increasing in picturesqueness. The Douglas fir and other monsters of the
lower levels disappear, their places taken by other species. At an
altitude of four thousand feet the Englemann spruce and other
mountain-trees begin to appear, not in the massed ranks of the lower
levels, but in groves bordering the flowered opens.
The extreme limit of tree growth on Mount Rainier is about seven
thousand feet of altitude, above which one finds only occasional
distorted, wind-tortured mountain-hemlocks. There is no well-defined
timber-line, as on other lofty mountains. Avalanches and snow-slides
keep the upper levels swept and bare.
The wild-flower catalogue is too long to enumerate here. John Muir
expresses the belief that no other sub-alpine floral gardens excel
Rainier's in profusion and gorgeousness. The region differs little from
other Pacific regions of similar altitude in variety of species; in
luxuriance it is unsurpassed.
V
According to Theodore Winthrop who visited the northwest in 1853 and
published a book entitled "The Canoe and the Saddle," which had wide
vogue at the time and is consulted to-day, Mount Rainier had its Indian
Rip Van Winkle. The story was told him in great detail by Hamitchou, "a
frowsy ancient of the Squallyamish." The hero was a wise and wily
fisherman and hunter. Also, as his passion was gain, he became an
excellent business man. He always had salmon and berries when food
became scarce and prices high. Gradually he amassed large savings in
hiaqua, the little perforated shell which was the most valued form of
wampum, the Indian's money. The richer he got the stronger his passion
grew for hiaqua, and, when a spirit told him in a dream of vast hoards
at the summit of Rainier, he determined to climb the mountain. The
spirit was Tamanoues, which, Winthrop explains, is the vague Indian
personification of the supernatural.
So he threaded the forests and climbed the mountain's glistening side.
At the summit he looked over the rim into a large basin in the bottom of
which was a black lake surrounded by purple rock. At the lake's eastern
end stood three monuments. The first was as tall as a man and had a head
carved like a salmon; the second was the image of a camas-bulb; the two
represented the great necessities of Indian life. The third was a stone
elk's head with the antlers in velvet. At the foot of this monument he
dug a hole.
Suddenly a noise behind him caused him to turn. An otter clambered over
the edge of the lake and struck the snow with its tail. Eleven others
followed. Each was twice as big as any otter he had ever seen; their
chief was four times as big. The eleven sat themselves in a circle
around him; the leader climbed upon the stone elk-head.
At first the treasure-seeker was abashed, but he had come to find hiaqua
and he went on digging. At every thirteenth stroke the leader of the
otters tapped the stone elk with his tail, and the eleven followers
tapped the snow with their tails. Once they all gathered closer and
whacked the digger good and hard with their tails, but, though
astonished and badly bruised, he went on working. Presently he broke his
elkhorn pick, but the biggest otter seized another in his teeth and
handed it to him.
Finally his pick struck a flat rock with a hollow sound, and the otters
all drew near and gazed into the hole, breathing excitedly. He lifted
the rock and under it found a cavity filled to the brim with pure-white
hiaqua, every shell large, unbroken and beautiful. All were hung neatly
on strings.
Never was treasure-quest so successful! The otters, recognizing him as
the favorite of Tamanoues, retired to a distance and gazed upon him
respectfully.
"But the miser," writes the narrator, "never dreamed of gratitude, never
thought to hang a string from the buried treasure about the salmon and
camas tamanoues stones, and two strings around the elk's head; no, all
must be his own, all he could carry now, and the rest for the future."
Greedily he loaded himself with the booty and laboriously climbed to the
rim of the bowl prepared for the descent of the mountain. The otters,
puffing in concert, plunged again into the lake, which at once
disappeared under a black cloud.
Straightway a terrible storm arose through which the voice of Tamanoues
screamed tauntingly. Blackness closed around him. The din was horrible.
Terrified, he threw back into the bowl behind him five strings of
hiaqua to propitiate Tamanoues, and there followed a momentary lull,
during which he started homeward. But immediately the storm burst again
with roarings like ten thousand bears.
Nothing could be done but to throw back more hiaqua. Following each
sacrifice came another lull, followed in turn by more terrible
outbreaks. And so, string by string, he parted with all his gains. Then
he sank to the ground insensible.
When he awoke he lay under an arbutus-tree in a meadow of camas. He was
shockingly stiff and every movement pained him. But he managed to gather
and smoke some dry arbutus-leaves and eat a few camas-bulbs. He was
astonished to find his hair very long and matted, and himself bent and
feeble. "Tamanoues," he muttered. Nevertheless, he was calm and happy.
Strangely, he did not regret his lost strings of hiaqua. Fear was gone
and his heart was filled with love.
Slowly and painfully he made his way home. Everything was strangely
altered. Ancient trees grew where shrubs had grown four days before.
Cedars under whose shade he used to sleep lay rotting on the ground.
Where his lodge had stood now he saw a new and handsome lodge, and
presently out of it came a very old decrepit squaw who, nevertheless,
through her wrinkles, had a look that seemed strangely familiar to him.
Her shoulders were hung thick with hiaqua strings. She bent over a pot
of boiling salmon and crooned:
"My old man has gone, gone, gone.
My old man to Tacoma has gone.
To hunt the elk he went long ago.
When will he come down, down, down
To salmon pot and me?"
"He has come down," quavered the returned traveller, at last recognizing
his wife.
He asked no questions. Charging it all to the wrath of Tamanoues, he
accepted fate as he found it. After all, it was a happy fate enough in
the end, for the old man became the Great Medicine-Man of his tribe, by
whom he was greatly revered.
The name of this Rip Van Winkle of Mount Rainier is not mentioned in Mr.
Winthrop's narrative.
IX
CRATER LAKE'S BOWL OF INDIGO
CRATER LAKE NATIONAL PARK, SOUTHWESTERN OREGON. AREA, 249 SQUARE MILES
Crater Lake is in southwestern Oregon among the Cascade Mountains, and
is reached by an automobile ride of several hours from Medford. The
government information circular calls it "the deepest and bluest lake in
the world." Advertising circulars praise it in choicest professional
phrase. Its beauty is described as exceeding that of any other lake in
all the world. Never was blue so wonderful as the blue of these waters;
never were waters so deep as its two thousand feet.
Lured by this eloquence the traveller goes to Crater Lake and finds it
all as promised--in fact, far better than promised, for the best
intended adjectives, even when winged by the energetic pen of the most
talented ad writer, cannot begin to convey the glowing, changing,
mysterious loveliness of this lake of unbelievable beauty. In fact, the
tourist, with expectation at fever-heat by the time he steps from the
auto-stage upon the crater rim, is silenced as much by astonishment as
by admiration.
Before him lies a crater of pale pearly lava several miles in diameter.
A thousand feet below its rim is a lake whose farthest blues vie in
delicacy with the horizon lavas, and deepen as they approach till at
his feet they turn to almost black. There is nothing with which to
compare the near-by blue looked sharply down upon from Crater's rim. The
deepest indigo is nearest its intensity, but at certain angles falls far
short.
Nor is it only the color which affects him so strongly; its kind is
something new, startling, and altogether lovely. Its surface, so
magically framed and tinted, is broken by fleeting silver wind-streaks
here and there; otherwise, it has the vast stillness which we associate
with the Grand Canyon and the sky at night. The lava walls are pearly,
faintly blue afar off, graying and daubed with many colors nearer by.
Pinks, purples, brick-reds, sulphurs, orange-yellows and many
intermediates streak and splash the foreground gray. And often
pine-green forests fringe the rim, and funnel down sharply tilted
canyons to the water's edge; and sometimes shrubs of livelier green find
foothold on the gentler slopes, and, spreading, paint bright patches.
Over all, shutting down and around it like a giant bowl, is a sky of
Californian blue overhead softening to the pearl of the horizon. A
wonder spectacle indeed!
And then our tourist, recovering from his trance, walks upon the rim and
descends the trail to the water's edge to join a launch-party around the
lake. Here he finds a new and different experience which is quite as
sensational as that of his original discovery. Seen close by from the
lake's surface these tinted lava cliffs are carved as grotesquely as a
Japanese ivory. Precipices rise at times two thousand feet, sheer as a
wall. Elsewhere gentle slopes of powdery lava, moss-tinted, connect rim
and water with a ruler line. And between these two extremes are found
every fashion and kind and degree of lava wall, many of them
precipitous, most of them rugged, all of them contorted and carved in
the most fantastic manner that imagination can picture. Caves open their
dark doors at water's edge. Towered rocks emerge from submerged reefs. A
mimic volcano rises from the water near one side. Perpetual snow fills
sheltered crevices in the southern rim.
And all this wonder is reflected, upside down, in the still mirror
through which the launch ploughs its rapid way. But looking backward
where the inverted picture is broken and tossed by the waves from the
launch's prow, he looks upon a kaleidoscope of color which he will
remember all his life; for, to the gorgeous disarray of the broken image
of the cliffs is added the magic tint of this deep-dyed water, every
wavelet of which, at its crest, seems touched for the fraction of a
second with a flash of indigo; the whole dancing, sparkling, shimmering
in a glory which words cannot convey; and on the other side, and far
astern, the subsiding waves calming back to normal in a flare of
robin's-egg blue.
Our tourist returns to the rim-side hotel to the ceremony of sunset on
Crater Lake, for which the lake abandons all traditions and clothes
itself in gold and crimson. And in the morning after looking, before
sunrise, upon a Crater Lake of hard-polished steel from which a falling
rock would surely bounce and bound away as if on ice, he breakfasts and
leaves without another look lest repetition dull his priceless memory of
an emotional experience which, all in all, can never come again the
same.
It is as impossible to describe Crater Lake as it is to paint it. Its
outlines may be photographed, but the photograph does not tell the
story. Its colors may be reproduced, but the reproduction is not Crater
Lake. More than any other spot I know, except the Grand Canyon from its
rim, Crater Lake seems to convey a glory which is not of line or mass or
color or composition, but which seems to be of the spirit. No doubt this
vivid impression which the stilled observer seems to acquire with his
mortal eye, is born somehow of his own emotion. Somehow he finds himself
in communion with the Infinite. Perhaps it is this quality which seems
so mysterious that made the Klamath Indians fear and shun Crater Lake,
just as the Indians of the great plateau feared and shunned the Grand
Canyon. It is this intangible, seemingly spiritual quality which makes
the lake impossible either to paint or to describe.
So different is this spectacle from anything else upon the continent
that the first question asked usually is how it came to be. The answer
discloses one of the most dramatic incidents in the history of the
earth.
In the evolution of the Cascades, many have been the misadventures of
volcanoes. Some have been buried alive in ash and lava, and merged into
conquering rivals. Some have been buried in ice which now, organized as
glaciers, is wearing down their sides. Some have died of starvation and
passed into the hills. Some have been blown to atoms. Only one in
America, so far as known, has returned into the seething gulf which gave
it birth. That was Mount Mazama.
The processes of creation are too deliberate for human comprehension.
The Mississippi takes five thousand years to lower one inch its valley's
surface. The making of Glacier National Park required many--perhaps
hundreds--of millions of years. It seems probable that the cataclysm in
which Mount Mazama disappeared was exceptional; death may have come
suddenly, even as expressed in human terms.
What happened seems to have been this. Some foundation underpinning gave
way in the molten gulf below, and the vast mountain sank and disappeared
within itself. Imagine the spectacle who can! Mount Mazama left a
clean-cut rim surrounding the hole through which it slipped and
vanished. But there was a surging back. The eruptive forces, rebounding,
pushed the shapeless mass again up the vast chimney. They found it too
heavy a load. Deep within the ash-choked vent burst three small craters,
and that was all. Two of these probably were short-lived, the third
lasted a little longer. And, centuries later, spring water seeped
through, creating Crater Lake.
Crater Lake is set in the summit of the Cascade Range, about sixty-five
miles north of the California boundary. The road from the
railway-station at Medford leads eighty miles eastward up the
picturesque volcanic valley of the Rogue River. The country is
magnificently forested. The mountains at this point are broad, gently
rolling plateaus from which suddenly rise many volcanic cones, which,
seen from elevated opens, are picturesque in the extreme. Each of these
cones is the top of a volcano from whose summit has streamed the
prehistoric floods of lava which have filled the intervening valleys,
raising and levelling the country.
[Illustration: CROSS-SECTION OF CRATER LAKE SHOWING PROBABLE OUTLINE OF
MOUNT MAZAMA]
Entering the park, a high, broad, forested elevation is quickly
encountered which looks at a glance exactly what it is, the base which
once supported a towering cone. At its summit, this swelling base is
found to be the outside supporting wall of a roughly circular lake,
about five miles in diameter, the inside wall of which is steeply
inclined to the water's surface a thousand feet below. The strong
contrast between the outer and inner walls tells a plainly read story.
The outer walls, all around, slope gently upward at an angle of about
fifteen degrees; naturally, if carried on, they would converge in a
peaked summit higher than that of Shasta. The inner walls converge
downward at a steep angle, suggesting a funnel of enormous depth. It was
through this funnel that Mount Mazama, as men call the volcano that man
never saw, once collapsed into the gulf from which it had emerged.
Studying the scene from the Lodge on the rim where the automobile-stage
has left you, the most vivid impressions of detail are those of the
conformation of the inner rim, the cliffs which rise above it, and the
small volcano which emerges from the blue waters of the lake.
The marvellous inner slope of the rim is not a continuous cliff, but a
highly diversified succession of strata. Examination shows the layers of
volcanic conglomerate and lava of which, like layers of brick and stone,
the great structure was built. The downward dip of these strata away
from the lake is everywhere discernible. The volcano's early story thus
lies plain to eyes trained to read it. The most interesting of these
strata is the lava flow which forms twelve thousand feet of the total
precipice of Llao Rock, a prominence of conspicuous beauty.
Many of these cliffs are magnificently bold. The loftiest is Glacier
Peak, which rises almost two thousand feet above the water's surface.
But Dutton Cliff is a close rival, and Vidae Cliff, Garfield Peak, Llao
Rock, and the Watchman fall close behind. Offsetting these are breaks
where the rim drops within six hundred feet of the water. The statement
of a wall height of a thousand feet expresses the general impression,
though as an average it is probably well short of the fact.
[Illustration: _From a photograph copyright by Scenic America Company_
DUTTON CLIFF AND THE PHANTOM SHIP, CRATER LAKE]
[Illustration: _From a photograph copyright by Scenic America Company_
SUNSET FROM GARFIELD PEAK, CRATER LAKE NATIONAL PARK]
[Illustration: CROSS-SECTION OF CRATER LAKE]
At the foot of all the walls, at water's edge, lie slopes of talus, the
rocky fragments which erosion has broken loose and dropped into the
abyss. Nowhere is there a beach. The talus shallows the water for a few
hundred feet, and descending streams build small deltas. These shallows
edge the intense blue of the depths with exquisite lighter tints which
tend to green. But this edging is very narrow.
The next most striking object after the gigantic carven cliffs is Wizard
Island. This complete volcano in miniature, notwithstanding that it is
forest-clothed and rises from water, carries the traveller's mind
instantly to the thirteen similar cones which rise within the enormous
desert crater of dead Haleakala, in the Hawaii National Park. Wizard
Island's crater may easily be seen in the tip of its cone. Its two
fellow volcanoes are invisible four hundred feet under water.
Scanning the blue surface, one's eye is caught by an interesting
sail-like rock rising from the waters on the far right close to the foot
of Dutton Cliff. This is the Phantom Ship. Seen two miles away in
certain lights the illusion is excellent. The masts seem to tilt
rakishly and the sails shine in the sun. There are times when the
Phantom Ship suddenly disappears, and times again when it as suddenly
appears where nothing was before. Hence its name and mysterious repute.
But there is nothing really mysterious about this ghostly behavior,
which occurs only when the heated atmosphere lends itself readily to
mirage.
Days and weeks of rare pleasure may be had in the exploration of these
amazing walls, a pleasure greatly to be enhanced by discovering and
studying the many plain evidences of Mazama's slow upbuilding and sudden
extinction. The excellent automobile road around the rim affords easy
approach afoot as well as by automobile and bicycle. Its passage is
enlivened by many inspiring views of the outlying Cascades with their
great forests of yellow pine and their lesser volcanic cones, some of
which, within and without the park boundaries, hung upon the flanks of
Mount Mazama while it was belching flame and ash, while others, easing
the checked pressure following the great catastrophe, were formed anew
or enlarged from older vents.
From this road any part of the fantastic rim may be reached and
explored, often to the water's edge, by adventurous climbers. What more
enjoyable day's outing, for instance, than the exploration of the
splendid pile of pentagonal basaltic columns suspended half-way in the
rim at one point of picturesque beauty? What more inspiring than the
climbing of Dutton Cliff, or, for experienced climbers, of many of the
striking lava spires? The only drawback to these days of happy wandering
along this sculptured and painted rim is the necessity of carrying
drinking-water from the Lodge.
Then there are days of pleasure on the water. Wizard Island may be
thoroughly explored, with luncheon under its trees by the lakeside. The
Phantom Ship's gnarled lavas may be examined and climbed. Everywhere the
steep rocky shore invites more intimate acquaintance; its caves may be
entered, some afoot, at least one afloat. The lake is well stocked with
rainbow trout, some of them descendants of the youngsters which Will G.
Steel laboriously carried across country from Gordon's Ranch, forty-nine
miles away, in 1888. They are caught with the fly from shore and boat. A
pound trout in Crater Lake is a small trout. Occasionally a monster of
eight or ten pounds is carried up the trail to the Lodge.
During all these days and weeks of pleasure and study, the vision of
ancient Mount Mazama and its terrible end grows more and more in the
enlightened imagination. There is much in the conformation of the base
to justify a rather definite picture of this lost brother of Hood,
Shasta, St. Helens, and Rainier. At the climax of his career, Mazama
probably rose sixteen thousand feet above the sea, which means ten
thousand feet above the level of the present lake. We are justified too
in imagining his end a cataclysm. Volcanic upbuildings are often
spasmodic and slow, a series of impulses separated by centuries of
quiescence, but their climaxes often are sudden and excessively violent.
It seems more probable that Mazama collapsed during violent eruption.
Perhaps like a stroke of lightning at the moment of triumph, death came
at the supreme climax of his career.
Certainly no mausoleum was ever conceived for human hero which may be
compared for a moment with this glorified grave of dead Mazama!
The human history of Crater Lake has its interest. The Indians feared
it. John W. Hillman was the first white man to see it. Early in 1853 a
party of Californian miners ascended the Rogue River to rediscover a
lost gold-mine of fabulous richness. The expedition was secret, but
several Oregonians who suspected its object and meant to be in at the
finding, quickly organized and followed. Hillman was of this party. The
Californians soon learned of the pursuit.
"Then," wrote Hillman half a century later, "it was a game of hide and
seek until rations on both sides got low. The Californians would push
through the brush, scatter, double backward on their trail, and then
camp in the most inaccessible places to be found, and it sometimes
puzzled us to locate and camp near enough to watch them."
Eventually the rivals united. A combination search-party was chosen
which included Hillman, and this party, while it found no gold-mine,
found Crater Lake.
[Illustration: _From a photograph copyright by Fred H. Kiser_
APPLEGATE CLIFF, CRATER LAKE]
[Illustration: _From a photograph by Fred H. Kiser_
PHANTOM SHIP FROM GARFIELD PEAK]
"While riding up a long sloping mountain," Hillman continued, "we
suddenly came in sight of water and were very much surprised as we did
not expect to see any lakes. We did not know but what we had come in
sight and close to Klamath Lake, and not until my mule stopped within a
few feet of the rim of Crater Lake did I look down, and if I had been
riding a blind mule I firmly believe I would have ridden over the edge
to death and destruction...."
"The finding of Crater Lake," he concludes, "was an accident, as we were
not looking for lakes; but the fact of my being the first upon its banks
was due to the fact that I was riding the best saddle mule in southern
Oregon, the property of Jimmy Dobson, a miner and packer with
headquarters at Jacksonville, who had furnished me the mule in
consideration of a claim to be taken in his name should we be
successful. Stranger to me than our discovery was the fact that after
our return I could get no acknowledgment from any Indian, buck or squaw,
old or young, that any such lake existed; each and every one denied any
knowledge of it, or ignored the subject completely."
The next development in Crater's history introduces Will G. Steel,
widely known as "the Father of Crater Lake National Park," a pioneer of
the highest type, a gold-seeker in the coast ranges and the Klondike, a
school-teacher for many years, and a public-spirited enthusiast. In
1869, a farmer's boy in Kansas, he read a newspaper account of an Oregon
lake with precipice sides five thousand feet deep. Moving to Oregon in
1871, he kept making inquiries for seven years before he verified the
fact of the lake's existence, and it was two years later before he found
a man who had seen it. This man's description decided him to visit it,
then an undertaking of some difficulty.