point upon the north is the Yosemite National Park, where one may
provide himself with horses and supplies for a journey of any desired
duration. Starting in the Yosemite Valley, and leaving the park near the
carved cirques of Mount Lyell, the traveller will find the intervening
miles of the John Muir Trail a panorama of magnificence. Thousand Island
Lake, reflecting the glorious pyramid of Banner Peak, the Devil's
Postpile, a group of basaltic columns, far finer than Ireland's
celebrated Giant's Causeway, the Mono Valley, with its ancient volcano
split down through the middle so that all may see its vent and spreading
crater, are merely the more striking features of a progress of
spectacles to the north entrance of Roosevelt Park; this is at the
junction of the South Fork of the San Joaquin River and Piute Creek. The
principal eastern gateway is Kearsarge Pass, on the crest of the Sierra
a few miles north of Mount Whitney. The trail ascends from Independence,
where one also may comfortably outfit.
These four are, at this writing, the principal entrance gates, each
opening from points at which parties may be sure of securing horses,
equipment, and guides. But several other trails enter from the east,
south, southwest, and west sides. All of these in time will become, with
development, well travelled trails into the heart of the great
wilderness.
IV
Any description of the glories of the John Muir Trail from its entrance
into the park to its climax upon the summit of Mount Whitney far passes
the limits of a chapter. In time it will inspire a literature.
Approaching from Yosemite through the canyon of the San Joaquin, the
traveller swings around the north side of Mount Goddard, crosses
gorgeous Muir Pass, and enters the fringe of cirques and lakes which
borders the western edge of Sierra's crest from end to end. Through this
he winds his way southward, skirting lakes, crossing snow-fields,
encircling templed cirques, plunging into canyons, climbing divides,
rounding gigantic peaks, surprising views of sublimity, mounting ever
higher until he stands upon the shoulders of Mount Whitney. Dismounting
here, he scrambles up the few hundred feet of stiff climb which places
him on the summit, from which he looks out north, west, and south over
the most diversified high mountain landscape in America, and eastward
over the Sierra foothills to Death Valley, lowest land in the United
States.
No thrilling Alpine feat is the ascent of our loftiest summit. But those
who want to measure human strength and skill in terms of perpendicular
granite may find among Whitney's neighbors peaks which will present
harder problems than those offered abroad, peaks which themselves well
may become as celebrated in future years.
The John Muir Trail is destined to a fame and a use perhaps many times
as great as those men thought who conceived it as a memorial to a lover
of the trail, and of all that that implies. It will play a distinguished
part in the education of the nation in the love of mountains. It will
win artists to a phase of the sublime in America which they have
overlooked. It will bring students to the classrooms where Nature
displays her most tremendous exhibits.
Nevertheless, Roosevelt's lower levels will draw many times as many
devotees as will the High Sierra; and these visitors will stay longer.
It is the valleys and the canyons which will prove the greatest lure,
for here one may camp leisurely and in entire comfort, and thence make
what trips he chooses into the regions of the peaks and the cirques.
There are literally thousands of canyons and of many kinds. Besides the
Kern Canyon there are two which must rank with Yosemite. In the summer
of 1916 I travelled the length of the park, as far as the Giant Forest,
with a party led by Director Stephen T. Mather, of the National Park
Service, then Assistant to the Secretary of the Interior, and was
powerfully impressed with the scenic qualities of the Tehipite Valley,
and the Kings River Canyon, at that time little known.
Time will not dim my memory of Tehipite Dome, the august valley and the
leaping, singing river which it overlooks. Well short of the Yosemite
Valley in the kind of beauty that plunges the observer into silence,
the Tehipite Valley far excels it in bigness, power, and majesty.
Lookout Point on the north rim, a couple of miles south of the Dome,
gave us our first sensation. Three thousand feet above the river, it
offered by far the grandest valley view I have looked upon, for the rim
view into Yosemite by comparison is not so grand as it is beautiful.
The canyon revealed itself to the east as far as Mount Woodworth, its
lofty diversified walls lifting precipitously from the heavy forests of
the floor and sides, and yielding to still greater heights above.
Enormous cliffs abutted, Yosemite-like, at intervals. South of us,
directly across the canyon, rose the strenuous heights of the Monarch
Divide, Mount Harrington, towering a thousand feet higher above the
valley floor than Clouds Rest above the Yosemite. Down the slopes of the
Monarch Divide, seemingly from its turreted summits, cascaded many
frothing streams. The Eagle Peaks, Blue Canyon Falls, Silver Spur, the
Gorge of Despair, Lost Canyon--these were some of the romantic and
appropriate titles we found on the Geological Survey map.
And, close at hand, opposite Mount Harrington and just across Crown
Creek Canyon, rose mighty Tehipite. We stood level with its rounded
glistening dome. The Tehipite Dome is a true Yosemite feature. It
compares in height and prominence with El Capitan. In fact, it stands
higher above the valley floor and occupies a similar position at the
valley's western gate. It is not so massive as El Capitan, and therefore
not so impressive; but it is superb. It is better compared with Half
Dome, though again perhaps not so impressive. But it has its own august
personality, as notably so as either of these world-famed rocks; and, if
it stood in the Yosemite, would share with them the incomparable
valley's highest honors.
Descending to the floor, the whole aspect of the valley changed. Looking
up, Tehipite Dome, now outlined against the sky, and the neighboring
abrupt castellated walls, towered more hugely than ever. We did not need
the contour map to know that some of these heights exceeded Yosemite's.
The sky-line was fantastically carved into spires and domes, a
counterpart in gigantic miniature of the Great Sierra of which it was
the valley climax. The Yosemite measure of sublimity, perhaps, lacked,
but in its place was a more rugged grandeur, a certain suggestion of
vastness and power that I have not seen elsewhere.
This impression was strengthened by the floor itself, which contains no
suggestion whatever of Yosemite's exquisiteness. Instead, it offers
rugged spaciousness. In place of Yosemite's peaceful woods and meadows,
here were tangled giant-studded thickets and mountainous masses of
enormous broken talus. Instead of the quiet winding Merced, here was a
surging, smashing, frothing, cascading, roaring torrent, several times
its volume, which filled the valley with its turbulence.
[Illustration: _From a photograph by Herbert W. Gleason_
TEHIPITE DOME, GUARDIAN ROCK OF THE TEHIPITE VALLEY
It rises abruptly more than three thousand feet; proposed Roosevelt
National Park]
Once step foot on the valley floor and all thought of comparison with
Yosemite vanishes forever. This is a different thing altogether, but a
thing in its own way no less superlative. The keynote of the Tehipite
Valley is wild exuberance. It thrills where Yosemite enervates. Yet its
temperature is quite as mild.
The Middle Fork contains more trout than any other stream I have fished.
We found them in pools and riffles everywhere; no water was too white to
get a rise. In the long, greenish-white borders of fast rapids they
floated continually into view. In five minutes' watching I could count a
dozen or more such appearances within a few feet of water. They ran from
eight to fourteen inches. No doubt larger ones lay below. So I got great
fun by picking my particular trout and casting specially for him. Stop
your fly's motion and the pursuing fish instantly stops, backs, swims
round the lure in a tour of examination, and disappears. Start it moving
and he instantly reappears from the white depth, where, no doubt, he has
been cautiously watching. A pause and a swift start often tempted to a
strike.
These rainbows of the torrents are hard fighters. And many of them, if
ungently handled, availed of swift currents to thresh themselves free.
You must fish a river to appreciate it. Standing on its edges, leaping
from rock to rock, slipping waist deep at times, wading recklessly to
reach some pool or eddy of special promise, searching the rapids,
peering under the alders, testing the pools; that's the way to make
friends with a river. You study its moods and its ways as those of a
mettlesome horse.
And after a while its spirit seeps through and finds yours. Its
personality unveils. A sweet friendliness unites you, a sense of mutual
understanding. There follows the completest detachment that I know.
Years and the worries disappear. You and the river dream away the
unnoted hours.
Passing on from the Tehipite Valley to the Kings River Canyon, the
approach to Granite Pass was nothing short of magnificent. We crossed a
superb cirque studded with lakelets; we could see the pass ahead of us
on a fine snow-crowned bench. We ascended the bench and found ourselves,
not in the pass, but in the entrance to still another cirque, also
lake-studded, a loftier, nobler cirque encircling the one below. Ahead
of us upon another lofty bench surely was the pass. Those inspiring
snow-daubed heights whose serrated edges cut sharply into the sky
certainly marked the supreme summit. Our winding trail up steep, rocky
ascents pointed true; an hour's toil would carry us over. But the hour
passed and the crossing of the shelf disclosed, not the glowing valley
of the South Fork across the pass, but still a vaster, nobler cirque
above, sublime in Arctic glory!
How the vast glaciers that cut these titanic carvings must have swirled
among these huge concentric walls, pouring over this shelf and that,
piling together around these uplifting granite peaks, concentrating
combined effort upon this unyielding mass and that, and, beaten back,
pouring down the tortuous main channel with rendings and tearings
unimaginable!
[Illustration: _From a photograph by Herbert W. Gleason_
EAST VIDETTE FROM A FOREST OF FOXTAIL PINES
This is one of the great granite peaks of the proposed Roosevelt
National Park]
Granite Pass is astonishing! We saw no less than four of these vast
concentric cirques, through three of which we passed. And the Geological
Survey map discloses a tributary basin adjoining which enclosed a group
of large volcanic lakes, and doubtless other vast cirque-like chambers.
We took photographs, but knew them vain.
A long, dusty descent of Copper Creek brought us, near day's end, into
the exquisite valley of the South Fork of the Kings River, the Kings
River Canyon.
Still another Yosemite!
It is not so easy to differentiate the two canyons of the Kings. They
are similar and yet very different. Perhaps the difference lies chiefly
in degree. Both lie east and west, with enormous rocky bluffs rising on
either side of rivers of quite extraordinary beauty. Both present carved
and castellated walls of exceptional boldness of design. Both are
heavily and magnificently wooded, the forests reaching up sharp slopes
on either side. Both possess to a marked degree the quality that lifts
them above the average of even the Sierra's glacial valleys.
But the outlines here seem to be softer, the valley floor broader, the
river less turbulent. If the keynote of the Tehipite Valley is wild
exuberance, that of the Kings River Canyon is wild beauty. The one
excites, the other lulls. The one shares with Yosemite the distinction
of extraordinary outline, the other shares with Yosemite the distinction
of extraordinary charm.
There are few nobler spots than the junction of Copper Creek with the
Kings. The Grand Sentinel is seldom surpassed. It fails of the
personality of El Capitan, Half Dome, and Tehipite, but it only just
fails. If they did not exist, it would become the most celebrated rock
in the Sierra, at least. The view up the canyon from this spot has few
equals. The view down the canyon is not often excelled. When the day of
the Kings River Canyon dawns, it will dawn brilliantly.
V
The western slopes of the Pacific ranges, from the Canadian border
southward to the desert, carry the most luxuriant forest in the United
States. The immense stands of yellow pine and Douglas fir of the far
north merge into the sugar pines and giant sequoias of the south in
practically an unbroken belt which, on Sierra's slopes, lies on the
middle levels between the low productive plains of the west and the
towering heights of the east. The Sequoia National Park and its little
neighbor, the General Grant National Park, enclose areas of remarkable
fertility in which trees, shrubs, and wild flowers reach their greatest
development. The million sequoia trees which grow here are a very small
part, numerically, of this amazing forest.
These slopes are rich with the soil of thousands of years of
accumulations. They are warmed in summer by mild Pacific winds heated in
their passage across the lowlands, and blanketed in winter by many feet
of soft snow. They are damp with countless springs and streams sheltered
under heavy canopies of foliage. In altitude they range from two
thousand feet at the bottom of Kaweah's canyon, as it emerges from the
park, to eight thousand feet in the east, with mountains rising three or
four thousand feet higher. It is a tumbled land of ridges and canyons,
but its slopes are easy and its outline gracious. Oases of luscious
meadows dot the forests.
This is the Court of King Sequoia. Here assemble in everlasting
attendance millions of his nobles, a statelier gathering than ever bowed
the knee before human potentate. Erect, majestic, clothed in togas of
perpetual green, their heads bared to the heavens, stand rank upon rank,
mile upon mile, the noblest personalities of the earth.
Chief among the courtiers of the king is the sugar-pine, towering here
his full two hundred feet, straight as a ruler, his stem at times eight
feet in thickness, scarcely tapering to the heavy limbs of his high
crown. Largest and most magnificent of the Pacific pines, reaching
sometimes six hundred years of age, the greater trunks clear themselves
of branches a hundred feet from the ground, and the bark develops long
dark plates of armor. So marked is his distinguished personality that,
once seen, he never can be mistaken for another.
Next in rank and scarcely less in majesty is the massive white fir,
rising at times even to two hundred feet, his sometimes six-foot trunk
conspicuously rough, dark brown in color, deeply furrowed with ashen
gray. His pale yellow-green crown is mysteriously tinged with white. His
limit of age is three hundred and fifty years.
Last of the ranking trio is the western yellow pine, a warrior clad in
plates of russet armor. A hundred and sixty feet in natural height, here
he sometimes towers even with his fellow knights. He guards the outer
precincts of the court, his cap of yellow-green, his branching arms
resting upon his sides.
These are the great nobles, but with them are millions of lesser
courtiers, the incense cedar from whose buttressed, tapering trunks
spring countless branches tipped with fan-like plumes; many lesser
conifers; the splendid Pacific birches in picturesque pose; the oaks of
many kinds far different from their eastern cousins. And among the feet
of these courtiers of higher degree crowd millions upon millions of
flowering shrubs, massing often in solid phalanxes, disputing passage
with the deer.
All mingle together, great and small. The conifers, in the king's honor,
flaunt from stem and greater branch long fluttering ribbons of pale
green moss. Thousands of squirrels chatter in the branches. Millions of
birds make music. It is a gala day.
Enter the King.
The King of Trees is of royal lineage. The patient searchers in the
rocks of old have traced his ancestry unknown millions of years, back to
the forests of the Cretaceous Period. His was Viking stock from arctic
zones where trees can live no more.
To-day he links all human history. The identical tree around which
gather thousands of human courtiers every year emerged, a seedling,
while Nebuchadnezzar besieged Jerusalem. No man knows how old his
predecessors were when finally they sank into death--mighty fall! But
John Muir counted four thousand rings in the trunk of one fallen giant,
who must have lived while Pharaoh still held captive the Children of
Israel.
The General Sherman Tree of the Giant Forest, the oldest living thing
to-day, so far as I have been able to ascertain, probably has seen
thirty-six hundred years. It is evident to the unlearned observer that,
while mature, he is long short of the turn of life. A thousand years
from now he still may be the earth's biggest and oldest living thing;
how much beyond that none may venture to predict.
Picture, now, the Giant Forest, largest of the several sequoia groves in
the Sequoia National Park. You have entered, say, in the dusk of the
night before, and after breakfast wander planless among the trees. On
every side rise the huge pines and firs, their dark columns springing
from the tangled brush to support the cathedral roof above. Here an
enormous purplish-red column draws and holds your astonished eye. It is
a gigantic thing in comparison with its monster neighbors; it glows
among their dull columns; it is clean and spotless amid their mosshung
trunks; branchless, it disappears among their upper foliage, hinting at
steeple heights above. Yet your guide tells you that this tree is small;
that its diameter is less than twenty feet; that in age it is a
youngster of only two thousand years! Wait, he tells you, till you see
the General Sherman Tree's thirty-six and a half feet of diameter; wait
till you see the hundreds, yes thousands, which surpass this infant!
But you heed him not, for you see another back among those sugar pines!
Yes, and there's another. And there on the left are two or three in a
clump! Back in the dim cathedral aisles are reddish glows which must
mean still others. Your heart is beating with a strange emotion. You
look up at the enormous limbs bent at right angles, at the canopy of
feathery foliage hanging in ten thousand huge plumes. You cry aloud for
the sheer joy of this great thing, and plunge into the forest's heart.
The Giant Forest contains several thousand sequoia trees of large size,
and many young trees. You see these small ones on every hand, erect,
sharply pointed, giving in every line a vivid impression of quivering,
bounding life. Later on, as they emerge above the roof of the forest,
for some of them are more than three hundred feet high, they lose their
sharp ambitious tops; they become gracefully rounded. Springing from
seed less than a quarter of an inch in diameter, they tend, like their
cousins the redwoods, to grow in groups, and these groups tend to grow
in groves. But there are scattering individuals in every grove, and many
small isolated groves in the Sierra. The Giant Forest is the largest
grove of greatest trees. The General Grant Grove, in a small national
park of its own, near by, is the second grove in size and importance;
its central figure is the General Grant Tree, second in size and age to
the General Sherman Tree.
[Illustration: _From a photograph by S.H. Willard_
BULL FROG LAKE, PROPOSED ROOSEVELT NATIONAL PARK
Along the crest of the Sierra extends a region of lofty cirques and
innumerable glacier-fed lakelets]
[Illustration: UNDER A GIANT SEQUOIA
From right to left: Benjamin Ide Wheeler, William Loeb, Jr., Nicholas
Murray Butler, John Muir, Surgeon-General Rixey, U.S.N., Theodore
Roosevelt, then President, George C. Pardee, and William H. Moody]
The dimensions of the greatest trees are astonishing. Glance at this
table:
-----------------------------------------------
| HEIGHT | DIAMETER
NAME | FEET | FEET
-----------------------------------------------
GIANT FOREST GROVE |
General Sherman | 279.9 | 36.5
Abraham Lincoln | 270 | 31
William McKinley | 291 | 28
| |
MUIR GROVE | |
Dalton | 292 | 27
| |
GARFIELD GROVE |
California | 260 | 30
| |
GENERAL GRANT GROVE |
General Grant | 264 | 35
George Washington | 255 | 29
-----------------------------------------------
The Theodore Roosevelt Tree, which has not been measured at this
writing, is one of the noblest of all, perfect in form and color,
abounding in the glory of young maturity.
To help realization at home of the majesty of the General Sherman Tree,
mark its base diameter, thirty-six and a half feet, plainly against the
side of some building, preferably a church with a steeple and
neighboring trees; then measure two hundred and eighty feet, its
height, upon the ground at right angles to the church; then stand on
that spot and, facing the church, imagine the trunk rising, tapering
slightly, against the building's side and the sky above it; then slowly
lift your eyes until you are looking up into the sky at an angle of
forty-five degrees, this to fix its height were it growing in front of
the church.
Imagine its lowest branches, each far thicker than the trunks of eastern
elms and oaks, pushing horizontally out at a height above ground of a
hundred and fifty feet, which is higher than the tops of most of the
full-grown trees of our eastern forests. Imagine these limbs bent
horizontally at right angles, like huge elbows, as though holding its
green mantle close about its form. Imagine the upper branches nearly
bare, shattered perhaps by lightning. And imagine its crown of foliage,
dark yellowish-green, hanging in enormous graceful plumes.
This is the King of Trees.
IV
THE HEART OF THE ROCKIES
THE ROCKY MOUNTAIN NATIONAL PARK, NORTH CENTRAL COLORADO. AREA, 398
SQUARE MILES
I
The Sierra Nevada Mountains of California and the Cascade Range of
California, Oregon, and Washington have each three national parks which
fully represent their kind and quality. The great central system of the
United States, the Rocky Mountains, which also possess three national
parks, are represented in kind by only one, for Yellowstone is an
exceptional volcanic interlude, and Glacier is the chance upheaval of
shales and limestones from a period antedating the granite Rockies by
many millions of years; neither in any sense exhibits the nature and
scenic quality of the backbone of our continent.
This is one of the reasons for the extraordinary distinction of the
reservation appropriately called the Rocky Mountain National Park,
namely that it is the only true example of the continental mountain
system in the catalogue of our national parks. It is well, therefore, to
lay the foundations for a sound comprehension of its differentiating
features.
The Rocky Mountains, which began to rise at the close of the Cretaceous
Period at a rate so slow that geologists think they are making a pace
to-day as rapid as their maximum, extend from the plateau of New Mexico
northwesterly until they merge into the mountains of eastern Alaska. In
the United States physiographers consider them in two groups, the
Northern Rockies and the Southern Rockies, the point of division being
the elevated Wyoming Basin. There are numerous ranges, known, like the
Wasatch Mountains, by different names, which nevertheless are consistent
parts of the Rocky Mountain System.