I like that name the Indians give to the mountain of Lone Pine, and find
it pertinent to my subject,--Oppapago, The Weeper. It sits eastward and
solitary from the lordliest ranks of the Sierras, and above a range of
little, old, blunt hills, and has a bowed, grave aspect as of some woman
you might have known, looking out across the grassy barrows of her dead.
From twin gray lakes under its noble brow stream down incessant white
and tumbling waters. "Mahala all time cry," said Winnenap', drawing
furrows in his rugged, wrinkled cheeks.
The origin of mountain streams is like the origin of tears, patent to
the understanding but mysterious to the sense.
They are always at it, but one so seldom catches them in the act. Here
in the valley there is no cessation of waters even in the season when
the niggard frost gives them scant leave to run. They make the most of
their midday hour, and tinkle all night thinly under the ice. An ear
laid to the snow catches a muffled hint of their eternal busyness
fifteen or twenty feet under the cañon drifts, and long before any
appreciable spring thaw, the sagging edges of the snow bridges mark out
the place of their running. One who ventures to look for it finds the
immediate source of the spring freshets--all the hill fronts furrowed
with the reek of melting drifts, all the gravelly flats in a swirl of
waters. But later, in June or July, when the camping season begins,
there runs the stream away full and singing, with no visible
reinforcement other than an icy trickle from some high, belated clot of
snow. Oftenest the stream drops bodily from the bleak bowl of some
alpine lake; sometimes breaks out of a hillside as a spring where the
ear can trace it under the rubble of loose stones to the neighborhood of
some blind pool. But that leaves the lakes to be accounted for.
The lake is the eye of the mountain, jade green, placid, unwinking, also
unfathomable. Whatever goes on under the high and stony brows is guessed
at. It is always a favorite local tradition that one or another of the
blind lakes is bottomless. Often they lie in such deep cairns of broken
boulders that one never gets quite to them, or gets away unhurt. One
such drops below the plunging slope that the Kearsarge trail winds over,
perilously, nearing the pass. It lies still and wickedly green in its
sharp-lipped cup, and the guides of that region love to tell of the
packs and pack animals it has swallowed up.
But the lakes of Oppapago are perhaps not so deep, less green than gray,
and better befriended. The ousel haunts them, while still hang about
their coasts the thin undercut drifts that never quite leave the high
altitudes. In and out of the bluish ice caves he flits and sings, and
his singing heard from above is sweet and uncanny like the Nixie's
chord. One finds butterflies, too, about these high, sharp regions which
might be called desolate, but will not by me who love them. This is
above timber-line but not too high for comforting by succulent small
herbs and golden tufted grass. A granite mountain does not crumble with
alacrity, but once resolved to soil makes the best of it. Every handful
of loose gravel not wholly water leached affords a plant footing, and
even in such unpromising surroundings there is a choice of locations.
There is never going to be any communism of mountain herbage, their
affinities are too sure. Full in the runnels of snow water on gravelly,
open spaces in the shadow of a drift, one looks to find buttercups,
frozen knee-deep by night, and owning no desire but to ripen their fruit
above the icy bath. Soppy little plants of the portulaca and small, fine
ferns shiver under the drip of falls and in dribbling crevices. The
bleaker the situation, so it is near a stream border, the better the
cassiope loves it. Yet I have not found it on the polished glacier
slips, but where the country rock cleaves and splinters in the high
windy headlands that the wild sheep frequents, hordes and hordes of the
white bells swing over matted, mossy foliage. On Oppapago, which is also
called Sheep Mountain, one finds not far from the beds of cassiope the
ice-worn, stony hollows where the bighorns cradle their young. These are
above the wolf's quest and the eagle's wont, and though the heather beds
are softer, they are neither so dry nor so warm, and here only the stars
go by. No other animal of any pretensions makes a habitat of the alpine
regions. Now and then one gets a hint of some small, brown creature, rat
or mouse kind, that slips secretly among the rocks; no others adapt
themselves to desertness of aridity or altitude so readily as these
ground inhabiting, graminivorous species. If there is an open stream the
trout go up the lake as far as the water breeds food for them, but the
ousel goes farthest, for pure love of it.
Since no lake can be at the highest point, it is possible to find plant
life higher than the water borders; grasses perhaps the highest, gilias,
royal blue trusses of polymonium, rosy plats of Sierra primroses. What
one has to get used to in flowers at high altitudes is the bleaching of
the sun. Hardly do they hold their virgin color for a day, and this
early fading before their function is performed gives them a pitiful
appearance not according with their hardihood. The color scheme runs
along the high ridges from blue to rosy purple, carmine and coral red;
along the water borders it is chiefly white and yellow where the mimulus
makes a vivid note, running into red when the two schemes meet and mix
about the borders of the meadows, at the upper limit of the columbine.
Here is the fashion in which a mountain stream gets down from the
perennial pastures of the snow to its proper level and identity as an
irrigating ditch. It slips stilly by the glacier scoured rim of an ice
bordered pool, drops over sheer, broken ledges to another pool, gathers
itself, plunges headlong on a rocky ripple slope, finds a lake again,
reinforced, roars downward to a pot-hole, foams and bridles, glides a
tranquil reach in some still meadow, tumbles into a sharp groove between
hill flanks, curdles under the stream tangles, and so arrives at the
open country and steadier going. Meadows, little strips of alpine
freshness, begin before the timber-line is reached. Here one treads on a
carpet of dwarf willows, downy catkins of creditable size and the
greatest economy of foliage and stems. No other plant of high altitudes
knows its business so well.
It hugs the ground, grows roots from stem joints where no roots should
be, grows a slender leaf or two and twice as many erect full catkins
that rarely, even in that short growing season, fail of fruit. Dipping
over banks in the inlets of the creeks, the fortunate find the rosy
apples of the miniature manzanita, barely, but always quite
sufficiently, borne above the spongy sod. It does not do to be anything
but humble in the alpine regions, but not fearful. I have pawed about
for hours in the chill sward of meadows where one might properly expect
to get one's death, and got no harm from it, except it might be Oliver
Twist's complaint. One comes soon after this to shrubby willows, and
where willows are trout may be confidently looked for in most Sierra
streams. There is no accounting for their distribution; though provident
anglers have assisted nature of late, one still comes upon roaring brown
waters where trout might very well be, but are not.
The highest limit of conifers--in the middle Sierras, the white bark
pine--is not along the water border. They come to it about the level of
the heather, but they have no such affinity for dampness as the tamarack
pines. Scarcely any bird-note breaks the stillness of the timber-line,
but chipmunks inhabit here, as may be guessed by the gnawed ruddy cones
of the pines, and lowering hours the woodchucks come down to the water.
On a little spit of land running into Windy Lake we found one summer the
evidence of a tragedy; a pair of sheep's horns not fully grown caught in
the crotch of a pine where the living sheep must have lodged them. The
trunk of the tree had quite closed over them, and the skull bones
crumbled away from the weathered horn cases. We hoped it was not too far
out of the running of night prowlers to have put a speedy end to the
long agony, but we could not be sure. I never liked the spit of Windy
Lake again. It seems that all snow nourished plants count nothing so
excellent in their kind as to be forehanded with their bloom, working
secretly to that end under the high piled winters. The heathers begin by
the lake borders, while little sodden drifts still shelter under their
branches. I have seen the tiniest of them (_Kalmia glauca_) blooming,
and with well-formed fruit, a foot away from a snowbank from which it
could hardly have emerged within a week. Somehow the soul of the heather
has entered into the blood of the English-speaking.
"And oh! is that heather?" they say; and the most indifferent ends by
picking a sprig of it in a hushed, wondering way. One must suppose that
the root of their respective races issued from the glacial borders at
about the same epoch, and remember their origin.
Among the pines where the slope of the land allows it, the streams run
into smooth, brown, trout-abounding rills across open flats that are in
reality filled lake basins. These are the displaying grounds of the
gentians--blue--blue--eye-blue, perhaps, virtuous and likable flowers.
One is not surprised to learn that they have tonic properties. But if
your meadow should be outside the forest reserve, and the sheep have
been there, you will find little but the shorter, paler _G. Newberryii_,
and in the matted sods of the little tongues of greenness that lick up
among the pines along the watercourses, white, scentless, nearly
stemless, alpine violets.
At about the nine thousand foot level and in the summer there will be
hosts of rosy-winged dodecatheon, called shooting-stars, outlining the
crystal runnels in the sod. Single flowers have often a two-inch spread
of petal, and the full, twelve blossomed heads above the slender
pedicels have the airy effect of wings.
It is about this level one looks to find the largest lakes with thick
ranks of pines bearing down on them, often swamped in the summer floods
and paying the inevitable penalty for such encroachment. Here in wet
coves of the hills harbors that crowd of bloom that makes the wonder of
the Sierra cañons.
They drift under the alternate flicker and gloom of the windy rooms of
pines, in gray rock shelters, and by the ooze of blind springs, and
their juxtapositions are the best imaginable. Lilies come up out of fern
beds, columbine swings over meadowsweet, white rein-orchids quake in the
leaning grass. Open swales, where in wet years may be running water, are
plantations of false hellebore (_Veratrum Californicum_), tall, branched
candelabra of greenish bloom above the sessile, sheathing, boat-shaped
leaves, semi-translucent in the sun. A stately plant of the lily family,
but why "false?" It is frankly offensive in its character, and its young
juices deadly as any hellebore that ever grew.
Like most mountain herbs it has an uncanny haste to bloom. One hears by
night, when all the wood is still, the crepitatious rustle of the
unfolding leaves and the pushing flower-stalk within, that has open
blossoms before it has fairly uncramped from the sheath. It commends
itself by a certain exclusiveness of growth, taking enough room and
never elbowing; for if the flora of the lake region has a fault it is
that there is too much of it. We have more than three hundred species
from Kearsarge Cañon alone, and if that does not include them all it is
because they were already collected otherwhere.
One expects to find lakes down to about nine thousand feet, leading into
each other by comparatively open ripple slopes and white cascades. Below
the lakes are filled basins that are still spongy swamps, or substantial
meadows, as they get down and down.
Here begin the stream tangles. On the east slopes of the middle Sierras
the pines, all but an occasional yellow variety, desert the stream
borders about the level of the lowest lakes, and the birches and
tree-willows begin. The firs hold on almost to the mesa levels,--there
are no foothills on this eastern slope,--and whoever has firs misses
nothing else. It goes without saying that a tree that can afford to take
fifty years to its first fruiting will repay acquaintance. It keeps,
too, all that half century, a virginal grace of outline, but having once
flowered, begins quietly to put away the things of its youth. Year by
year the lower rounds of boughs are shed, leaving no scar; year by year
the star-branched minarets approach the sky. A fir-tree loves a water
border, loves a long wind in a draughty cañon, loves to spend itself
secretly on the inner finishings of its burnished, shapely cones. Broken
open in mid-season the petal-shaped scales show a crimson satin surface,
perfect as a rose.
The birch--the brown-bark western birch characteristic of lower stream
tangles--is a spoil sport. It grows thickly to choke the stream that
feeds it; grudges it the sky and space for angler's rod and fly. The
willows do better; painted-cup, cypripedium, and the hollow stalks of
span-broad white umbels, find a footing among their stems. But in
general the steep plunges, the white swirls, green and tawny pools, the
gliding hush of waters between the meadows and the mesas afford little
fishing and few flowers.
One looks for these to begin again when once free of the rifted cañon
walls; the high note of babble and laughter falls off to the steadier
mellow tone of a stream that knows its purpose and reflects the sky.