granted to the State of California "the Cleft or Gorge of the Granite
Peak of the Sierra Nevada Mountains" known as the Yosemite Valley, with
the understanding that all income derived from it should be spent for
improving the reservation or building a road to it. The Mariposa Big
Tree Grove was also granted at the same time. California carefully
fulfilled her charge. The Yosemite Valley became world-famous, and in
1890 the Yosemite National Park was created.
VII
The Yosemite's geological history is much more thrilling. Everyone who
sees it asks, How did Nature make the Yosemite Valley? Was it split by
earth convulsions or scooped by glacier? Few ask what part was played by
the gentle Merced.
The question of Yosemite's making has busied geologists from Professor
Whitney of the University of California, who first studied the problem,
down to F.E. Matthes, of the United States Geological Survey, whose
recent exhaustive studies have furnished the final solution. Professor
Whitney maintained that glaciers never had entered the valley; he did
not even consider water erosion. At one time he held that the valley
was simply a cleft or rent in the earth's crust. At another time he
imagined it formed by the sudden dropping back of a large block in the
course of the convulsions that resulted in the uplift of the Sierra
Nevada. Galen Clark, following him, carried on his idea of an origin by
force. Instead of the walls being cleft apart, however, he imagined the
explosion of close-set domes of molten rock the riving power, but
conceived that ice and water erosion finished the job. With Clarence
King the theory of glacial origin began its long career. John Muir
carried this theory to its extreme.
Since the period of Muir's speculations, the tremendous facts concerning
the part played by erosion in the modification of the earth's surface
strata have been developed. Beginning with W.H. Turner, a group of
Yosemite students under the modern influence worked upon the theory of
the stream-cut valley modified by glaciers. The United States Geological
Survey then entered the field, and Matthes's minute investigations
followed; the manuscript of his monograph has helped me reconstruct the
dramatic past.
The fact is that the Yosemite Valley was cut from the solid granite
nearly to its present depth by the Merced River; before the glaciers
arrived, the river-cut valley was twenty-four hundred feet deep opposite
El Capitan, and three thousand feet deep opposite Eagle Peak. The valley
was then V-shaped, and the present waterfalls were cascades; those which
are now the Yosemite Falls were eighteen hundred feet deep, and those
of Sentinel Creek were two thousand feet deep. All this in pre-glacial
times.
Later on the glaciers of several successive epochs greatly widened the
valley, and measurably deepened it, making it U-shaped. The cascades
then became waterfalls.
But none will see the Yosemite Valley and its cavernous tributary
canyons without sympathizing a little with the early geologists. It is
difficult to imagine a gash so tremendous cut into solid granite by
anything short of force. One can think of it gouged by massive glaciers,
but to imagine it cut by water is at first inconceivable.
To comprehend it we must first consider two geological facts. The first
is that no dawdling modern Merced cut this chasm, but a torrent
considerably bigger; and that this roaring river swept at tremendous
speed down a sharply tilted bed, which it gouged deeper and deeper by
friction of the enormous masses of sand and granite fragments which it
carried down from the High Sierra. The second geological fact is that
the Merced and Tenaya torrents sand-papered the deepening beds of these
canyons day and night for several million years; which, when we remember
the mile-deep canyons which the Colorado River and its confluents cut
through a thousand or more miles of Utah and Arizona, is not beyond
human credence, if not conception.
But, objects the sceptical, the Merced couldn't keep always tilted; in
time it would cut down to a level and slow up; then the sand and gravel
it was carrying would settle, and the stream stop its digging. Again, if
the stream-cut valley theory is correct, why isn't every Sierra canyon a
Yosemite?
Let us look for the answer in the Sierra's history.
The present Sierra Nevada is not the first mountain chain upon its site.
The granite which underlay the folds of the first Sierra are still
disclosed in the walls of the Yosemite Valley. The granites which
underlay the second and modern Sierra are seen in the towering heights
of the crest.
Once these mountains overran a large part of our present far west. They
formed a level and very broad and high plateau; or, more accurately,
they tended to form such a plateau, but never quite succeeded, because
its central section kept caving and sinking in some of its parts as fast
as it lifted in others. Finally, in the course, perhaps, of some
millions of years, the entire central section settled several thousand
feet lower than its eastern and western edges; these edges it left
standing steep and high. This sunken part is the Great Basin of to-day.
The remaining eastern edge is the Wasatch Mountains; the remaining
western edge is the Sierra. That is why the Sierra's eastern front rises
so precipitously from the deserts of the Great Basin, while its western
side slopes gradually toward the Pacific.
But other crust changes accompanied the sinking of the Great Basin. The
principal one was the rise, in a series of upward movements, of the
remaining crest of the Sierra. These movements may have corresponded
with the sinkings of the Great Basin; both were due to tremendous
internal readjustments. And of course, whenever the Sierra crest lifted,
it tilted more sharply the whole granite block of which it was the
eastern edge. These successive tiltings are what kept the Merced and
Tenaya channels always so steeply inclined that, for millions of years,
the streams remained torrents swift enough to keep on sandpapering their
beds.
The first of these tiltings occurred in that far age which geologists
call the Cretaceous. It was inconsiderable, but enough to hasten the
speed of the streams and establish general outlines for all time. About
the middle of the Tertiary Period volcanic eruptions changed all things.
Nearly all the valleys except the Yosemite became filled with lava. Even
the crest of the range was buried a thousand feet in one place. This was
followed by a rise of the Sierra Crest a couple of thousand feet, and of
course a much sharper tilting of the western slopes. The Merced and
Tenaya Rivers must have rushed very fast indeed during the many thousand
years that followed.
The most conservative estimate of the duration of the Tertiary Period is
four or five million years, and until its close volcanic eruptions
continued to fill valleys with lava, and the Great Basin kept settling,
and the crest of the Sierra went on rising; and with each lifting of the
crest, the tilt of the rivers sharpened and the speed of the torrents
hastened. The canyon deepened during this time from seven hundred to a
thousand feet. The Yosemite was then a mountain valley whose sloping
sides were crossed by cascades.
Then, about the beginning of the Quaternary Period, came the biggest
convulsion of all. The crest of the Sierra was hoisted, according to
Matthes's calculations, as much as eight thousand feet higher in this
one series of movements, and the whole Sierra block was again tilted,
this time, of course, enormously.
For thousands of centuries following, the torrents from Lyell's and
McClure's melting snows must have descended at a speed which tore
boulders from their anchorages, ground rocks into sand, and savagely
scraped and scooped the river beds. Armed with sharp hard-cutting tools
ripped from the granite cirques of Sierra's crest, these mad rivers must
have scratched and hewn deep and fast. And because certain valleys,
including the Yosemite, were never filled with lava like the rest, these
grew ever deeper with the centuries.
The great crust movement of the Quaternary Period was not the last, by
any means, though it was the last of great size. There were many small
ones later. Several even have occurred within historic times. On March
26, 1872, a sudden earth movement left an escarpment twenty-five feet
high at the foot of the range in Owens Valley. The village of Lone Pine
was levelled by the accompanying earthquake. John Muir, who was in the
Yosemite Valley at the time, describes in eloquent phrase the
accompanying earthquake which was felt there. A small movement,
doubtless of similar origin, started the San Francisco fire in 1906.
Conditions created by the great Quaternary tilting deepened the valley
from eighteen hundred feet at its lower end to twenty-four hundred feet
at its upper end. It established what must have been an unusually
interesting and impressive landscape, which suggested the modern aspect,
but required completion by the glaciers.
Geologically speaking, the glaciers were recent. There were several ice
invasions, produced probably by the same changes in climate which
occasioned the advances of the continental ice sheet east of the
Rockies. Matthes describes them as similar to the northern glaciers of
the Canadian Rockies of to-day. For unknown thousands of years the
Valley was filled by a glacier three or four thousand feet thick, and
the surrounding country was covered with tributary ice-fields. Only
Cloud's Rest, Half Dome, Sentinel Dome, and the crown of El Capitan
emerged above this ice. The glacier greatly widened and considerably
deepened the valley, turned its slopes into perpendiculars, and changed
its side cascades into waterfalls. When it receded it left Yosemite
Valley almost completed.
There followed a long period of conditions not unlike those of to-day.
Frosts chipped and scaled the granite surfaces, and rains carried away
the fragments. The valley bloomed with forests and wild flowers. Then
came other glaciers and other intervening periods. The last glacier
advanced only to the head of Bridal Veil Meadow. When it melted it left
a lake which filled the Valley from wall to wall, three hundred feet
deep. Finally the lake filled up with soil, brought down by the streams,
and made the floor of the present valley.
The centuries since have been a period of decoration and enrichment.
Frost and rain have done their perfect work. The incomparable valley is
complete.
III
THE PROPOSED ROOSEVELT NATIONAL PARK
INCLUDING THE PRESENT SEQUOIA NATIONAL PARK, WEST CENTRAL CALIFORNIA.
AREA, 1,600 SQUARE MILES
I
Where the lava billows of the Cascade Mountains end in northern
California the granite knobs of the Sierra begin. Sharply differentiated
in appearance and nature a few miles further in either direction, here
their terminals overlap, and so nearly merge that the southern end of
the one and the northern beginning of the other are not easily
distinguished by the untrained eye.
But southward the Sierra Nevada, the snowy saw-toothed range of the
Spaniards, the Sierra of modern American phrase, rapidly acquires the
bulk and towering height, the craggy cirqued summits and the snowy
shoulders which have made it celebrated. Gathering grandeur as it sweeps
southward close to the western boundary of California, its western
slopes slashed deep with canyons, its granite peaks and domes pushing
ever higher above the scattering forests of its middle zones, its
eastern ramparts dropping in precipices to the desert, it valiantly
guards its sunny state against the passage of eastern highways, and
forces hard engineering problems upon the builders of transcontinental
railroads. Where it becomes the eastern boundary of the Yosemite
National Park it breaks into climaxes of magnificence.
From this point on the Sierra broadens and bulks. It throws out spurs,
multiplies paralleling ranges, heaps peaks and ridges between gulf-like
canyons which carry roaring waters through their forested trenches.
Pushing ever higher above timber-line, it breaks into large lake-bearing
cirques, sometimes cirque within cirque, walled in silvery granite, hung
with garlands of snow and dripping with shining glaciers. Ninety miles
south of Yosemite it culminates in a close grouping of snow-daubed,
glacier-gouged, lightning-splintered peaks, one of which, Mount Whitney,
highest summit in the United States, raises his head just a little above
his gigantic neighbors.
South of Whitney, the Sierra subsides rapidly and merges into the high
plateaus and minor ranges of southern California.
Seventy-five miles of the crest of this titanic range at the climax of
its magnificence, sixty-five miles of it north of Whitney and ten miles
of it south, constitute the western boundary of an area of sixteen
hundred square miles which Congress is considering setting apart under
the title of the Roosevelt National Park; a region so particularly
characterized by ruggedness, power, and unified purpose that it is
eminently fitted to serve as the nation's memorial to Theodore
Roosevelt. Besides its stupendous mountains, it includes the wildest and
most exuberant forested canyons, and the most luxuriant groves in the
United States, for its boundaries will enclose also the present Sequoia
National Park, in which a million trunks of the famous Sequoia
Washingtoniana cluster around the General Sherman Tree, believed to be
the biggest and oldest living thing in all the world.
Wide though its range from bleak crest to warm forest, every part of
this region is a necessary part of its whole. Nature's subtle finger has
so knitted each succeeding zone into the fabric of its neighbors that it
would be a vandal's hand which should arbitrarily cut the picture short
of the full completion of its perfect composition. It is one of Nature's
masterpieces, through whose extremest contrasts runs the common note of
supremacy.
Whether or not, then, Congress insures its perpetuity and unified
development, we can consider it scenically only as a whole.
Similar in kind to the Yosemite National Park, Roosevelt is far ruggeder
and more masterful. It will be the national park of superlatives. Yet
each of these similar areas is a completed unit of striking
individuality. Yosemite, taking its note from its incomparable Valley,
never will be equalled for sheer beauty; Roosevelt knows no peer for
exuberance and grandeur. Yosemite will remain Mecca for the tourist;
Roosevelt will draw into its forest of giant trees, and upon its
shoulders of chiselled granite, thousands of campers-out and lovers of
the high trail.
Joined near the crest of the Sierra by the John Muir Trail,
California's memorial to her own prophet of the out-of-doors, these two
national parks, so alike and yet so different, each striking surely its
own note of sublimity, are, in a very real sense, parts of one still
greater whole; the marriage of beauty and strength.
II
The region is roughly pear-shaped. A straight line drawn from Pine Creek
Pass at its northern end to Sheep Mountain on the southern base line
measures sixty-eight miles; the park is thirty-six miles wide at its
widest, just north of Mount Whitney. Its eastern boundary, the crest of
the Sierra, divides many notable peaks. From north to south we pass, as
we travel the John Muir Trail, Mount Humphreys, 13,972 feet; Mount
Darwin, 13,841 feet; Mount Winchell, 13,749 feet; Split Mountain, 14,051
feet; Striped Mountain, 13,160 feet; Mount Baxter, 13,118 feet; Junction
Peak, 13,903 feet; Mount Tyndall, 14,025 feet; and Mount Whitney, 14,501
feet; supporting Whitney on the south is Mount Langley, 14,042 feet; all
these connected by splintered peaks, granite ledges, and mountain masses
scarcely less in altitude.
Between the bristling crest of this snow-daubed eastern boundary and the
park's western boundary, thousands of feet lower where the forests
begin, the region roughly divides into parallel zones. That which
immediately adjoins the crest upon its west side, a strip ten miles or
more in width, is known to its devotees as the High Sierra. It is a
country of tremendous jagged peaks, of intermediate pinnacled walls, of
enormous cirques holding remnants of once mighty glaciers, of great
fields of sun-cupped snow, of turquoise lakes resting in chains upon
enormous granite steps; the whole gleaming like chased silver in the
noon sun; a magical land of a thousand Matterhorns, whose trails lead
from temple to temple, so mighty of size and noble of design that no
mind less than the Creator's could ever have conceived them.
The High Sierra has been celebrated for many years in the fast-growing
brotherhood of American mountain climbers, east as well as west, many of
whom proclaim its marked superiority to all parts of the Swiss Alps
except the amazing neighborhood of Mont Blanc. With the multiplication
of trails and the building of shelters for the comfort of the
inexperienced, the veriest amateur of city business life will find in
these mountains of perpetual sunshine a satisfaction which is only for
the seasoned mountaineer abroad.
The zone adjoining the High Sierra upon its west is one of far wider
range of pleasure. Subsiding rapidly in elevation, it becomes a knobbed
and bouldered land which includes timber-line and the thin forests of
wind-twisted pines which contend with the granite for foothold. It is
crossed westward by many lesser ranges buttressing the High Sierra; from
these cross ranges many loftier peaks arise, and between them roar the
rivers whose thousands of contributing streams drain the snow-fields and
the glaciers of the white heights.
Finally, paralleling the western boundary, is the narrow zone in which
this region meets and merges with the greater forests and the meadows
beyond the boundary. Here, in the southwestern corner, is the marvellous
warm forest in which trees of many kinds attain their maximum of size
and proportion, and which encloses a million sequoia trees, including
the greatest and oldest embodiments of the principle of life. This
extraordinary forest was reserved in 1890 under the title of the Sequoia
National Park. At the same time was created the General Grant National
Park, a reservation of four square miles of similar forest, virtually a
part of it, but separated because of an intervening area of privately
owned lands.
Thus does this region run the gamut of supremacy from the High Sierra
upon its east, to the Giant Forest upon its west.
Of no less distinction are its waters. Innumerable lakelets of the High
Sierra, born of the snows, overflow in tiny streams which combine into
roaring, frothing creeks. These in turn, augmented by the drainage of
the lofty tumbled divides, combine into powerful little rivers. Four
river systems originate in this region.
Far in the north a lake, more than eleven thousand feet high, lying at
the western foot of Mount Goddard, begins the South Fork of the San
Joaquin River, which drains the park's northern area. Incidentally, it
has cut a canyon of romantic beauty, up which the John Muir Trail finds
its way into the park.
The northern middle area of the park is drained by the Middle and South
Forks of the Kings River, which find their origins in perhaps forty
miles of Sierra's crest. The drainage basins of these splendid streams
cover nearly half of the park's total area, and include some of the
biggest, as well as some of the wildest and most beautiful mountain
scenery in the world. Bounded upon their west by an arc of snowy
mountains, separated by the gigantic Monarch Divide, flanked by twisted
ranges and towering peaks, they cascade westward through meadows of rank
grasses and vividly colored wild-flowers, alternating with steep-sided
gorges and canyons of sublimity. Dropping thousands of feet within a few
miles, they abound in cascades and majestic falls, between which swift
rapids alternate with reaches of stiller, but never still, waters which
are the homes of cut-throat trout. Each of these rivers has its canyon
of distinguished magnificence. The Tehipite Valley of the Middle Fork
and the Kings River Canyon of the South Fork are destined to world
celebrity.
The southwestern area of the park is drained by five forks of the
beautiful Kaweah River. These streams originate on the north in the
divide of the South Fork of the Kings River, and on the east in a
conspicuously fine range known as the Great Western Divide. They wind
through the wooded valleys of the Sequoia National Park. Upon their
banks grow the monsters of the American forest.
The southern area is drained by the Kern River, into which flow the
waters of Mount Whitney and his giant neighbors. The Kern Canyon is one
of Roosevelt's noblest expressions. Flowing southward between
precipitous walls three thousand feet and more in height, flanked upon
the east by monsters of the High Sierra, and on the west by the splendid
elevations of the Great Western Divide, it is a valley supremely fitted
for the highest realization of the region's gifts of enjoyment. From
camps beside its trout-haunted waters, it is a matter of no difficulty
for those equipped for the trail to reach the summit of Whitney, on the
one hand, and the Giant Forest on the other.
Near the southern boundary of the park, Golden Trout Creek enters the
Kern. It originates at the very crest of the Sierra, which it follows
closely for many miles before swinging westward to its outlet. In this
stream is found a trout which appears, when fresh caught, as though
carved from gold. Popularly it is known as the golden trout; its
scientific name is Salmo Rooseveltii. Originally, no doubt, the color
evolved from the peculiar golden hues of the rocks through which its
waters flow. The golden trout has been transplanted into other Sierra
streams, in some of which, notably the open upper waters of the Middle
Fork of the Kings, it has thrived and maintained its vivid hue. In
sheltered waters it has apparently disappeared, a fact which may merely
mean that its color has changed with environment.
III
There are many gateways, two by road, the rest by trail. For years to
come, as in the past, the great majority of visitors will enter through
the Giant Forest of the Sequoia National Park and through the General
Grant National Park. The traveller by rail will find motor stages at
Visalia for the run into the Giant Forest, and at Fresno for the General
Grant National Park. The motorist will find good roads into both from
California's elaborate highway system. In both the traveller will find
excellent hotel camps, and, if his purpose is to live awhile under his
private canvas, public camp grounds convenient to stores and equipped
with water supply and even electric lights. Under the gigantic pines,
firs, and ancient sequoias of these extraordinary forests, increasing
thousands spend summer weeks and months.
From these centres the lovers of the sublime take saddle-horses and
pack-trains, or, if they are hikers, burros to carry their equipment,
and follow the trails to Kern Canyon, or the summit of Whitney, or the
Kings River Canyon, or the Tehipite Valley, or the John Muir Trail upon
the Sierra's crest. Many are the trip combinations, the choice of which
depends upon the time and the strenuousness of the traveller.
Camping-out on trail in Roosevelt is an experience which demands
repetition. Sure of clear weather, the traveller does not bother with
tents, but snuggles at night in a sleeping-bag under a roof of spreading
pine.