THE VALLEY OF TEN THOUSAND SMOKES
The next morning they had a good look around before deciding which way to
go. On one side pointed firs in patches on the canyon walls contrasted
with the snow in the ravines. There was a brook that divided, then
reunited in white strands, only to spread out into a smooth, glistening
sheet, golden in the sunlight, to join the green river.
The notches between two rounding, glacier-smoothed granite masses
disclosed distant peaks, snow-capped, their jagged ledges thrusting
through the mantling white, dazzling in the sunshine like a mirror,--now
gray under a hazing sky, now dappled under a passing shower cloud.
They finally decided to wind through the gap, and Pedro, Norris and Long
Lester started on with the burros, while Ace and Ted started fine-combing
the map beneath them for the elusive Mexicans. Very probably, they
thought, they had been hiding in some of the caves that honeycombed the
region, and sooner or later they would have to reappear. Their supplies
could not hold out forever.
All along the Western flank of the Sierra, (as both Norris and Long
Lester were able to assure them), from the McCloud River in the North to
the Kaweah,--a distance of at least 400 miles,--stretched a belt of
metamorphic limestone, reaching up to as high as 7,000 feet, and it was
fairly riddled with caves.
But again the day went by without success. Ace only squared his chin. Ted
offered to abdicate his observer's seat in favor of any one of the party,
but Pedro and Long Lester preferred terra firma, and even Norris found
more to interest him in the rocks beneath their feet.
Once a little spiral of smoke drew them to a canyon head where they found
three fishermen with a pack train of seven horses,--but no Mexicans. They
searched Southward along the John Muir trail, returning along the Eastern
flank,--but to no purpose, so far as the fugitives were concerned.
As no one had had time to fish, they dined on tinned corned beef, which
Ace, the cook for the day, made the mistake of salting. (After that he
had to make tea twice.)
"One thing I'd like fer to ask you, Mr. Norris," said Long Lester that
night around the bon-fire, "is where does the salt in the ocean come
from? I don't see for the life of me, from what you've told us----"
"The salt was originally in the rock of the earth's crust," Norris
explained with a pleased smile at the old man's interest. "As this
igneous rock weathered with time, the rain and the streams washed it into
the ocean. Then when the sea water evaporates----"
"To make clouds, to make more rain?" Long Lester recited.
"Yes,--the salt of course remained behind, so that the oceans have been
growing constantly saltier since the earth began. Yet even now sea water
must be nine-tenths evaporated before the sodium begins to precipitate,
as we say."
"So there is room for a lot more."
"Especially as the oceans are growing larger all the time."
"But doesn't the ocean give it back to the land when it leaves these
sediments along the shore?"
"Not to any extent, speaking comparatively. But one of the interesting
things about the salt in the sea is this: Chemists and geologists
estimate that, for the amount of salt in the sea, enough of the original
earth crust must have been weathered away to have covered the continents
over 6,000 feet high. And that calculation just about fits what we
believe to have happened.
"The United States Geological Survey gave out an official statement in
1912 that this country is annually being washed back into the ocean at
the rate of two hundred and seventy million tons of matter dissolved in
the streams and five hundred and thirteen millions of tons of matter held
in suspension in the same streams. That is to say, the oceans every year
receive from the surface of the United States seven hundred and
eighty-three millions of tons of rock materials.
"That means that, here in this part of the country at least, one hundred
and seventy-seven tons per square mile are being washed back each year."
"Gee!" said Ted. "I should think, at that rate, that the continents would
have been all washed away long ago."
"Yes, there have been, since geological history began, at least twenty
whole mountain ranges as high as the Rockies worn to sea level. Of course
the oceans have periodically flooded the margins of the continents at
such times, in long troughs where now stand our Appalachian and Rocky
Mountain ranges, leaving their deposits.
"In the Rockies there are coarse sediments miles deep, together with
limestone formed of the ground-up shells of marine animals of the earlier
times. Now think of this!
"If all that stands above sea level in the United States to-day were to
be washed into the sea, as it undoubtedly will be, in time,--(but not in
our time), the level of the oceans will rise, (just as the level of a
half glass of water rises if you drop in a handful of sand), until--it
has been estimated--everything under six hundred and fifty feet above sea
level will be inundated. That means that probably half of the continent
would be under water. It has been so in times past, and it will be again.
In fact, in the age of reptile dominance, (the Cretaceous Period), when
the earth was just beginning to be peopled with birds and flying
reptiles, and the first, primitive mammals,--the Atlantic flowed straight
from what is now the Gulf of Mexico, through what is now the Rocky
Mountain Region, and through the Eastern part of Alaska, to the Arctic.
That left one strip of land that reached along what is now the Pacific
Coast, clear from the Isthmus of Panama to the Aleutian Islands and
straight across to Siberia. The Northern part of the Atlantic Coast
formed another land area, broken by the fresh water bodies of America and
Canada and in one with a strip of land that extended across Greenland to
Europe.
"It is pretty well established, in fact, that the United States has been
more or less flooded by warm, shallow marine waters at least sixteen
times since the age of fish dominance began. But not since the age of
man!" he hastened to assure the old prospector, who was beginning to look
uneasy.
"Of course these flood times brought a moist, warm climate to the land
areas, and life was easy for the then existing animal forms. Then when
readjustments in the earth's crust again raised up mountain ranges and
the climate became colder and drier, the struggle for existence became
more intense, the process of evolution was stimulated, and new forms
originated.
"We are living in one of those periods now. The organic world is being
stimulated to develop even better bodies, endowed with even more alert
brains.
"Life is easiest of all for the inhabitants of the ocean. That is why
they have developed so little intelligence."
"Is that why it's such an insult to call any one a poor fish?" grinned
Ted.
"An ichthyosaurus?" supplemented Ace.
"As has been said before," Norris took up the thread of his talk, "with a
drier climate and soil, comes the need of developing a faster mode of
locomotion, for food no longer lies or swims everywhere about, as it did
in the ocean, and in the swamps, and tropic humidity. Food and water are
scarce, and it is the speediest animal that fulfills his needs. This
speediness on his part means that he uses up more energy, and hence needs
more food, and he needs to assimilate it faster. In other words, it means
increased metabolism. This in turn means that he keeps his body at a
higher temperature. He needs it too, now, with the increased cold. This
results in the development of warm blood, by which the animal can
maintain his body warmth regardless of winter cold. If it had not been
for conditions that forced certain reptiles to develop warm-bloodedness,
we would have no birds or mammals to-day, for as you doubtless know,
birds and mammals both were evolved from reptiles."
"I swan!" was all the old prospector could say.
"Yes, the first mammals developed from a reptile known as the cynodont.
Many of these reptiles had long legs and could travel with the body well
off the ground. Birds originated from the same reptilian stock as did the
dinosaurs. First their hind-legs grew long so that they could run on
them,--and you will notice at the Museum how the legs of a dinosaur are
joined to the body exactly like a bird's,--then their scales gradually
evolved into feathers.
"There is a lot more to it than I can tell you now, but after various ups
and downs, dinosaurs became extinct and Nature tried out several kinds of
warm-blooded, furry mammals, some of them herbivorous and built for speed
to run away from their enemies, some of them swamp-dwelling monsters with
heavy legs and small brains, who, slow of movement, relied on horns and
other armor and sharp teeth for their defense.
"But there is no end to this subject. I only mean to make the point that
it was geological changes that drove the fish to land, and the land
animal to higher forms, till finally other geological changes drove man's
ancestors down out of the trees." The boys, no less than the old
prospector, testifying their interest in the last named operation, he
continued.
"When the Alps, the Andes and the Himalayas arose, man's ancestors still
lived in trees. But high mountains hold a large part of the moisture of
the atmosphere in the form of snow and ice, and at the same time the
decreased oceanic areas offer less surface for evaporation. Not only does
that mean a drier climate, but the sun's rays pass more freely through
dry air, and the days are hotter, and the heat passing freely back
through the same dry air at night, the nights are colder. Seasons are
more extreme, and ice accumulates on the mountain tops and around the
polar region, precursor of a glacier period. The aridity decreases the
amount of forest, and the manlike tree dweller had to descend to the
ground to get his living. That necessitated the development of his hind
legs for speed, and that speed necessitated his assuming a wholly erect
posture. That in turn freed his hands, and he, or the man descended from
him, could defend himself by throwing stones at the huge beasts who then
peopled the earth. The cold winters necessitated the use of the skins of
beasts for clothing, and so on through the list. It was geological
necessity that drove man into his higher development.
"Changes of climate and environment, however, are stimulating, even
to-day. Statistics show that stormy weather actually increases people's
energy."
The next day they passed a long crack in a rock slope, which Norris felt
sure had been made by an earthquake, perhaps as recent as that of 1906,
to judge from the cleanness and newness of it. The crack was no more than
a foot or two in width, but in places eight feet deep, they estimated,
and along the Western side of it stood a fault scarp, in this case a wall
of granite bowlders of various sizes up to four or five feet in height.
"This," pronounced the geology man, "is evidently a region overlying
subterranean volcanoes, which might even yet build the range higher. I'll
bet that kind of mountain building may still be going on around here."
Again and again Norris, or even Ace, had been able to point out, in the
record of the rocks, the evidences of the two glacier periods that had
helped shape the Sierra Nevada, the earlier one much larger, and enduring
longer, as shown by the moraines (or deposits) left behind. The lower end
of a canyon would be no wider than the stream that incised it, but the
upper portion would have been smoothed into grassy parks or lakelets on
each tread of a giant stairway to the summit of the range.
Rounded water-worn pebbles and cobblestones among a mass of angular
bowlders, left behind by glacier streams, together with an occasional
striated pebble, were "sermons in stones" to the geologist.
"Hey, Ted," his chum had challenged him that day, "did you ever see a
pirate?"
"Don't know as I did," admitted the ranch boy.
"Then I'll show you one. Climb in," and he prepared to search once more
for the Mexicans.
"Show me one! You speak as if they kept them in museums."
"This pirate will be a river. A river pirate,--I mean a pirate river! If
I could find the divide just North of Muah Mountain I'd show you where
streams are being captured this minute. Cottonwood Creek has already
captured one of the tributaries of Mulkey Creek, I hear, and diverted it
into an eastward flow, and further captures are likely to be pulled off
any time. Isn't it a scandal?"
"I say, Ace," protested his chum, "I've swallowed a lot since we started
on this trip, but I'm not so gullible as you seem to think."
"Look here, old kid," said Ace seriously. "It's a fact. Along a divide, a
stream flowing one way will divert one flowing the other way into its own
channel."
They found a pirate river,--but still no trace of the incendiaries.
However, that merely determined the Senator's son the more.
That night Norris told them the long promised tale of his Alaskan trip.
"Nothing like the Valley of Ten Thousand Smokes has ever been seen by the
eye of man," he declared. "If we could take all the other volcanic
regions of the world to-day and set them down side by side, they would
present less of a spectacle, except, of course, at the time of a
dangerous eruption. There has been nothing like it in the memory of
man,--though geologists can read from the rocks that such conditions must
have existed in past ages. The Mt. Katmai eruption of 1912, one of the
most dangerous in history, first attracted attention to this region, and
the National Geographic Society has since sent various expeditions to
Alaska. It was that way that the Valley came to be discovered, in 1916.
"I happened to be a member of the last expedition."
"Honestly!" the boys exclaimed.
"Yes, and I tell you, boys, when I first looked through Katmai Pass, it
just looked as if the whole valley were full of smoke. Of course it was
steam."
"Weren't you afraid of another volcano?" asked the boys, snuggling down
ready for a real story.
"No, because with all those vents letting off steam, it must relieve the
pressure from below, like so many safety-valves. Two black, glassy
looking lava mountains guard the pass. The wind on the side of
Observation Mountain was blowing so hard it honestly lifted us off our
feet at times, and it blew a hail of pumice stone in our faces that
literally cut the flesh. Of course we wore goggles.
"Once in the valley, there were certainly all of ten thousand smokes
rising from the ground. We were simply speechless, it was such an awesome
spectacle."
"I'll bet you were!" breathed Ted.
"Personally, I consider it more wonderful than either the Grand Canyon or
the geysers of the Yellowstone. As far as we could see in any
direction,--and there seemed to be three arms to the valley,--the white
vapor was steaming out of the ground until it mingled with a great cloud
that hung between the mountain walls. And we later camped in places where
we could keep our food in a hollow of a glacier while we boiled our
breakfast in a steam hole, and the ground was almost too warm for
comfort."
"Must have been an ideal camping place," said Ace.
"Far from that. Too much danger of breaking through. And then of course
there wasn't a tree or a grass blade anywhere, much less a stick of
firewood. But we sure had steam heat at night, and we cooked, in the
milder of the fumaroles."
"Wasn't there a lot of gas coming up with the steam?" asked Ace.
"Yes, but it didn't taint our food any. It was an ideal steam cooker.
Farther down the valley were some vents hot enough to fry bacon."
"I should think it would have steamed it," said Ted.
"No, we found one vent where the steam came so hot that it didn't
condense for several feet above ground; the only trouble was that the
frying pan had a tendency to go flying up in the air and the cook had to
have a strong arm to hold it down."
At the picture his memory evoked, Norris burst into hearty chuckles. "As
the bacon got crisp, of course it didn't weigh so heavy, and there always
came a point where it began to fly out of the pan. Then we'd all stand
around, and it was the liveliest man that caught the most breakfast.
"There was another camp convenience, too, there in Hades, as the valley
has been named."
"Thar, didn't I tell you so?" triumphed Long Lester.
"And they named the river Lethe. A river that ran down from the melting
glaciers,--though it almost all goes up in smoke, as it were,--in steam,
before it gets out of the hot part. This river whirls along, and in
places the steam actually boils up through the ice water, or along the
banks. I used to think it was an awful pity there were no fish in that
stream, because we could have cooked them without taking them off the
hook."
"Huh!" The old prospector shook his head. "I've thought all along this
here was a fish story."
"But it's gospel truth," Norris assured him. "I mean about the valley. I
_said_ there were no fish. Everything we ate, by the way, had to be
packed in on our backs. It was no place for horses, where in places the
ground fairly shook beneath our feet, and if it were to give way, we'd
find ourselves sure enough in hot water."
"It must have been almighty dangerous," gasped Ted.
"Well, not after we learned the ropes. Sometimes we accidentally put a
foot through a thin place and steam came through. I assure you we stepped
lively then. At other times our feet sank into the soft, hot mud.
"By the way, there is a mountain across the head of the valley that looks
like a crouching dog, and it has been named Cerberus."
"Were those geysers, those ten thousand smokes?" asked the old prospector.
"No, a geyser comes after volcanic activity, while here something is
still likely to happen. A geyser begins as a column of steam and hot
water, which erupts as often as the water gets to the boiling point. It
follows that the water must accumulate in rock not so hot that it would
instantly vaporize it. But the rock underlying this valley is so hot that
no water can accumulate."
"How large are the vents through which the steam comes?" asked Ted.
"All sizes down to nothing at all. There are even a few craters 100 feet
across, that have been produced by volcanic explosions. You will find
these craters, generally, along a large fissure, just the way you find
the Aleutian chain of volcanoes along a fissure in the earth's crust
several hundred miles in length.
"There are fissures all along the margins of the valley, besides those in
the center, and many of these have one side standing higher than the
other, showing them to be earthquake faults,--the same sort of thing we
see here in the rocks of the Sierras. And you should hear the hissing and
roaring of the steam as it forces its way up through these fissures from
the hot depths beneath. Sometimes it looks like blue smoke, it is so full
of gases, especially sulphur dioxide, the gas that is given off by
burning sulphur. So the popular notion of Hades isn't so far off after
all, eh?"
"Could you smell the sulphur fumes?"
"Sometimes, yes,--when the other gases did not overwhelm the odor. But
the weirdest part of all is the incrustations along the borders of the
vents. All colors of the rainbows--shapes as fantastic as anything in
fairyland. Lots of yellow, of course, from the sulphur,--crystals of it,
some of them neighbor to an orange tinted crystal, lying in the blue mud.
It was a beautiful color combination. Then there were green and gray
alum crystals which looked like growing lichens. There were also deep
green algae actually growing. Strange how certain designs are used over
and over again in nature! In other places the mud is actually burned
brick red, especially where the fumaroles are burnt out. This shades to
purple, and in other places to pink. But the most surprising, perhaps,
were the white vents just tinted with a delicate pink or cream.
"The largest fissure of all, one lying at the foot of Mt. Mageik, is
filled with the clear green water of a melted glacier. And above, the
mountain smokes away into the clouds!"
"It must be a marvelous place!" said Ace. "I suppose it was regular ice
water."
Norris laughed. "That is the funny part of it. It's not. The water is
actually warm, or rather, tepid, in places, on account of the heat from
below."
"So you had good swimming even in Alaska."
"We might have had. And then I must tell you about Novarupta. That's the
largest vent in the valley, and it is something you won't see very many
places in the world, a new volcano. It was only formed at the time of the
eruption of 1912, and it is one of the largest volcanoes in the world
to-day,--with a crater much larger than that of Vesuvius."
"But Mr. Norris, do y' mind my asking," Pedro hesitated, "but how do you
know it is a new volcano? Don't volcanoes sometimes burst forth again
after many years of quiet?"
"They do, but there is where the rocks tell the story again. Instead of
bursting forth from a mountain top, through igneous rock, (left from the
time when the earth-crust was molten), this one erupted in the valley, in
sandstone. On a still day, the smoke will rise as high as ten thousand
feet."
Norris, then a student, had been one of the first to view Lassen Volcano
when, in 1914, it broke its slumber of 200 years. Indeed, he had had a
real adventure, as the second outburst had caught him within half a mile
of the crater and he had barely escaped with his life. Of course the boys
had to hear all about it.
While the Sierra south of Lassen has been built more through uplift than
volcanic activity, at least since the Tertiary period, he explained, the
Cascades and indeed, the whole range to the northward through Oregon and
Washington, is a product of lava flow.
Happening to be about to start on a camping trip in the Feather River
region at the time of the first eruption, he and his companion had
hastened immediately to the scene of so much geological history making.
The smoke and ashes that billowed forth had been visible for fifty miles,
and the accompanying earthquake shocks had been accompanied by a downpour
of rain.
Climbing the path of a recent snow-slide, which had cleared a narrow path
in the fifteen-foot drifts, they could smell sulphur strongly from near
the South base onward. Veering around to the East, past half a dozen
cinder cones, they finally reached a narrow ridge leading directly to, as
yet unoccupied, the fire outlook station. Clambering over crags so steep,
finally, that they could not see ahead, they came to the little square
building, now tattered by the stones that had fallen through its roof,
tethered to the few feet of space available by wire cables that seemed to
hold it down in the teeth of the winds. Suddenly below them lay the bowl
of the ancient crater, bordered by snow fields now gray with ash. That
the ash had not been hot they judged from the fact that it had nowise
melted the snow, but lay on its surface. From the ragged edge of the
steaming basin, yellow with sulphur, rose the oppressive fumes they had
been getting more and more strongly. How deep was this funnel to the
interior of the earth? To their amazement it appeared to be only about 80
feet deep. That, they decided,--coupled with the fact that the ash and
rocks exploded had not been hot, but cold, must be because the sides of
the crater, as they gradually caved in, must have choked the neck of the
crater with debris, which had been expelled when the smoke and gases had
been exploded. There had been no lava flow, then!
They had retraced their steps to perhaps half a mile's distance when of a
sudden the earth beneath their feet began to heave and rumble
thunderously. Ashes and rocks, some the size of flour sacks, some huge
bowlders, began shooting into the air,--observers at a distance assuring
them afterwards that the smoke must have risen 3,000 feet above the peak.
It grew black as midnight, the smoke stung their eyes and lungs and
whiffs of sulphur nearly overwhelmed them.
It was a position of deadly peril. Quick as thought, they ran, Norris
dragging his companion after him, beneath the shelter of an overhanging
ledge, where at least the rocks could not fall on them, and there they
buried their faces in the snow and waited.
What seemed hours was later pronounced to have been but fifteen minutes,
though with the roaring as of mighty winds, and the subterranean
grumblings and sudden inky night, the crashing of stones and thundering
of rolling bowlders, it seemed like the end of the world.
Norris's companion had suffered a blow that dislocated his shoulder, but
otherwise they emerged unhurt. They afterwards found several areas on the
sides of Lassen where sulphurous gases were escaping from pools of hot
mud or boiling water. They also visited a lake that had been formed at
the time of the lava flow of 200 years ago, (now a matter of legend among
the Pitt River Indians), this lava having formed a dam across a little
valley which later filled from the melting snows. The stumps of the
inundated trees could still be seen.
A geyser, said the Geological Survey man, is just like a volcano, only it
expels steam and boiling water from the interior. There is a line of
volcanic activity up and down the Pacific Coast, from Alaska to Central
America, though Lassen is the only active peak in California, Shasta
having become quiescent save for the hot spring that steams through the
snow near its summit.
The North half of the range, he added, is covered with floods of glassy
black lava and dotted with extinct craters, whereas the Southern half is
almost solid granite, though there are plenty of volcanic rocks to be
found among its wild gorges. The rocks around Lassen tell a vivid story
of the chain of fire mountains that must have again and again blazed into
geysers of molten rock, till the whole smoking range was quenched beneath
the ice of that last glacier period, which through the ages has been
sculpturing new lake and river beds, and grinding soil for the rebirth of
the mighty forests.
The boys drowsed off that night to dream of fire mountains and
explorations in the nether regions.
The next day they planned to bi-plane up and down the John Muir trail
again and see if the Mexicans could have crossed to the Eastern side of
the range. They might have made their way through some pass, traveling
after nightfall and hiding by day, and once on the desert around Mono
Lake they would be easy to locate. For it seemed ridiculous that they
could actually make a get-away.