta on freebooting
excursions, stealing wives, fish, and weapons from the Pitts and
McClouds. Mothers would hush their children by telling them that the
Modocs would catch them.
During my stay at the Government fish-hatching station on the McCloud I
was accompanied in my walks along the riverbank by a McCloud boy about
ten years of age, a bright, inquisitive fellow, who gave me the Indian
names of the birds and plants that we met. The water-ousel he knew well
and he seemed to like the sweet singer, which he called “Sussinny.” He
showed me how strips of the stems of the beautiful maidenhair fern were
used to adorn baskets with handsome brown bands, and pointed out
several plants good to eat, particularly the large saxifrage growing
abundantly along the river margin. Once I rushed suddenly upon him to
see if he would be frightened; but he unflinchingly held his ground,
struck a grand heroic attitude, and shouted, “Me no fraid; me Modoc!”
Mount Shasta, so far as I have seen, has never been the home of
Indians, not even their hunting ground to any great extent, above the
lower slopes of the base. They are said to be afraid of fire-mountains
and geyser basins as being the dwelling places of dangerously powerful
and unmanageable gods. However, it is food and their relations to other
tribes that mainly control the movements of Indians; and here their
food was mostly on the lower slopes, with nothing except the wild sheep
to tempt them higher. Even these were brought within reach without
excessive climbing during the storms of winter.
On the north side of Shasta, near Sheep Rock, there is a long cavern,
sloping to the northward, nearly a mile in length, thirty or forty feet
wide, and fifty feet or more in height, regular in form and direction
like a railroad tunnel, and probably formed by the flowing away of a
current of lava after the hardening of the surface. At the mouth of
this cave, where the light and shelter is good, I found many of the
heads and horns of the wild sheep, and the remains of campfires, no
doubt those of Indian hunters who in stormy weather had camped there
and feasted after the fatigues of the chase. A wild picture that must
have formed on a dark night—the glow of the fire, the circle of
crouching savages around it seen through the smoke, the dead game, and
the weird darkness and half-darkness of the walls of the cavern, a
picture of cave-dwellers at home in the stone age!
Interest in hunting is almost universal, so deeply is it rooted as an
inherited instinct ever ready to rise and make itself known. Fine
scenery may not stir a fiber of mind or body, but how quick and how
true is the excitement of the pursuit of game! Then up flames the
slumbering volcano of ancient wildness, all that has been done by
church and school through centuries of cultivation is for the moment
destroyed, and the decent gentleman or devout saint becomes a howling,
bloodthirsty, demented savage. It is not long since we all were cavemen
and followed game for food as truly as wildcat or wolf, and the long
repression of civilization seems to make the rebound to savage love of
blood all the more violent. This frenzy, fortunately, does not last
long in its most exaggerated form, and after a season of wildness
refined gentlemen from cities are not more cruel than hunters and
trappers who kill for a living.
Dwelling apart in the depths of the woods are the various kinds of
mountaineers,—hunters, prospectors, and the like,—rare men, “queer
characters,” and well worth knowing. Their cabins are located with
reference to game and the ledges to be examined, and are constructed
almost as simply as those of the wood rats made of sticks laid across
each other without compass or square. But they afford good shelter from
storms, and so are “square” with the need of their builders. These men
as a class are singularly fine in manners, though their faces may be
scarred and rough like the bark of trees. On entering their cabins you
will promptly be placed on your good behavior, and, your wants being
perceived with quick insight, complete hospitality will be offered for
body and mind to the extent of the larder.
These men know the mountains far and near, and their thousand voices,
like the leaves of a book. They can tell where the deer may be found at
any time of year or day, and what they are doing; and so of all the
other furred and feathered people they meet in their walks; and they
can send a thought to its mark as well as a bullet. The aims of such
people are not always the highest, yet how brave and manly and clean
are their lives compared with too many in crowded towns mildewed and
dwarfed in disease and crime! How fine a chance is here to begin life
anew in the free fountains and skylands of Shasta, where it is so easy
to live and to die! The future of the hunter is likely to be a good
one; no abrupt change about it, only a passing from wilderness to
wilderness, from one high place to another.
Now that the railroad has been built up the Sacramento, everybody with
money may go to Mount Shasta, the weak as well as the strong,
fine-grained, succulent people, whose legs have never ripened, as well
as sinewy mountaineers seasoned long in the weather. This, surely, is
not the best way of going to the mountains, yet it is better than
staying below. Many still small voices will not be heard in the noisy
rush and din, suggestive of going to the sky in a chariot of fire or a
whirlwind, as one is shot to the Shasta mark in a booming palace-car
cartridge; up the rocky cañon, skimming the foaming river, above the
level reaches, above the dashing spray—fine exhilarating translation,
yet a pity to go so fast in a blur, where so much might be seen and
enjoyed.
The mountains are fountains not only of rivers and fertile soil, but of
men. Therefore we are all, in some sense, mountaineers, and going to
the mountains is going home. Yet how many are doomed to toil in town
shadows while the white mountains beckon all along the horizon! Up the
cañon to Shasta would be a cure for all care. But many on arrival seem
at a loss to know what to do with themselves, and seek shelter in the
hotel, as if that were the Shasta they had come for. Others never leave
the rail, content with the window views, and cling to the comforts of
the sleeping car like blind mice to their mothers. Many are sick and
have been dragged to the healing wilderness unwillingly for body-good
alone. Were the parts of the human machine detachable like Yankee
inventions, how strange would be the gatherings on the mountains of
pieces of people out of repair!
How sadly unlike the whole-hearted ongoing of the seeker after gold is
this partial, compulsory mountaineering!—as if the mountain treasuries
contained nothing better than gold! Up the mountains they go,
high-heeled and high-hatted, laden like Christian with mortifications
and mortgages of divers sorts and degrees, some suffering from the
sting of bad bargains, others exulting in good ones; hunters and
fishermen with gun and rod and leggins; blythe and jolly troubadours to
whom all Shasta is romance; poets singing their prayers; the weak and
the strong, unable or unwilling to bear mental taxation. But, whatever
the motive, all will be in some measure benefited. None may wholly
escape the good of Nature, however imperfectly exposed to her
blessings. The minister will not preach a perfectly flat and
sedimentary sermon after climbing a snowy peak; and the fair play and
tremendous impartiality of Nature, so tellingly displayed, will surely
affect the after pleadings of the lawyer. Fresh air at least will get
into everybody, and the cares of mere business will be quenched like
the fires of a sinking ship.
Possibly a branch railroad may some time be built to the summit of
Mount Shasta like the road on Mount Washington. In the mean time
tourists are dropped at Sisson’s, about twelve miles from the summit,
whence as headquarters they radiate in every direction to the so-called
“points of interest”; sauntering about the flowery fringes of the
Strawberry Meadows, bathing in the balm of the woods, scrambling,
fishing, hunting; riding about Castle Lake, the McCloud River, Soda
Springs, Big Spring, deer pastures, and elsewhere. Some demand bears,
and make excited inquiries concerning their haunts, how many there
might be altogether on the mountain, and whether they are grizzly,
brown, or black. Others shout, “Excelsior,” and make off at once for
the upper snow fields. Most, however, are content with comparatively
level ground and moderate distances, gathering at the hotel every
evening laden with trophies—great sheaves of flowers, cones of various
trees, cedar and fir branches covered with yellow lichens, and possibly
a fish or two, or quail, or grouse.
[Illustration: AT SHASTA SODA SPRINGS]
But the heads of deer, antelope, wild sheep, and bears are
conspicuously rare or altogether wanting in tourist collections in the
“paradise of hunters.” There is a grand comparing of notes and
adventures. Most are exhilarated and happy, though complaints may
occasionally be heard—“The mountain does not look so very high after
all, nor so very white; the snow is in patches like rags spread out to
dry,” reminding one of Sydney Smith’s joke against Jeffrey, “D—n the
Solar System; bad light, planets too indistinct.” But far the greater
number are in good spirits, showing the influence of holiday enjoyment
and mountain air. Fresh roses come to cheeks that long have been pale,
and sentiment often begins to blossom under the new inspiration.
The Shasta region may be reserved as a national park, with special
reference to the preservation of its fine forests and game. This should
by all means be done; but, as far as game is concerned, it is in little
danger from tourists, notwithstanding many of them carry guns, and are
in some sense hunters. Going in noisy groups, and with guns so shining,
they are oftentimes confronted by inquisitive Douglas squirrels, and
are thus given opportunities for shooting; but the larger animals
retire at their approach and seldom are seen. Other gun people, too
wise or too lifeless to make much noise, move slowly along the trails
and about the open spots of the woods, like benumbed beetles in a
snowdrift. Such hunters are themselves hunted by the animals, which in
perfect safety follow them out of curiosity.
During the bright days of midsummer the ascent of Shasta is only a
long, safe saunter, without fright or nerve strain, or even serious
fatigue, to those in sound health. Setting out from Sisson’s on
horseback, accompanied by a guide leading a pack animal with provision,
blankets, and other necessaries, you follow a trail that leads up to
the edge of the timberline, where you camp for the night, eight or ten
miles from the hotel, at an elevation of about ten thousand feet. The
next day, rising early, you may push on to the summit and return to
Sisson’s. But it is better to spend more time in the enjoyment of the
grand scenery on the summit and about the head of the Whitney Glacier,
pass the second night in camp, and return to Sisson’s on the third day.
Passing around the margin of the meadows and on through the zones of
the forest, you will have good opportunities to get ever-changing views
of the mountain and its wealth of creatures that bloom and breathe.
The woods differ but little from those that clothe the mountains to the
southward, the trees being slightly closer together and generally not
quite so large, marking the incipient change from the open sunny
forests of the Sierra to the dense damp forests of the northern coast,
where a squirrel may travel in the branches of the thick-set trees
hundreds of miles without touching the ground. Around the upper belt of
the forest you may see gaps where the ground has been cleared by
avalanches of snow, thousands of tons in weight, which, descending with
grand rush and roar, brush the trees from their paths like so many
fragile shrubs or grasses.
At first the ascent is very gradual. The mountain begins to leave the
plain in slopes scarcely perceptible, measuring from two to three
degrees. These are continued by easy gradations mile after mile all the
way to the truncated, crumbling summit, where they attain a steepness
of twenty to twenty-five degrees. The grand simplicity of these lines
is partially interrupted on the north subordinate cone that rises from
the side of the main cone about three thousand feet from the summit.
This side cone, past which your way to the summit lies, was active
after the breaking-up of the main ice-cap of the glacial period, as
shown by the comparatively unwasted crater in which it terminates and
by streams of fresh-looking, unglaciated lava that radiate from it as a
center.
The main summit is about a mile and a half in diameter from southwest
to northeast, and is nearly covered with snow and _névé_, bounded by
crumbling peaks and ridges, among which we look in vain for any sure
plan of an ancient crater. The extreme summit is situated on the
southern end of a narrow ridge that bounds the general summit on the
east. Viewed from the north, it appears as an irregular blunt point
about ten feet high, and is fast disappearing before the stormy
atmospheric action to which it is subjected.
At the base of the eastern ridge, just below the extreme summit, hot
sulphurous gases and vapor escape with a hissing, bubbling noise from a
fissure in the lava. Some of the many small vents cast up a spray of
clear hot water, which falls back repeatedly until wasted in vapor. The
steam and spray seem to be produced simply by melting snow coming in
the way of the escaping gases, while the gases are evidently derived
from the heated interior of the mountain, and may be regarded as the
last feeble expression of the mighty power that lifted the entire mass
of the mountain from the volcanic depths far below the surface of the
plain.
The view from the summit in clear weather extends to an immense
distance in every direction. Southeastward, the low volcanic portion of
the Sierra is seen like a map, both flanks as well as the crater-dotted
axis, as far as Lassen’s Butte[6], a prominent landmark and an old
volcano like Shasta, between ten and eleven thousand feet high, and
distant about sixty miles. Some of the higher summit peaks near
Independence Lake, one hundred and eighty miles away, are at times
distinctly visible. Far to the north, in Oregon, the snowy volcanic
cones of Mounts Pitt, Jefferson, and the Three Sisters rise in clear
relief, like majestic monuments, above the dim dark sea of the northern
woods. To the northeast lie the Rhett and Klamath Lakes, the Lava Beds,
and a grand display of hill and mountain and gray rocky plains. The
Scott, Siskiyou, and Trinity Mountains rise in long, compact waves to
the west and southwest, and the valley of the Sacramento and the coast
mountains, with their marvelous wealth of woods and waters, are seen;
while close around the base of the mountain lie the beautiful Shasta
Valley, Strawberry Valley, Huckleberry Valley, and many others, with
the headwaters of the Shasta, Sacramento, and McCloud Rivers. Some
observers claim to have seen the ocean from the summit of Shasta, but I
have not yet been so fortunate.
The Cinder Cone near Lassen’s Butte is remarkable as being the scene of
the most recent volcanic eruption in the range. It is a symmetrical
truncated cone covered with gray cinders and ashes, with a regular
crater in which a few pines an inch or two in diameter are growing. It
stands between two small lakes which previous to the last eruption,
when the cone was built, formed one lake. From near the base of the
cone a flood of extremely rough black vesicular lava extends across
what was once a portion of the bottom of the lake into the forest of
yellow pine.
This lava flow seems to have been poured out during the same eruption
that gave birth to the cone, cutting the lake in two, flowing a little
way into the woods and overwhelming the trees in its way, the ends of
some of the charred trunks still being visible, projecting from beneath
the advanced snout of the flow where it came to rest; while the floor
of the forest for miles around is so thickly strewn with loose cinders
that walking is very fatiguing. The Pitt River Indians tell of a
fearful time of darkness, probably due to this eruption, when the sky
was filled with falling cinders which, as they thought, threatened
every living creature with destruction, and say that when at length the
sun appeared through the gloom it was red like blood.
Less recent craters in great numbers dot the adjacent region, some with
lakes in their throats, some overgrown with trees, others nearly
bare—telling monuments of Nature’s mountain fires so often lighted
throughout the northern Sierra. And, standing on the top of icy Shasta,
the mightiest fire-monument of them all, we can hardly fail to look
forward to the blare and glare of its next eruption and wonder whether
it is nigh. Elsewhere men have planted gardens and vineyards in the
craters of volcanoes quiescent for ages, and almost without warning
have been hurled into the sky. More than a thousand years of profound
calm have been known to intervene between two violent eruptions.
Seventeen centuries intervened between two consecutive eruptions on the
island of Ischia. Few volcanoes continue permanently in eruption. Like
gigantic geysers, spouting hot stone instead of hot water, they work
and sleep, and we have no sure means of knowing whether they are only
sleeping or dead.