All streets of the mountains lead to the citadel; steep or slow they go
up to the core of the hills. Any trail that goes otherwhere must dip and
cross, sidle and take chances. Rifts of the hills open into each other,
and the high meadows are often wide enough to be called valleys by
courtesy; but one keeps this distinction in mind,--valleys are the
sunken places of the earth, canons are scored out by the glacier ploughs
of God. They have a better name in the Rockies for these hill-fenced
open glades of pleasantness; they call them parks. Here and there in
the hill country one comes upon blind gullies fronted by high stony
barriers. These head also for the heart of the mountains; their
distinction is that they never get anywhere.
All mountain streets have streams to thread them, or deep grooves where
a stream might run. You would do well to avoid that range uncomforted by
singing floods. You will find it forsaken of most things but beauty and
madness and death and God. Many such lie east and north away from the
mid Sierras, and quicken the imagination with the sense of purposes not
revealed, but the ordinary traveler brings nothing away from them but an
intolerable thirst.
The river canons of the Sierras of the Snows are better worth while than
most Broadways, though the choice of them is like the choice of streets,
not very well determined by their names. There is always an amount of
local history to be read in the names of mountain highways where one
touches the successive waves of occupation or discovery, as in the old
villages where the neighborhoods are not built but grow. Here you have
the Spanish Californian in Cero Gordo and pinon; Symmes and Shepherd,
pioneers both; Tunawai, probably Shoshone; Oak Creek, Kearsarge,--easy
to fix the date of that christening,--Tinpah, Paiute that; Mist Canon
and Paddy Jack's. The streets of the west Sierras sloping toward the
San Joaquin are long and winding, but from the east, my country, a day's
ride carries one to the lake regions. The next day reaches the passes
of the high divide, but whether one gets passage depends a little on
how many have gone that road before, and much on one's own powers. The
passes are steep and windy ridges, though not the highest. By two and
three thousand feet the snow-caps overtop them. It is even possible to
wind through the Sierras without having passed above timber-line, but
one misses a great exhilaration.
The shape of a new mountain is roughly pyramidal, running out into
long shark-finned ridges that interfere and merge into other
thunder-splintered sierras. You get the saw-tooth effect from a
distance, but the near-by granite bulk glitters with the terrible keen
polish of old glacial ages. I say terrible; so it seems. When those
glossy domes swim into the alpenglow, wet after rain, you conceive how
long and imperturbable are the purposes of God.
Never believe what you are told, that midsummer is the best time to go
up the streets of the mountain--well--perhaps for the merely idle or
sportsmanly or scientific; but for seeing and understanding, the best
time is when you have the longest leave to stay. And here is a hint if
you would attempt the stateliest approaches; travel light, and as much
as possible live off the land. Mulligatawny soup and tinned lobster will
not bring you the favor of the woodlanders.
Every canon commends itself for some particular pleasantness; this
for pines, another for trout, one for pure bleak beauty of granite
buttresses, one for its far-flung irised falls; and as I say, though
some are easier going, leads each to the cloud shouldering citadel.
First, near the canon mouth you get the low-heading full-branched,
one-leaf pines. That is the sort of tree to know at sight, for the
globose, resin-dripping cones have palatable, nourishing kernels, the
main harvest of the Paiutes. That perhaps accounts for their growing
accommodatingly below the limit of deep snows, grouped sombrely on the
valley-ward slopes. The real procession of the pines begins in the rifts
with the long-leafed Pinus jeffreyi, sighing its soul away upon the
wind. And it ought not to sigh in such good company. Here begins the
manzanita, adjusting its tortuous stiff stems to the sharp waste of
boulders, its pale olive leaves twisting edgewise to the sleek, ruddy,
chestnut stems; begins also the meadowsweet, burnished laurel, and the
million unregarded trumpets of the coral-red pentstemon. Wild life is
likely to be busiest about the lower pine borders. One looks in hollow
trees and hiving rocks for wild honey. The drone of bees, the chatter of
jays, the hurry and stir of squirrels, is incessant; the air is odorous
and hot. The roar of the stream fills up the morning and evening
intervals, and at night the deer feed in the buckthorn thickets. It is
worth watching the year round in the purlieus of the long-leafed pines.
One month or another you set sight or trail of most roving mountain
dwellers as they follow the limit of forbidding snows, and more bloom
than you can properly appreciate.
Whatever goes up or comes down the streets of the mountains, water has
the right of way; it takes the lowest ground and the shortest passage.
Where the rifts are narrow, and some of the Sierra canons are not a
stone's throw from wall to wall, the best trail for foot or horse winds
considerably above the watercourses; but in a country of cone-bearers
there is usually a good strip of swardy sod along the canon floor. Pine
woods, the short-leafed Balfour and Murryana of the high Sierras, are
sombre, rooted in the litter of a thousand years, hushed, and corrective
to the spirit. The trail passes insensibly into them from the black
pines and a thin belt of firs. You look back as you rise, and strain for
glimpses of the tawny valley, blue glints of the Bitter Lake, and tender
cloud films on the farther ranges. For such pictures the pine
branches make a noble frame. Presently they close in wholly; they
draw mysteriously near, covering your tracks, giving up the trail
indifferently, or with a secret grudge. You get a kind of impatience
with their locked ranks, until you come out lastly on some high, windy
dome and see what they are about. They troop thickly up the open ways,
river banks, and brook borders; up open swales of dribbling springs;
swarm over old moraines; circle the peaty swamps and part and meet about
clean still lakes; scale the stony gullies; tormented, bowed, persisting
to the door of the storm chambers, tall priests to pray for rain. The
spring winds lift clouds of pollen dust, finer than frankincense, and
trail it out over high altars, staining the snow.
No doubt they understand this work better than we; in fact they know no
other. "Come," say the churches of the valleys, after a season of dry
years, "let us pray for rain." They would do better to plant more trees.
It is a pity we have let the gift of lyric improvisation die out.
Sitting islanded on some gray peak above the encompassing wood, the soul
is lifted up to sing the Iliad of the pines. They have no voice but the
wind, and no sound of them rises up to the high places. But the waters,
the evidences of their power, that go down the steep and stony ways, the
outlets of ice-bordered pools, the young rivers swaying with the force
of their running, they sing and shout and trumpet at the falls, and the
noise of it far outreaches the forest spires. You see from these conning
towers how they call and find each other in the slender gorges; how
they fumble in the meadows, needing the sheer nearing walls to give them
countenance and show the way; and how the pine woods are made glad by
them.
Nothing else in the streets of the mountains gives such a sense of
pageantry as the conifers; other trees, if they are any, are home
dwellers, like the tender fluttered, sisterhood of quaking asp. They
grow in clumps by spring borders, and all their stems have a permanent
curve toward the down slope, as you may also see in hillside pines,
where they have borne the weight of sagging drifts.
Well up from the valley, at the confluence of canons, are delectable
summer meadows. Fireweed flames about them against the gray boulders;
streams are open, go smoothly about the glacier slips and make deep
bluish pools for trout. Pines raise statelier shafts and give themselves
room to grow,--gentians, shinleaf, and little grass of Parnassus in
their golden checkered shadows; the meadow is white with violets and all
outdoors keeps the clock. For example, when the ripples at the ford of
the creek raise a clear half tone,--sign that the snow water has come
down from the heated high ridges,--it is time to light the evening fire.
When it drops off a note--but you will not know it except the Douglas
squirrel tells you with his high, fluty chirrup from the pines' aerial
gloom--sign that some star watcher has caught the first far glint of the
nearing sun. Whitney cries it from his vantage tower; it flashes from
Oppapago to the front of Williamson; LeConte speeds it to the westering
peaks. The high rills wake and run, the birds begin. But down three
thousand feet in the canon, where you stir the fire under the cooking
pot, it will not be day for an hour. It goes on, the play of light
across the high places, rosy, purpling, tender, glint and glow, thunder
and windy flood, like the grave, exulting talk of elders above a merry
game.
Who shall say what another will find most to his liking in the streets
of the mountains. As for me, once set above the country of the
silver firs, I must go on until I find white columbine. Around the
amphitheatres of the lake regions and above them to the limit of
perennial drifts they gather flock-wise in splintered rock wastes. The
crowds of them, the airy spread of sepals, the pale purity of the petal
spurs, the quivering swing of bloom, obsesses the sense. One must learn
to spare a little of the pang of inexpressible beauty, not to spend all
one's purse in one shop. There is always another year, and another.
Lingering on in the alpine regions until the first full snow, which
is often before the cessation of bloom, one goes down in good company.
First snows are soft and clogging and make laborious paths. Then it is
the roving inhabitants range down to the edge of the wood, below the
limit of early storms. Early winter and early spring one may have sight
or track of deer and bear and bighorn, cougar and bobcat, about the
thickets of buckthorn on open slopes between the black pines. But when
the ice crust is firm above the twenty foot drifts, they range far and
forage where they will. Often in midwinter will come, now and then, a
long fall of soft snow piling three or four feet above the ice crust,
and work a real hardship for the dwellers of these streets. When such a
storm portends the weather-wise blacktail will go down across the valley
and up to the pastures of Waban where no more snow falls than suffices
to nourish the sparsely growing pines. But the bighorn, the wild sheep,
able to bear the bitterest storms with no signs of stress, cannot cope
with the loose shifty snow. Never such a storm goes over the mountains
that the Indians do not catch them floundering belly deep among the
lower rifts. I have a pair of horns, inconceivably heavy, that were
borne as late as a year ago by a very monarch of the flock whom death
overtook at the mouth of Oak Creek after a week of wet snow. He met it
as a king should, with no vain effort or trembling, and it was wholly
kind to take him so with four of his following rather than that the
night prowlers should find him.
There is always more life abroad in the winter hills than one looks to
find, and much more in evidence than in summer weather. Light feet of
hare that make no print on the forest litter leave a wondrously plain
track in the snow. We used to look and look at the beginning of winter
for the birds to come down from the pine lands; looked in the orchard
and stubble; looked north and south on the mesa for their migratory
passing, and wondered that they never came. Busy little grosbeaks picked
about the kitchen doors, and woodpeckers tapped the eaves of the farm
buildings, but we saw hardly any other of the frequenters of the summer
canons. After a while when we grew bold to tempt the snow borders we
found them in the street of the mountains. In the thick pine woods where
the overlapping boughs hung with snow-wreaths make wind-proof shelter
tents, in a very community of dwelling, winter the bird-folk who get
their living from the persisting cones and the larvae harboring bark.
Ground inhabiting species seek the dim snow chambers of the chaparral.
Consider how it must be in a hill-slope overgrown with stout-twigged,
partly evergreen shrubs, more than man high, and as thick as a hedge.
Not all the canon's sifting of snow can fill the intricate spaces of
the hill tangles. Here and there an overhanging rock, or a stiff arch
of buckthorn, makes an opening to communicating rooms and runways deep
under the snow.
The light filtering through the snow walls is blue and ghostly,
but serves to show seeds of shrubs and grass, and berries, and the
wind-built walls are warm against the wind. It seems that live plants,
especially if they are evergreen and growing, give off heat; the snow
wall melts earliest from within and hollows to thinnness before there is
a hint of spring in the air. But you think of these things afterward.
Up in the street it has the effect of being done consciously; the
buckthorns lean to each other and the drift to them, the little birds
run in and out of their appointed ways with the greatest cheerfulness.
They give almost no tokens of distress, and even if the winter tries
them too much you are not to pity them. You of the house habit can
hardly understand the sense of the hills. No doubt the labor of being
comfortable gives you an exaggerated opinion of yourself, an exaggerated
pain to be set aside. Whether the wild things understand it or not they
adapt themselves to its processes with the greater ease. The
business that goes on in the street of the mountain is tremendous,
world-formative. Here go birds, squirrels, and red deer, children crying
small wares and playing in the street, but they do not obstruct its
affairs. Summer is their holiday; "Come now," says the lord of the
street, "I have need of a great work and no more playing."
But they are left borders and breathing-space out of pure kindness. They
are not pushed out except by the exigencies of the nobler plan which
they accept with a dignity the rest of us have not yet learned.