Glenora Peak
On the trail to the steamboat-landing at the foot of Dease Lake, I met
a Douglas squirrel, nearly as red and rusty in color as his Eastern
relative the chickaree. Except in color he differs but little from the
California Douglas squirrel. In voice, language, gestures, temperament,
he is the same fiery, indomitable little king of the woods. Another
darker and probably younger specimen met near the Caribou House,
barked, chirruped, and showed off in fine style on a tree within a few
feet of us.
“What does the little rascal mean?” said my companion, a man I had
fallen in with on the trail. “What is he making such a fuss about? I
cannot frighten him.”
“Never mind,” I replied; “just wait until I whistle ‘Old Hundred’ and
you will see him fly in disgust.” And so he did, just as his California
brethren do. Strange that no squirrel or spermophile I yet have found
ever seemed to have anything like enough of Scotch religion to enjoy
this grand old tune.
The taverns along the Cassiar gold trail were the worst I had ever
seen, rough shacks with dirt floors, dirt roofs, and rough meals. The
meals are all alike—a potato, a slice of something like bacon, some
gray stuff called bread, and a cup of muddy, semi-liquid coffee like
that which the California miners call “slickers” or “slumgullion.” The
bread was terrible and sinful. How the Lord’s good wheat could be made
into stuff so mysteriously bad is past finding out. The very de’il, it
would seem, in wicked anger and ingenuity, had been the baker.
On our walk from Dease Lake to Telegraph Creek we had one of these
rough luncheons at three o’clock in the afternoon of the first day,
then walked on five miles to Ward’s, where we were solemnly assured
that we could not have a single bite of either supper or breakfast, but
as a great favor we might sleep on his best gray bunk. We replied that,
as we had lunched at the lake, supper would not be greatly missed, and
as for breakfast we would start early and walk eight miles to the next
road-house. We set out at half-past four, glad to escape into the fresh
air, and reached the breakfast place at eight o’clock. The landlord was
still abed, and when at length he came to the door, he scowled savagely
at us as if our request for breakfast was preposterous and criminal
beyond anything ever heard of in all goldful Alaska. A good many in
those days were returning from the mines dead broke, and he probably
regarded us as belonging to that disreputable class. Anyhow, we got
nothing and had to tramp on.
As we approached the next house, three miles ahead, we saw the
tavern-keeper keenly surveying us, and, as we afterwards learned,
taking me for a certain judge whom for some cause he wished to avoid,
he hurriedly locked his door and fled. Half a mile farther on we
discovered him in a thicket a little way off the trail, explained our
wants, marched him back to his house, and at length obtained a little
sour bread, sour milk, and old salmon, our only lonely meal between the
Lake and Telegraph Creek.
We arrived at Telegraph Creek, the end of my two-hundred-mile walk,
about noon. After luncheon I went on down the river to Glenora in a
fine canoe owned and manned by Kitty, a stout, intelligent-looking
Indian woman, who charged her passengers a dollar for the fifteen-mile
trip. Her crew was four Indian paddlers. In the rapids she also plied
the paddle, with stout, telling strokes, and a keen-eyed old man,
probably her husband, sat high in the stern and steered. All seemed
exhilarated as we shot down through the narrow gorge on the rushing,
roaring, throttled river, paddling all the more vigorously the faster
the speed of the stream, to hold good steering way. The canoe danced
lightly amid gray surges and spray as if alive and enthusiastically
enjoying the adventure. Some of the passengers were pretty thoroughly
drenched. In unskillful hands the frail dugout would surely have been
wrecked or upset. Most of the season goods for the Cassiar gold camps
were carried from Glenora to Telegraph Creek in canoes, the steamers
not being able to overcome the rapids except during high water. Even
then they had usually to line two of the rapids—that is, take a line
ashore, make it fast to a tree on the bank, and pull up on the capstan.
The freight canoes carried about three or four tons, for which fifteen
dollars per ton was charged. Slow progress was made by poling along the
bank out of the swiftest part of the current. In the rapids a tow line
was taken ashore, only one of the crew remaining aboard to steer. The
trip took a day unless a favoring wind was blowing, which often
happened.
Next morning I set out from Glenora to climb Glenora Peak for the
general view of the great Coast Range that I failed to obtain on my
first ascent on account of the accident that befell Mr. Young when we
were within a minute or two of the top. It is hard to fail in reaching
a mountain-top that one starts for, let the cause be what it may. This
time I had no companion to care for, but the sky was threatening. I was
assured by the local weather-prophets that the day would be rainy or
snowy because the peaks in sight were muffled in clouds that seemed to
be getting ready for work. I determined to go ahead, however, for
storms of any kind are well worth while, and if driven back I could
wait and try again.
With crackers in my pocket and a light rubber coat that a kind Hebrew
passenger on the steamer Gertrude loaned me, I was ready for anything
that might offer, my hopes for the grand view rising and falling as the
clouds rose and fell. Anxiously I watched them as they trailed their
draggled skirts across the glaciers and fountain peaks as if
thoughtfully looking for the places where they could do the most good.
From Glenora there is first a terrace two hundred feet above the river
covered mostly with bushes, yellow apocynum on the open spaces,
together with carpets of dwarf manzanita, bunch-grass, and a few of the
compositæ, galiums, etc. Then comes a flat stretch a mile wide,
extending to the foothills, covered with birch, spruce, fir, and
poplar, now mostly killed by fire and the ground strewn with charred
trunks. From this black forest the mountain rises in rather steep
slopes covered with a luxuriant growth of bushes, grass, flowers, and a
few trees, chiefly spruce and fir, the firs gradually dwarfing into a
beautiful chaparral, the most beautiful, I think, I have ever seen, the
flat fan-shaped plumes thickly foliaged and imbricated by snow
pressure, forming a smooth, handsome thatch which bears cones and
thrives as if this repressed condition were its very best. It extends
up to an elevation of about fifty-five hundred feet. Only a few trees
more than a foot in diameter and more than fifty feet high are found
higher than four thousand feet above the sea. A few poplars and willows
occur on moist places, gradually dwarfing like the conifers. Alder is
the most generally distributed of the chaparral bushes, growing nearly
everywhere; its crinkled stems an inch or two thick form a troublesome
tangle to the mountaineer. The blue geranium, with leaves red and showy
at this time of the year, is perhaps the most telling of the flowering
plants. It grows up to five thousand feet or more. Larkspurs are
common, with epilobium, senecio, erigeron, and a few solidagos. The
harebell appears at about four thousand feet and extends to the summit,
dwarfing in stature but maintaining the size of its handsome bells
until they seem to be lying loose and detached on the ground as if like
snow flowers they had fallen from the sky; and, though
frail and delicate-looking, none of its companions is more enduring or
rings out the praises of beauty-loving Nature in tones more appreciable
to mortals, not forgetting even Cassiope, who also is here, and her
companion, Bryanthus, the loveliest and most widely distributed of the
alpine shrubs. Then come crowberry, and two species of huckleberry, one
of them from about six inches to a foot high with delicious berries,
the other a most lavishly prolific and contented-looking dwarf, few of
the bushes being more than two inches high, counting to the topmost
leaf, yet each bearing from ten to twenty or more large berries.
Perhaps more than half the bulk of the whole plant is fruit, the
largest and finest-flavored of all the huckleberries or blueberries I
ever tasted, spreading fine feasts for the grouse and ptarmigan and
many others of Nature’s mountain people. I noticed three species of
dwarf willows, one with narrow leaves, growing at the very summit of
the mountain in cracks of the rocks, as well as on patches of soil,
another with large, smooth leaves now turning yellow. The third species
grows between the others as to elevation; its leaves, then
orange-colored, are strikingly pitted and reticulated. Another alpine
shrub, a species of sericocarpus, covered with handsome heads of
feathery achenia, beautiful dwarf echiverias with flocks of purple
flowers pricked into their bright grass-green, cushion-like bosses of
moss-like foliage, and a fine forget-me-not reach to the summit. I may
also mention a large mertensia, a fine anemone, a veratrum, six feet
high, a large blue daisy, growing up to three to four thousand feet,
and at the summit a dwarf species, with dusky, hairy involucres, and a
few ferns, aspidium, gymnogramma, and small rock cheilanthes, leaving
scarce a foot of ground bare, though the mountain looks bald and brown
in the distance like those of the desert ranges of the Great Basin in
Utah and Nevada.
Charmed with these plant people, I had almost forgotten to watch the
sky until I reached the top of the highest peak, when one of the
greatest and most impressively sublime of all the mountain views I have
ever enjoyed came full in sight—more than three hundred miles of
closely packed peaks of the great Coast Range, sculptured in the
boldest manner imaginable, their naked tops and dividing ridges dark in
color, their sides and the cañons, gorges, and valleys between them
loaded with glaciers and snow. From this standpoint I counted upwards
of two hundred glaciers, while dark-centred luminous clouds with
fringed edges hovered and crawled over them, now slowly descending,
casting transparent shadows on the ice and snow, now rising high above
them, lingering like loving angels guarding the crystal gifts they had
bestowed. Although the range as seen from this Glenora mountain-top
seems regular in its trend, as if the main axis were simple and
continuous, it is, on the contrary, far from simple. In front of the
highest ranks of peaks are others of the same form with their own
glaciers, and lower peaks before these, and yet lower ones with their
ridges and cañons, valleys and foothills. Alps rise beyond alps as far
as the eye can reach, and clusters of higher peaks here and there
closely crowded together; clusters, too, of needles and pinnacles
innumerable like trees in groves. Everywhere the peaks seem
comparatively slender and closely packed, as if Nature had here been
trying to see how many noble well-dressed mountains could be crowded
into one grand range.
The black rocks, too steep for snow to lie upon, were brought into
sharp relief by white clouds and snow and glaciers, and these again
were outlined and made tellingly plain by the rocks. The glaciers so
grandly displayed are of every form, some crawling through gorge and
valley like monster glittering serpents; others like broad cataracts
pouring over cliffs into shadowy gulfs; others, with their main trunks
winding through narrow cañons, display long, white finger-like
tributaries descending from the summits of pinnacled ridges. Others lie
back in fountain cirques walled in all around save at the lower edge
over which they pour in blue cascades. Snow, too, lay in folds and
patches of every form on blunt, rounded ridges in curves, arrowy lines,
dashes, and narrow ornamental flutings among the summit peaks and in
broad radiating wings on smooth slopes. And on many a bulging headland
and lower ridge there lay heavy, over-curling copings and smooth, white
domes where wind-driven snow was pressed and wreathed and packed into
every form and in every possible place and condition. I never before
had seen so richly sculptured a range or so many awe-inspiring
inaccessible mountains crowded together. If a line were
drawn east and west from the peak on which I stood, and extended both
ways to the horizon, cutting the whole round landscape in two equal
parts, then all of the south half would be bounded by these icy peaks,
which would seem to curve around half the horizon and about twenty
degrees more, though extending in a general straight, or but moderately
curved, line. The deepest and thickest and highest of all this
wilderness of peaks lie to the southwest. They are probably from about
nine to twelve thousand feet high, springing to this elevation from
near the sea-level. The peak on which these observations were made is
somewhere about seven thousand feet high, and from here I estimated the
height of the range. The highest peak of all, or that seemed so to me,
lies to the westward at an estimated distance of about one hundred and
fifty or two hundred miles. Only its solid white summit was visible.
Possibly it may be the topmost peak of St. Elias. Now look northward
around the other half of the horizon, and instead of countless peaks
crowding into the sky, you see a low brown region, heaving and swelling
in gentle curves, apparently scarcely more waved than a rolling
prairie. The so-called cañons of several forks of the upper Stickeen
are visible, but even where best seen in the foreground and middle
ground of the picture, they are like mere sunken gorges, making scarce
perceptible marks on the landscape, while the tops of the highest
mountain-swells show only small patches of snow and no glaciers.
Glenora Peak, on which I stood, is the highest point of a spur that
puts out from the main range in a northerly direction. It seems to have
been a rounded, broad-backed ridge which has been sculptured into its
present irregular form by short residual glaciers, some of which, a
mile or two long, are still at work.
As I lingered, gazing on the vast show, luminous shadowy clouds seemed
to increase in glory of color and motion, now fondling the highest
peaks with infinite tenderness of touch, now hovering above them like
eagles over their nests.
When night was drawing near, I ran down the flowery slopes exhilarated,
thanking God for the gift of this great day. The setting sun fired the
clouds. All the world seemed new-born. Every thing, even the commonest,
was seen in new light and was looked at with new interest as if never
seen before. The plant people seemed glad, as if rejoicing with me, the
little ones as well as the trees, while every feature of the peak and
its traveled boulders seemed to know what I had been about and the
depth of my joy, as if they could read faces.