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 seems 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 dome. 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 cañon 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 cañon, 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 cañons 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.