MOUNTAIN-BARRIERS
[Sidenote: The western mountains.]
[Sidenote: Saddles and passes.]
The character of the land lying along the western boundaries of the
deserts is very different from that of the Arizona canyon country.
Moving toward the Pacific you meet with no mesas of consequence, nor
do you traverse many plateaus or foot-hills. The sands extend up to
the bases of the Coast Range and then stop short. The mountains rise
abruptly from the desert like a barrier or wall. Sometimes they lift
vertically for several thousand feet, but more often they present
only a steep rough grade. There are cracks in the wall called passes,
through which railways lead on to the Pacific; and there are high
divides and saddles--dips in the top of the wall--through which in the
old days the Indians trailed from desert to sea, and which are to-day
known only to the inquisitive few.
[Sidenote: The view from the mountain-top.]
From the saddles--and better still from the topmost peaks--there are
wonderful sights to be seen. You will never know the vast reach of
the deserts until you see them from a point of rock ten thousand feet
in air. Then you are standing on the Rim of the Bowl and can see the
yellow ocean of sand within and the blue ocean of water without.
The ascent to that high point is, however, not easy, especially if
undertaken from the desert side. But nothing could be more interesting
in quick change and new surprise than the rise from the hot waste at
the bottom to the cold white-capped peaks of the top. It is not often
that you find mountains with their feet thrust into tropic sands and
their heads thrust into clouds of snow.
[Sidenote: Looking up toward the peak.]
[Sidenote: Lost streams.]
Before you start to climb, before you reach the foot of the mountains,
you are struck by the number of dry washes leading down from the sides
and gradually losing themselves in the sands. As the eyes trace these
arroyos up the mountain-side they are seen to turn into green streaks
and finally, near the peak, into white streaks. You know what that
means and yet can hardly believe that those white lines are snow-banks
packed many feet deep in the canyons; that from them run streams which
lower down become green lines because of the grasses, bushes, and trees
growing on their banks; and that finally the streams, after plunging
through canyons, fall into the arroyos and are drunk up by the desert
sands before they have left the mountain-bases. It seems incredible
that a stream should be born; run its course through valley, gorge,
and canyon; and then disappear forever in the sands, all within a few
miles. Yet not one but many of these mountain-streams have that brief
history.
[Sidenote: Avalanches and bowlder-beds.]
And at one time they must have been larger, or there were slips of
glaciers or avalanches on the mountains; for the arroyos are piled with
great blocks of granite and there are rows of bowlders on either side
which might have been rolled there by floods or pushed there by an
ice-sheet. As you draw nearer, the bowlders crop out in large fields
and beds. They surround the rock bases like a deposit rather than a
talus, and over them one must pass on his way up the mountain-side.
[Sidenote: The ascent by the arroyo.]
[Sidenote: Growth of the stream.]
If you ascend by the bed of the arroyo it is not long before you begin
to note the presence of underground water. It is apparent in the green
of the vegetation. The grasses are seen growing first in bunches and
then in sods, little blue flowers are blooming beside the grasses;
alders, willows, and young sycamores are growing along the banks,
and live-oaks are in the stream-bed among the bowlders. As you move
up and into the mountain the bed becomes more of a rocky floor, the
earth-deposits grow thinner, and presently little water-pockets begin
to show themselves. At first you see them in pot-holes and worn basins
in the rock, then water begins to show in small pools under cut banks,
and then perhaps there is a little glassy slip of light over a flat
rock in a narrow section of the bed. Gradually the slip grows in length
and joins the pools, until at last you see the stream come to life, as
it were, out of the ground.
[Sidenote: Rising banks.]
[Sidenote: Waterfalls.]
The banks begin to rise. As you advance they lift higher and higher,
they grow into abrupt walls of rock; the strata of granite crop out
in ragged ledges. The trees and grasses disappear, and in their place
come cold pale flowers growing out of beds of moss, or clinging in
rock-niches where all around the gray and orange lichens are weaving
tapestries upon the walls. The bed of the stream seems to have sunken
down, but in reality it is rising by steps and falls ever increasing in
size. The stream itself has grown much larger, swifter, more noisy. You
move slowly up and around the falls, each one harder to surmount than
the last, until finally you are in the canyon.
[Sidenote: In the gorge.]
The walls are high, the air is damp, the light is dim. The glare and
heat of the desert have vanished and in their place is the shadow of
the cave. You toil on far up the chasm, creeping along ledges and
rising by niches, until a great pool, a basin hewn from the rock, is
before you; and the hewer is seen waving and flashing in the air a
hundred feet as it falls into the pool. Around you and ahead of you is
a sheer pitch of rock curved like a horseshoe. It is insurmountable;
there is no thoroughfare. You will not gain the peak by way of
the canyon. The water-ousel on the basin edge--sole tenant of the
gorge--seems to laugh at your ignorance of that fact. Let us turn back
and try the ridges.
[Sidenote: The ascent by the ridges.]
[Sidenote: The chaparral.]
[Sidenote: Home of the grizzly.]
Up the faces of the spurs and thus by the backbones and saddles to the
summit is not easy travelling. At first desert vegetation surrounds
you, for the cacti and all their companions creep up the mountain-side
as far as possible. The desert does not give up its dominion easily.
Bowlders are everywhere, vines and grasses are growing under their
shade; and, as you advance, the bushes arise and gradually thicken
into brush, and the brush runs into a chaparral. The manzanita,
the lavender, and white lilac, the buckthorn, the laurel, the
sumac, all throw out stiff dry arms that tear at your clothing. The
mountain-covering that from below looked an ankle-deep of grasses and
weeds--a velvety carpet only--turns out to be a dense tangle of brush
a dozen feet high. It is not an attractive place because the only
successful method of locomotion through it is on the hands and knees.
That method of moving is peculiar to the bear, and so for that matter
is the chaparral through which you are tearing your way. It is one of
the hiding-places of the grizzly. And there are plenty of grizzlies
still left in the Sierra Madre. To avoid the chaparral (and also the
bear) you would better keep on the sunny side of the spurs where the
ground is more open.
[Sidenote: Ridge trails and taluses.]
You are at the top of one of the outlying spurs at last and you find
there a dim trail made by deer and wolves leading along the ridge,
across the saddle, and up to the next spur. As you follow this you
presently emerge from the brush and come face to face with a declivity,
covered by broken blocks of stone that seem to have been slipping down
the mountain-side for centuries. It is an old talus of one of the
spurs. You wind about it diagonally until different ground is reached,
and then you are once more upon a ridge--higher by a spur than before.
[Sidenote: Among the live-oaks.]
[Sidenote: Birds and deer.]
Again the scene changes. An open park-like country appears covered with
tall grass, the sunlight flickers on the shiny leaves of live-oaks,
and dotted here and there are tall yuccas in bloom--the last of the
desert growths to vanish from the scene. Flowers strange to the desert
are growing in the grass--clumps of yellow violets, little fields of
pink alfileria, purple lilies, purple nightshades, red paint-brushes,
and flaming fire-rods. And there are birds in the trees that know the
desert only as they fly--blue birds with red breasts as in New England,
blue-jays with their chatter as in Minnesota, blue-backed woodpeckers
with their tapping on dead limbs as in Pennsylvania. And here was once
the stamping-ground of the mule-deer. Here in the old days under the
shade of the live-oak he would drowse away the heat of the day and at
night perhaps step down to the desert. He was safe then in the open
country, but to-day he knows danger and skulks in the depths of the
chaparral, from which a hound can scarcely drive him.
[Sidenote: Yawning canyons.]
[Sidenote: The canyon stream.]
Onward and upward through the oaks until you are on the top of another
ridge. Did you think it was the top because it hid the peak? Ah no;
the granite crags are still far above you. And there, yawning at your
very feet, is another canyon whose existence you never suspected. How
steep and broad and ragged the walls look to you! And down in the
bottom of the canyon--almost a mile down it seems--are huge masses of
rock, fallen towers and ledges, great frost-heaved strata lying piled
in confusion among trees and vines and heavy brush. Here and there
down the canyon’s length appear disconnected flashes of silvery light
showing where a stream is dashing its way under rocks and through
tangled brush down to the sandy sea. And far above you to the right
where the canyon heads is a streak of dirty-looking snow. There is
nothing for it but to get around the head of the canyon above the
snow-streak, for crossing the canyon itself is unprofitable, not to say
impossible.
[Sidenote: Snow.]
[Sidenote: The wear of water.]
How odd it seems after the sands to see the snow. The long wedge lying
in the barranca under the shadowed lee of an enormous spur is not
very inviting looking. It has melted down and accumulated dust and
dirt until it looks almost like a bed of clay. But the little stream
running away from its lowest part is pure; and it dashes through the
canyon, tumbles into little pools, and slips over shelving precipices
like a thing of life. Could the canyon have been cut out of the solid
rock by that little stream? Who knows! Besides, the stream is not
always so small. The descent is steep, and bowlders carried down by
great floods cut faster than water.
[Sidenote: The pines.]
[Sidenote: Barrancas and escarpments.]
It is dangerous travelling--this crossing of snow-banks in June. You
never know how soft they may be nor how deep they may drop you. Better
head the snow-bank no matter how much hard brush and harder stones
there may be to fight against. The pines are above you and they are
beginning to appear near you. Beside you is a solitary shaft of dead
timber, its branches wrenched from it long ago and its trunk left
standing against the winds. And on the ground about you there are
fallen trunks, crumbled almost to dust, and near them young pines
springing up to take the place of the fallen. Manzanita and buckthorn
and lilac are here, too; but the chaparral is not so dense as lower
down. You pass through it easily and press on upward, still upward, in
the cool mountain-air, until you are above the barranca of snow and
under the lee of a vast escarpment. The wall is perpendicular and you
have to circle it looking for an exit higher up. For half an hour you
move across a talus of granite blocks, and then through a break in the
wall you clamber up to the top of the escarpment. You are on a high
spur which leads up a pine-clad slope. You are coming nearer your quest.
[Sidenote: Under the pines.]
[Sidenote: Bushes, ferns, and mosses.]
The pines!--at last the pines! How gigantic they seem, those trees
standing so calm and majestic in their mantles of dark green--how
gigantic to eyes grown used to the little palo verde or the scrubby
grease wood! All classes of pines are here--sugar pines, bull pines,
white pines, yellow pines--not in dense numbers standing close together
as in the woods of Oregon, but scattered here and there with open
aisles through which the sunshine falls in broad bars. Many small
bushes--berry bushes most of them--are under the pines; and with them
are grasses growing in tufts, flowers growing in beds, and bear-clover
growing in fields. Aimless and apparently endless little streams wander
everywhere, and ferns and mosses go with them. Bowlder streams they
are, for the rounded bowlder is still in evidence--in the stream, on
the bank, and under the roots of the pine.
[Sidenote: Mountain-quail.]
[Sidenote: Indigo jays.]
[Sidenote: Warblers.]
The beautiful mountain-quail loves to scramble over these stones,
especially when they are in the water; and the mountain-quail is
here. This is his abiding-place, and you are sure to see him, for
he has a curiosity akin to that of the antelope and must get on a
bowlder or a log to look at you. And this is the home of hundreds of
woodpeckers that seem to spend their entire lives in pounding holes
in the pine-trees and then pounding acorns into the holes. It is a
very thrifty practice and provides against winter consumption, only
the squirrels consume the greater part of the acorns if the blue-jays
do not get ahead of them. For here lives the ordinary blue-jay and
also his mountain cousin, the crested jay, with a coat so blue that it
might better be called indigo. A beautiful bird, but with a jangling
note that rasps the air with discord. His chief occupation seems to
be climbing pine-trees as by the rungs of a ladder. There are sweeter
notes from the warblers, the nuthatches, and the chickadees. But no
desert-bird comes up so high; and as for the common lawn and field
birds like the robin and the thrush, they do not fancy the pines.
[Sidenote: The mountain-air.]
[Sidenote: The dwarf pine.]
Upward, still upward, under the spreading arms of the pines! How silent
the forest save for the soughing of the wind through the pine needles
and the jangle of the jays! And how thin and clear the mountain-air!
How white the sunlight falling upon the moss-covered rocks! It must
be that we have risen out of the dust-laden atmosphere of the desert.
And out of its heat too. The air feels as though blown to us from
snow-banks, and indeed, they are in the gullies lying on either side
of us. For now we are coming close to the peak. The bushes have been
dwindling away for some time past, and the pines have been growing
thinner in body, fewer in number, smaller in size. A dwarf pine begins
to show itself--a scraggly tempest-fighting tree, designed by Nature to
grow among the bowlders of the higher peaks and to be the first to stop
the slides of snow. The hardy grasses fight beside it, and with them is
the little snow-bird, fighting for life too.
[Sidenote: The summit.]
Upward, still upward, until great spaces begin to show through the
trees and the ground flattens and becomes a floor of rock. In the
barrancas on the north side the snow still lies in banks, but on the
south side, where the sun falls all day, the ground is bare. You are
now above the timber line. Nothing shows but wrecked and shattered
strata of rock with patches of stunted grass. The top is only barren
stone. The uppermost peak, which you have perhaps seen from the desert
a hundred miles away looking like a sharp spine of granite shot up
in the air, turns out to be something more of a dome than a spine--a
rounded knob of gray granite which you have no difficulty in ascending.
[Sidenote: The look upward at the sky.]
[Sidenote: The dark-blue dome.]
At last you are on the peak and your first impulse is to look down.
But no. Look up! You have read and heard many times of the “deep blue
sky.” It is a stock phrase in narrative and romance; but I venture to
doubt if you have ever seen one. It is seen only from high points--from
just such a place as you are now standing upon. Therefore look up
first of all and see a blue sky that is turning into violet. Were you
ten thousand feet higher in the air you would see it darkened to a
purple-violet with the stars even at midday shining through it. How
beautiful it is in color and how wonderful it is in its vast reach! The
dome instead of contracting as you rise into it, seems to expand. There
are no limits to its uttermost edge, no horizon lines to say where it
begins. It is not now a cup or cover for the world, but something that
reaches to infinity--something in which the world floats.
[Sidenote: White light.]
[Sidenote: Distant views.]
[Sidenote: The Pacific.]
And do you notice that the sun is no longer yellow but white, and that
the light that comes from it is cold with just the faintest shade of
violet about it? The air, too, is changed. Look at the far-away ridges
and peaks, some of them snow-capped, but the majority of them bare; and
see the air how blue and purple it looks along the tops and about the
slopes. Peak upon peak and chain upon chain disappear to the north and
south in a mysterious veil of gray, blue, and purple. Green pine-clad
spurs of the peaks, green slopes of the peaks themselves, keep fading
away in blue-green mazes and hazes. Look down into the canyons, into
the shadowed depths where the air lies packed in a mass, and the top of
the mass seems to reflect purple again. This is a very different air
from the glowing mockery that dances in the basin of Death Valley. It
is mountain-air and yet has something of the sea in it. Even at this
height you can feel the sea-breezes moving along the western slopes.
For the ocean is near at hand--not a hundred miles away as the crow
flies. From the mountain-top it looks like a flat blue band appended
to the lower edge of the sky, and it counts in the landscape only as a
strip of color or light.
[Sidenote: Southern California.]
Between the ocean and the mountain you are standing upon lies the
habitable portion of Southern California, spread out like a relief
map with its broken ranges, its chaparral-covered foot-hills, and its
wide valleys. How fair it looks lying under the westering sun with
the shadows drawing in the canyons, and the valleys glowing with the
yellow light from fields of ripened barley! And what a contrast to the
yellow of the grain are the dark green orchards of oranges and lemons
scattered at regular intervals like the squares of a checker-board! And
what pretty spots of light and color on the map are the orchards of
prunes, apricots, peaches, pears, the patches of velvety alfalfa, the
groves of eucalyptus and Monterey cypress, the long waving green lines
of cottonwoods and willows that show where run the mountain-streams to
the sea!
[Sidenote: The garden in the desert.]
Yet large as they are, these are only spots. The cultivated portion
of the land is but a flower-garden beside the unbroken foot-hills and
the untenanted valleys. As you look down upon them the terra-cotta of
the granite shows through the chaparral of the hills; and the sands
of the valleys have the glitter of the desert. You know intuitively
that all this country was planned by Nature to be desert. Down to the
water-edge of the Pacific she once carried the light, air, and life of
the Mojave and the Colorado.
[Sidenote: Reclaiming the valleys.]
[Sidenote: Fighting fertility.]
But man has in measure changed the desert conditions by storing the
waste waters of the mountains and reclaiming the valleys by irrigation.
His success has been phenomenal. Out of the wilderness there have
sprung farms, houses, towns, cities with their wealth and luxury. But
the cultivated conditions are maintained only at the price of eternal
vigilance. Nature is compelled to reap where she has not sown; and
at times she seems almost human in the way she rebels and recurs to
former conditions. Two, three; yes, at times, four years in succession
she gives little rain. A great drouth follows. Then the desert breaks
in upon the valley ranches, upon the fields of barley, the orchards
of prunes and peaches and apricots. Then abandoned farms are quite as
plentiful as in New England; and once abandoned, but a few years elapse
before the desert has them for its own. Nature is always driven with
difficulty. Out on the Mojave she fights barrenness at every turn;
here in Southern California she fights fertility. She is determined
to maintain just so much of desert with just so much of its hardy,
stubborn life. When she is pleased to enhance it or abate it she will
do so; but in her own good time and way.
[Sidenote: The desert from the mountain-top.]
[Sidenote: The great extent of the desert.]
Come to the eastern side of the peak and look out once more upon the
desert while yet there is time. The afternoon sun is driving its rays
through the passes like the sharp-cut shafts of search-lights, and
the shadows of the mountains are lengthening in distorted silhouette
upon the sands below. Yet still the San Bernardino Range, leading off
southeast to the Colorado River, is glittering with sunlight at every
peak. You are above it and can see over its crests in any direction.
The vast sweep of the Mojave lies to the north; the Colorado with its
old sea-bed lies to the south. Far away to the east you can see the
faint forms of the Arizona mountains melting and mingling with the sky;
and in between lie the long pink rifts of the desert valleys and the
lilac tracery of the desert ranges.
[Sidenote: The fateful wilderness.]
What a wilderness of fateful buffetings! All the elemental forces
seem to have turned against it at different times. It has been swept
by seas, shattered by earthquakes and volcanoes, beaten by winds and
sands, and scorched by suns. Yet in spite of all it has endured. It
remains a factor in Nature’s plan. It maintains its types and out of
its desolation it brings forth increase that the species may not perish
from the face of the earth.
[Sidenote: All shall perish.]
[Sidenote: The death of worlds.]
And yet in the fulness of time Nature designs that this waste and all
of earth with it shall perish. Individual, type, and species, all shall
pass away; and the globe itself become as desert sand blown hither and
yon through space. She cares nothing for the individual man or bird or
beast; can it be thought that she cares any more for the individual
world? She continues the earth-life by the death of the old and the
birth of the new; can it be thought that she deals differently with the
planetary and stellar life of the universe? Whence come the new worlds
and their satellites unless from the dust of dead worlds compounded
with the energy of nebulæ? Our outlook is limited indeed, but have we
not proof in our own moon that worlds do die? Is it possible that its
bleached body will never be disintegrated, will never dissolve and be
resolved again into some new life? And how came it to die? What was the
element that failed--fire, water, or atmosphere? Perhaps it was water.
Perhaps it died through thousands of years with the slow evaporation
of moisture and the slow growth of the--desert.
[Sidenote: The desert the beginning of the end?]
[Sidenote: Development through adversity.]
Is then this great expanse of sand and rock the beginning of the end?
Is that the way our globe shall perish? Who can say? Nature plans the
life, she plans the death; it must be that she plans aright. For death
may be the culmination of all character; and life but the process of
its development. If so, then not in vain these wastes of sand. The
harsh destiny, the life-long struggle which they have imposed upon all
the plants and birds and animals have been but as the stepping-stones
of character. It is true that Nature taxed her invention to the utmost
that each might not wage unequal strife. She gave cunning, artifice,
persistence, strength; she wished that each should endure and fulfil to
its appointed time. But it is not the armor that develops the wearer
thereof. It is the struggle itself--the hard friction of the fight. Not
in the spots of earth where plenty breeds indolence do we meet with the
perfected type. It is in the land of adversity, and out of much pain
and travail that finally emerges the highest manifestation.
[Sidenote: Sublimity of the waste.]
[Sidenote: Desolation and silence.]
Not in vain these wastes of sand. And this time not because they
develop character in desert life, but simply because they are beautiful
in themselves and good to look upon whether they be life or death. In
sublimity--the superlative degree of beauty--what land can equal the
desert with its wide plains, its grim mountains, and its expanding
canopy of sky! You shall never see elsewhere as here the dome, the
pinnacle, the minaret fretted with golden fire at sunrise and sunset;
you shall never see elsewhere as here the sunset valleys swimming in
a pink and lilac haze, the great mesas and plateaus fading into blue
distance, the gorges and canyons banked full of purple shadow. Never
again shall you see such light and air and color; never such opaline
mirage, such rosy dawn, such fiery twilight. And wherever you go, by
land or by sea, you shall not forget that which you saw not but rather
felt--the desolation and the silence of the desert.
[Sidenote: Good-night to the desert.]
Look out from the mountain’s edge once more. A dusk is gathering on
the desert’s face, and over the eastern horizon the purple shadow of
the world is reaching up to the sky. The light is fading out. Plain
and mesa are blurring into unknown distances, and mountain-ranges are
looming dimly into unknown heights. Warm drifts of lilac-blue are
drawn like mists across the valleys; the yellow sands have shifted into
a pallid gray. The glory of the wilderness has gone down with the sun.
Mystery--that haunting sense of the unknown--is all that remains. It is
time that we should say good-night--perhaps a long good-night--to the
desert.
Transcriber’s Notes
Italicized text is surrounded by underscores: _italics_.
Small capitals are changed to uppercase.
Sidenotes have been moved before the corresponding paragraph.
Footnotes have been moved to the end of the chapter.
Obvious typographical errors and punctuation errors have been corrected
after careful comparison with other occurrences within the text and
consultation of external sources. Except for those changes noted below,
all misspellings in the text, and inconsistent or archaic usage, have
been retained.
The following corrections have been applied to the text (before/after):
(p. viii)
... show itself, Yes; ...
... show itself. Yes; ...
(p. 40)
... that a wildcat can walk ...
... that a wild-cat can walk ...
(p. 54)
... and the wildcat do not ...
... and the wild-cat do not ...
(p. 54)
... look weary-like ...
... look weary--like ...
(p. 92)
Sunshafts through canyons.
Sun-shafts through canyons.
(p. 92)
... golden sunshafts shot through ...
... golden sun-shafts shot through ...
(p. 100)
... the yellow sunshafts that, ...
... the yellow sun-shafts that, ...
(p. 154)
... sheep be browses ...
... sheep he browses ...
(p. 181)
... high as twentyfive thousand ...
... high as twenty-five thousand ...